Looking at my pieces on this site, there’s a lot of local flavor but there is also an abandoned pet project I wrote entitled, ‘Creating Space.’ I wrote this as an introduction, an exploration of myself and an invitation to other Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) creators in Boston for discussion. It felt necessary; I was looking at my own identity in a critical, academic manner and trying to situate my race and ethnicity within the other facets of my identity. I was looking for my community during a time of uncertainty, knowing I wanted to be active and contributing but not sure how. This was before the explosion of Crazy Rich Asians opened the floodgates but well after a single concert changed my entire viewpoint on what was possible for my community – all of my communities.
On June 22nd, 2016, I was at the back of Brighton Music Hall, openly weeping as Mitski took the stage. If you’ve ever seen me in person, you realize this was a mildly frightening sight. I’m probably the tallest East Asian woman you’ve met at 5’11” and I can only assume I was decked out in all black, eyeliner streaking, as I was confronted with something so foreign. I had felt my eyes clouding through the sets of Jay Som and Japanese Breakfast, and watching Mitski step out was enough to poke at a bruise I didn’t even know I had formed – something fell into place that night for me that I wasn’t expecting, but that I knew I would be chasing every night afterwards. When the opportunity to speak to Michelle Zauner, the artist behind Japanese Breakfast, came up, I knew I needed to lead with that night.
“I do know it was very important to Mitski that she uses her platform to bring out bands that she really likes and to bring more marginalized voices on tour. I know it’s really important to her to have women of color on bills with her in general and that was something that’s really important to me too. I think when you see the kind of space that those artists make for you, you try to do that for smaller artists who are also doing a similar kind of thing,” Zauner says, making easy work of warming my jaded heart from the get-go. “It wasn’t until very close to announce that I realized all three of us were Asian women. And I don’t think it was a press thing, I don’t think it was intentional for her to be like, ‘This is gonna be the first all-female, Asian American fronted indie bill.’ […] I’m sure that a large part of her brain was just thinking ‘I’m excited for my record to come out!’ and this was just a secondary thing of ‘I wanna bring these artists with me.’ I didn’t think about it too much, I was really excited and I felt honored that she asked me but it wasn’t until the press started coming out, and it was more in retrospect, that I realized how big of a thing it was for a lot of people. All three of us ended up having a much larger audience than I think that any of us, or at least I, ever anticipated.”
This audience has only expanded since, shocking Zauner on multiple levels.
“I have been playing in bands since I was sixteen, I’ve always been Asian American, and I wouldn’t say that it was until this project that all of a sudden people started asking me about my identity, bringing it up, and including it in write-ups.” There’s a silent question hanging of ‘why’ between us, and it’s one I often ask myself. Seeing people suddenly accept and value you after years of putting in work is… jarring. You are simultaneously grateful for recognition, suspicious of motivation, and terrified of loss. Seeing it happen en masse leads to even more questions; aren’t these the same people who told us our food stank or shoved their eyelids to the side, putting on misaligned accents? We haven’t changed, are we supposed to trust that you have? It’s a moment we breeze past but one that lingers in my mind.
Zauner switches topics to speak to her way of reconciling her identities, and how she is able to interact with both communities, separately and together. “I would say that the primary part of my identity in a lot of ways is that I’m a musician, I’m an artist. I spend probably 90% of my time thinking about work and making things and then there’s this other part of my identity that grew up Asian American and had all of these experiences. My childhood, my mom, and the food that I eat is a secondary part of my identity so it’s cool because I meet people in the music community and the artist community first and [we] have these corresponding parts of our identities. We can talk largely about making music and art and living as a touring musician and being away from home 150 days out of the year and then also talk about growing up with Asian parents and what that was like, and being made fun of as a kid for this identity– these other things that make it amazing because this part of my identity that felt so niche is just the overlapping parts of those two things and there’s still a big community that exists there.”
While she was able to find representation in the badassery of Karen O & Thao Nguyen, the existence of the audience she has garnered still surprises Zauner. The musician, like many people of color who are raised in overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, went through a period of rejecting her identity. “I was really ashamed and I didn’t identify with Asian culture in a lot of ways and it wasn’t until my mom passed away that I started chasing after it again. I think that when you’re a teenager you’re just so painfully insecure of anything that marks you as different from your community and your peers.” It’s this differing, without the means of refute she is currently able to access, that led Zauner to feel distant from her Asian American identity. “I really resented [my identity] for quite some time and then as I grew older I came full circle and realized how much of an important role in my identity that was, especially after my mom passed away it was so important to me to connect with that and connect with her memory in that way.”
