2013 K-POP World Festival in Changwon
OPINION
Going up, up, up: Foreign music is more than a moment
Foreign culture isn’t a trend to copy — it’s people’s livelihoods.
“We’re going up, up, up, it’s our moment!”
According to Ejae, the singer-songwriter behind KPop Demon Hunters’ “Golden”, that moment belongs to Asian Americans. In an interview with The New York Times (NYT) about her story before the success of Golden, Ejae explained, “I feel like I found my purpose, which is representation.”
What representation meant to her though, wasn’t just representing Asia to the world, but to Asians directly. “I felt the responsibility of giving the younger generation and younger Asian kids some hope,” she told the NYT.
As someone who grew up in a working-class, immigrant-dominated neighborhood of New York City, I felt that hope.
I never related to immigrant stereotypes of being made fun of for stinky food or for speaking a different language. Those were stories from a different time period and different places; in the city and the modern day, the internet forced globalization into the core of our lives. It became normal to be both American and something else.
Growing up in an era marked by love for Chinese pop culture, Japanese manga and Latin reggaeton made me cognizant of how much representation actually matters.
Today is the age of cultural exchange. “Gangnam Style” was the first YouTube video to reach the 1-billion and 2-billion views records, and Bad Bunny’s “DTMF” album was the first time an all Spanish-language album won Album of the Year at a Grammy Award. Hearing foreign songs online every day is commonplace and how cultural exchange occurs at our fingertips. Even though the United States has always been a country of immigrants, our present era is one where non English-language media is the most influential it’s ever been.
When figures like Ejae or Bad Bunny talk about representation through music, it’s not a matter of soft-power and cultural dominance, but a matter of dismantling social norms. Bad Bunny performing in Spanish at the Super Bowl might be controversial to some English speakers, but not to the 37 million Americans who speak Spanish at home, hearing their language spoken at an event as publicized as the Super Bowl for the first time.
“Golden” and Asian culture’s popularity in the U.S. may be insignificant to most people, but it is significant to the Asians whose ancestors built railroads for low wages or lived in a WWII internment camp. Non English-language media doesn’t signify foreign intrusion into American culture when non-White people have been here since the founding of this country and can in fact, be American.
American culture is not a monolith because we came from all over the world to build this country, and that is our strength.
Despite the strides made, there is still work to be done. I wish I fully felt the hope Ejae talked about. Growing up in NYC with Thai immigrant parents but an East Asian complexion, there was always this assumption that I was “one of them”— one of the 630,000 people in NYC of Chinese descent. Although it’s not fair to expect people to be as familiar with Thailand, it’s fair to expect awareness.
Being asked, “Are there a lot of ladyboys in Thailand?” when I’ve only been there once in my life and, “You look Chinese or Korean, so how are you Thai?” by others (even other Asian people) isn’t the fault of individual people, but of systemic ignorance.
People don’t ask those same questions to Chinese or Korean people as often anymore because they now have knowledge of their cultures from social media and popular culture — the country that once banned Chinese immigration and imprisoned Japanese Americans now binges K-dramas. Though prejudice has faded, ignorance hasn’t. People still ask ignorant questions about lesser-known cultures without realizing how weird or insensitive it is because they simply see it as curiosity. These questions only occur less with more representation and recognition, proving its importance.
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There is still ignorance over other countries and the belief that foreignness is exotic and threatening. For these past two decades, popular culture has been a medium of cultural exchange and has given us the chance for us to be global citizens, yet many of us only see foreign music as a social media trend or a niche when it’s deeply impacted some of our core experiences growing up. We’ve gone from the Chinese Exclusion Act, to being “in a very Chinese time of [our lives],” and gone from viewing South Korea as an impoverished, third-world country, to being obsessed with learning Korean.
Perception of entire countries and groups of people can take a drastic turn with positive media exposure. This doesn’t mean we should consume foreign media for the sake of representation or reparations for historical events, but it means we shouldn’t be repulsed by it.We should be aware of the people that make up our country and the world.
Ejae sang that it was our moment, but a moment is only temporary. You don’t need to learn every language or memorize every culture, but the next time you see a non English-language song climb the charts, remember that it likely didn’t arrive in American culture from the outside.
Being a mindful, global citizen is not about having deep knowledge of other cultures, but about being aware that more moments are coming, and some of us are still waiting for our moment.
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