Episode 7:
We’ll be continuing our deep dive into the U.S. war in Vietnam, but this time through the music of No-No Boy! We’re going to explore what life was like in Vietnam during the war, what it was like to flee Vietnam after the war, and why people did or didn’t leave the country. This episode is part 2 of a 2-part series on the U.S war in Vietnam.
Guests include: No-No Boy (Julian Saporiti)
Anya Steinberg: Hey everyone, welcome back to New Narratives: dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. I’m your host, Anya Steinberg. I’m the storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a non-partisan non-profit based out of St. Paul Minnesota focused on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
Today we’re going to continue our deep dive into an aspect of Asian American history, the U.S. war in Vietnam. If you haven’t listened to part one, go and do that now! This time, we’re going to be exploring what life was like in Vietnam during the war, and also what it was like to flee Vietnam after the war and why people did or didn’t leave the country. And we’re going to explore it through some really beautiful music.
[INTRO MUSIC PLAYS]
Anya: A warning: this episode contains mention of war and some explicit language.
I made this episode after talking to a musician named Julian Saporiti, also known as No-No Boy. He’s half-Italian American, half-Vietnamese American, and was raised in Nashville, TN. He describes his music like this:
Julian Saporiti: Just, like, simple songs played by a simple Asian.
Anya: I don’t completely agree with the categorization ‘simple songs.” I think Julians’ music is unlike any other music I’ve heard before. His songs are this amazing blend of history and witty lyrics. And they’re about Asian Americans! I first heard his music when I went to see him perform at my college with a bunch of friends from Asian Student Union. No-No Boy live is Julian, who is this towering 6-foot tall Viet guy, and his guitar–all playing in front of a backdrop of archival footage and photos of Asian Americans. I remember sitting, watching this highlight reel of the diaspora play out behind him, and starting to openly sob. I was trying to wipe my tears away before anybody noticed I was crying at this academically-sponsored concert. I happened to look to my left and I saw that every single person from Asian student union was trying to wipe their tears away, too. So when I first sat down with Julian on Zoom, I wanted to know: how did he end up here, making college kids cry?
Julian: I mean my background is as a musician. I did that for a career, I went to music college and I did that for a career all through my 20s. And then I kind of fell ass-backward into this academia thing. I have a master’s degree from University of Wyoming, go Pokes, in American studies. Then I got a master’s at Brown University in ethnomusicology, which is sort of like anthropology meets music. And I’m finishing up my Ph.D. in American Studies through Brown.
My course of study revolves around immigration, refugees, war, imperialism–looking at transpacific migrations. So, Japanese American communities came over, Chinese American communities, Southeast Asians like myself, and the different times they came over. But what I’m really interested in is, what kind of music did they play?
Anya: Julian’s whole goal is to write his dissertation into music. Each song is built from events in Asian American history, or from people’s individual stories. In every note, no matter how simple, is informed by these hefty questions.
Julian: You have popular music, which is my bread and butter, sprinkled throughout Asian and Asian American history. That’s what I’m really interested in. How something like a rock band in Saigon can tell us about, you know one: life during wartime, but also larger issues of western imperialism in Southeast Asia. Why is that band playing Jimi Hendrix? How did they get those records? Through what avenues did they come? And then, what does it mean to them?
Anya: Composing your dissertation in the form of an album is not standard practice. Julian thinks it’s important, not just to talk about history, but to feel it, too. Music has so much more potential to capture emotions.
Julian: We can say, in a book, there was a band at Heart Mountain–this Japanese-American concentration camp in northeastern Wyoming. And this band played such-and-such songs. And these were the members of the band, and this was the dates that they performed, this is where in the camp they performed. But what I want are those moments that I know, as a musician, exist. Like, practicing. What were the rehearsals like? Was the tempo too fast or too slow? Like the people dancing, what was that like? What was going to dance behind barbed wire like? What were those feelings, that affect, that emotion? Whether it’s boredom or depression or horniness…all these superhuman things that all of us experience that are in the subtext of all these books, but something like music…ah, I can write a love song with it. I can get inside these characters that I’m patching together through researching primary sources like camp newspapers or conducting oral histories. So I’m really into those on-the-ground stories, you know? Music can just travel. I can go so many places that my colleagues can’t. I mean, good luck reading passages from your academic book in a bar and having people pay to come see it or whatever.
Anya: So what are we waiting for? Let’s hear some.