Zauner’s work is highly personal, made as an alternative to the therapy that has not been effective in processing all that has happened around her. Zauner lost her mother to cancer and turned to every creative vessel she could explore in order to cope. This was when she first explored non-fiction writing and began to write what would eventually be Japanese Breakfast’s debut, Psychopomp. It is this space that Japanese Breakfast is rooted in, but for Zauner the creativity that sparked her success does not feel like anything but necessity. “I wasn’t taking any chances. I was working a 9-5 job and I felt so hallow and unfulfilled that I needed to do something that made me feel like my life was worthwhile. Something that allowed me to navigate what I was feeling as a means of therapy […] and the way that I’ve always navigated mental stress has been through making art. It makes me feel like I have purpose, it was about stabilizing myself.” This alternative to therapy rings true across much of the AAPI community I have encountered– we fix ourselves through work and push through pain until our task is complete. Surveying past iterations of self, I know better than to blame my neurosis on just generational trauma but looking at the experiences of Zauner it is difficult to shy away from the mirrored truth.
To this day, there is still discomfort that Zauner finds in the labeling that surrounds her, but it is this intersection of identities that drives her. The most striking part of our interview is the moment when we discuss protecting her creative output from everyone on the outside. “I never think about [other people’s opinions]. I try not to ever think about that. To me that is just too much, to me it’s so exhausting. There’s going to be a bunch of people who hate you no matter what you do. I can’t go after pleasing the majority group of people because that would be embarrassing. I think that you would be able to hear it. I think that is what really crappy pop music is, it’s a bunch of mathematicians making a formula and I don’t make music that way. I think I’ve always valued artists whose sound is so unapologetically theirs and I’m chasing that. That’s truly all I feel capable of, really.” She mentions the stress that even a tour poster can cause her, trying to make sure that everything artistic is coming from her viewpoint. It’s this stubbornness to surrender control, to protect those things that are true, sincere, and hers that Zauner draws her power from.
“Your personal experiences aren’t isolated experiences. The things that feel really niche to you and that you are the only person that could relate to are actually experiences that are shared by a large amount of people. [Things] that happened to me in my childhood, and all of these parts that I never thought that anyone would find that interesting– those are the pieces of my work that I think resonate with people the most. Things that feel so particular to my experience are actually what people relate to the most because they’re the authentic things, and everyone is kind of the same in a way.” It was this same realization I came to after my discussions with the various AAPI musicians who had made Boston their home. We were all different but the common threads we possess are the ones we feel the deepest. They are the ones that evoke memories of past selves and the people we love and the memories we hold nearest to our self concept.
Zauner has seen so much evolve in the three years since the release of Psychopomp. With the newest Japanese Breakfast record, Soft Sounds from Another Planet, there has been a shift in expectations of others and internally. Zauner has been a musician for the past fourteen years and, in her own words, “no one ever gave a shit.” The shift to being booked, having a record advance, and the self-doubt of re-creating the most tumultuous time of her life come spiraling out as she recounts the head space going into recording, only to catch herself, mid-spiral, with the acknowledgement that, “it was very much my authentic voice because I wasn’t thinking about anyone else. I tried to create a space to replicate that again and not think about it too much and just make what felt natural and fulfilling to me. I think that is what I did.”
Zauner has since had her writing featured in the New Yorker, directed and starred in several music videos, and will be releasing her first book with the publishing company Knopf. You can catch her performing as Japanese Breakfast at The Royale on Monday, April 1st (tickets still available) or Saturday, April 6th (SOLD OUT).
If you are looking for other AAPI events to attend in Boston, please check out Sara Porkalob’s Dragon Cycle at the Oberon Theatre from now to April 7th, as well as the screening of Deported, created and directed by local filmmaker Sahra V. Nguyen, at the Castle Square Community Center, followed by a panel discussion, on April 4th.
Author’s Note: I do not know what this form this series will continue in, but I’m welcoming it back and welcome you to join me in that process.