Our first gig was at a bar-restaurant in Ithaca called “The Nines”. I took a bus there from New York on the day the rest of the band traveled from Oberlin, and they picked me up at the bus station right before the gig. We didn’t play very well, but the audience liked us and the energy was enough to make it a near kick-ass gig.
We had a horrible gig at Tufts in Boston. The turnout was bad and the energy was low and I was pissed at the band. A lot of it was stress being smack in the middle of a bunch of white people playing black music and not feeling I fit in one way or another. We had a free day in Boston and I met up with Lisa, Linus and Art and we went out for dinner at an amazing Vietnamese vegetarian restaurant. It was such a breath of fresh air.
Tufts University, Boston. Myla Goldberg, future author of bestseller "Bee Season" on the left. Me with a bad attitude.
The band left Boston with a lot of negative energy and we were all kind of sick of each other by the time we got to Hampshire College. Getting lost several times didn’t help the situation. We arrived screaming rude and cocked full of attitude and went straight for the beer and alcohol. But the tension helped us when we had to play because we rocked our asses off and it was amazing. We were playing outside and it was cold and people were dancing and there was a balcony above and behind us where people were dancing and cheering.
Hampshire College, balcony view. Myla on the boogie down playing percussion.
After that gig, I slept in one of the cars because I found the “hosts”, the people who were putting us up for the night, particularly offensive, racially speaking. It was flurrying when I woke up, but I think I had a better sleep than most of them. Then we had to decide whether or not we wanted to play at Washington Square Park. We had discussed doing the gig back at Oberlin, but since it was in public and wasn’t booked, it wasn’t something we had to do.
It looked grim. We were split and under the gun since if we wanted to do the gig, we would have to leave immediately and about half of us were up for just chilling. It was also snowing and we were all pretty tired. We decided to head down to New York and left the decision up in the air.
When we got to New York, the weather was actually pretty nice. It was an ordeal getting all the vehicles into the Washington Square Park area and parked since we all got separated on the way down (apparently the Ryder truck carrying the instruments had a pretty harrowing experience going through one of the tunnels leading into Manhattan).
It was a quick decision to play, no real discussion, just a few adamant “let’s do it”s and anyone against didn’t have much say. There was particular urgency on the part of the person driving the truck. Once the Ryder was on the sidewalk, either we were playing or the truck was getting the hell out of there. So we schlepped and we schlepped and set up the pans faster than we ever did before. A huge crowd gathered on all sides and the excitement was electric and we ripped through our set. It was quite scary. The police were present but they didn’t bother us, they were content just to ticket the Ryder truck.
After playing for about 40 minutes, we broke down and packed up faster than we ever had before. At the end of the day, we got a $60 ticket for parking the truck on the sidewalk, but we managed to collect over $200 in merchandise and . . . pan-handling.
Our last gig was at a lower Manhattan church on Sunday morning since one of our member’s father was a priest or something. I went home to New Jersey after the Washington Square Park gig, and drove in for the gig. It was a pretty good gig, and afterwards I parted ways with the band, picked up Ching Ching who was staying in Harlem and we headed back to Oberlin.
Spontaneous band shot just after arriving in Middletown, CT, for our Wesleyan gig.
Wesleyan University
I felt really strange being back today. It felt as if something had changed; nothing permanent I’m sure. I really didn’t want to hang out with Asians and I didn’t even eat dinner at Third World House. I felt a distinction between personal identity and community identity and I didn’t feel like I wanted to attach myself to crowds, be them Asian or white.
It seems odd that it’s possible to separate community and personal identities, but it’s something about the Asian American community. The feeling is that it’s just a clique, or a bunch of cliques, bunches of people who have something in common but don’t feel it deep within. It’s superficial.
It’s so hard for us who have to identify ourselves through community, rather than have our identities define the community. I don’t find any support through the community per se, they’re just the friends that I have through default. I don’t like hanging out with white people. It would seem that community should be able to act as some sort of support structure and this one doesn’t.
I look at people in the Asian American community, both people I know well and people I hardly know, and something seems intangibly sad in them. So many are so fucked up it’s incredible. The politics exist and are valid, but psychologically a lot seems to be going ignored. The community here is characterized by some social pathology it seems.
I don’t feel like being a part anymore. There is something humiliating about it. Something humiliating on the same lines as living in this white society and with a white culture which erases you, ignores you, appropriates your people, their identities, and their culture at their convenience. It is humiliating trying to put yourself in any group of people when you really don’t belong. And it’s not the color of your skin or your roots or origins, it’s the people. And what kind of community is it when you didn’t even know it existed until college?