[IMPERIAL TWIST BEGINS]
Robert (voiceover): I was pro-communist and extremely pro-American because I really loved that rock and roll.
Anya: If you remember from last episode, Vietnam was battling for its independence for most of the 20th century. The U.S. war in Vietnam was part of that. The United States presence in Vietnam was motivated by their fear of the spread of communism and their desire to maintain control in Southeast Asia. As Julian says:
Julian: Yeah, it was kind of a bummer. I think a bummer for Southeast Asia in general was the 20th century.
Anya: Last time, we talked about why the U.S. was in Southeast Asia in the first place. And we also talked about what they did there and some of the effects of the war. This time, I was talking to someone whose family had actually been there. I was curious about what it was like to live in Vietnam during all of this imperialism and warfare.
[IMPERIAL TWIST]
Julain: The song Imperial Twist was just about these Southeast Asian bands that formed despite the war or because of the war. That all started because I had a conversation with this guy named Robert, who went to high school with my mom in Vietnam. He now lives in France, in Paris. He has one of the nicest Vietnamese restaurants in town. I was there four or five years ago at this point, and my mom said, “Hey, go see Robert. He really likes your music. He found your old band’s CD at the Paris Library or something like that.” They, like the way old people do, connected through Facebook. So I go, “Okay, cool,”
[IMPERIAL TWIST]
Julian: So I went to see him because I thought, “Oh, he owns a restaurant. I’ll get a free meal out of this.” That was kind of my only agenda. I show up and he runs one of the nicest restaurants in Paris, and he sits me down to this 7, 8-course meal with champagne and his wonderful French wife is there. He just keeps asking me about my musical career and stuff like that, cause he was really interested in music. And he finally slips in, like, “Oh I was actually in a band too when I was a kid. You know, I don’t know if you’re interested but, these Americans came over and they needed people to play rock and roll for them. We loved American music because of the French and then the Americans being here…”
Anya: Robert says, in the beginning of Imperial Twist:
Robert (voiceover): I was pro-Communist and extremely pro-American…
Anya: Because I really love that rock and roll.
Julian: “…And we would load our instruments nad our drums into these helicopters and they’d bee full of prostitutes and drugs and we’d fly over the forest or the jungle and people would be shooting at us. And we’d play Jimi Hendrix songs in clandestine American army bases.” And then he just started eating again like it wasn’t the coolest story in the history of the world. Fortunately, my ethnomusicology training kicked in and I just started recording on my phone. I was like, “Robert, you gotta tell me everything.”
Anya: So Julian grills Robert about his band. He wanted to know what it was like to be in a Vietnamese rock band playing American music in the middle of a war between the U.S. and Vietnam. Robert told Julian that his rock music dealer was Julians’ mom, who brought back records for them from a trip to Paris.
[IMPERIAL TWIST]
Julian: Sitting in Paris, sitting in France, a place that means so much to me because that’s where my refugee community is. Like, my mom’s the only one in our family who came over to the states. Everyone else is in France. And hearing this French Vietnamese guy talk about doing exactly what I did when we were both teenagers: playing rock and roll and just trying to get gigs. But because of these crazy circumstances, his gigs were for American GIs in jungle army bases playing Doors songs and Rolling Stones songs and stuff. That was probably the most mind-blowing thing.
Anya: Robert’s experience during the war was unlike anything Julian had ever heard about the war. It gave him this little snapshot of what it was like to be growing up and trying to figure out who you are, while you’re living in a warzone.
Julian: It gave me a window into studying the war, which was either through the eyes of white Americans, through media, or was just very, like I said, academic. And then it was like “Oh I know someone who just like me was a musician and despite the world being on fire, they rocked.”
[ENDING OF IMPERIAL TWIST]
Anya: I asked Julian what he thought this, Vietnamese teens playing American rock and roll for American GIs while those same troops are laying waste to their homes. It was an image that felt weird to me like, are these rock and roll kids just another victim of the war? Forced to play the music of their oppressor?
Julian: Yeah I forget which, much smarter person than myself uses this term, but I think of it as a localization. So American popular music first starts coming in, like Western classical come in a little earlier, but like jazz and stuff and ragtime come in almost as soon as the Americans get the Philippines from Spain after 1898 in the Spanish American War. So we go over and we’re imperialist powers in Asia. Obviously the French, the Dutch, the English, and so on have been in Asia and Southeast Asia for a long time but it’s those American GIs that go to the Philippines and bring over jazz music in the early part of the 20th century.
Anya: With American imperialism also came American music. When Americans were running around Asia and the Pacific Islands, engaging in their sustained bid for dominance, they were also inadvertently bringing the sounds of America with them.
Julian: And now, even today, what you have is this incredible chameleon music of culture in the Philippines where if you go to any nice hotel around Asia or cruise lines across the Pacific, you’ll see inevitably a Filipino musician or a Filipino house band and that all comes from this music coming over. Like Robert says, in the beginning of that recording of Imperial Twist, he says “We like the music, we wanted to reproduce it.”
I think when you take that, zoom out, big cultural history look, you say, “Oh then these people started playing rock and roll, that must be part of this imperialist project of Americanizing them or whatever.” But, I mean, as a musician it’s like, good music is good music, exciting music is exciting music. To questions of appropriation and all that stuff, you need to be maybe cognitive of the music you’re playing and how you respect it, but there’s this tradition throughout Asia of playing jazz music and then rock and roll. Which I don’t deny the agency of musicians themselves playing it and picking it up.
Anya: To Julian, a teenager in Vietnam during the war is still just a teenager. Of course, they’re grappling with war and destruction and incredible loss occurring around them, but they’re also concerned with the general crisis that comes with being an adolescent. They’re living through history, but they’re also worrying about their budding love life or trying to sneak in rock records so their bands can jam to the Rolling Stones.
Julian: I think, I have to say imperialism is a double edge sword. So one edge is gigantic, like overwhelmingly big, like war and genocide and erasure of language and culture, that’s the big edge of imperialism. It’s a 99 to 1 ratio, to the little edge, which is some cool stuff, like banh mi sandwiches which people go crazy for nowadays. That’s Vietnamese food on French bread and they’re freakin delicious. So is imperialism worth it? Probably not, but banh mi, rock and roll, that’s the good stuff that comes out of it. Kind of like what you said, that cultural exchange. Maybe not much of exchange as much as a survival method of taking what people give you and making life out of it.
That’s the history of American music, that’s the Black experience. It’s survival and holding onto culture but also taking old brass instruments from Salvation army bands and people like Louis Armstrong making jazz out of instruments that weren’t intended to swing. That’s the same thing with some of my favorite music in Asian rock and roll. People came over and millions of people died throughout this part of the world and it just sucked. It’s horrible. My family died because of it. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also celebrate the agency and the joy that people created in that moment as well because life for the ppl who didn’t die went on.
Anya: There’s another story woven into Imperial Twist, and it’s the story of a band called the CBC Band. In the late 60s and early 70s, the CBC band was one of the biggest rock bands in Saigon.
[CON TIM VA NUOC MAT]
Julian: It was this sort of a band of peasant siblings from the countryside who were awesome at rock and roll. Their drummer was like 12, the guitar player was just incredible. They played this incredible, what we call acid rock 70s psychedelic music, and they have a few songs where the singer Bic, she sings in Vietnamese which is in itself a very musical tonal language. I’ve never heard Vietnamese sung on top of this beautiful fluid psychedelic rock and roll. It’s some of my favorite music ever. I got obsessed with this band, I love them but I wanted to pay tribute to them in this song.
Anya: I was curious, so I went online and found all these recordings of the CBC Band. This YouTube user, Chris Tran, must be like a superfan because he’s posted several recordings of their concerts from Saigon; and the band is pretty active on Facebook still.
Julian: There’s this story, that’s really interesting, where the CBC band is playing at this club where they always gigged in downtown Saigon. Where their friends were maybe able to come once a month because it was so expensive for a Vietnamese person, but the GIs could spend their money at this club so they mostly played to soldiers. They were playing, and they were starting that Jimi Hendrix song “Purple Haze” [Julian imitates electric guitar] and a bomb explodes inside the club.
[STAR SPANGLED BANNER PLAYED BY CBC BAND]
Julian: One of the drummer’s friends is killed, several people have hearing loss and they get injured. I don’t know, once again… they’re playing this music, these Vietnamese kids, the music of their oppressor, or liberator, depending on what kind of Vietnamese person you are and how you see Americans, but they’re making it their own and they’re playing the hell out of it.
There are some recordings of them playing that song, it’s just awesome. In that moment, as a musician you know what it’s like to be in a packed club: it’s sweaty, there’s smoke, people are shouting. It’s just one of the great rock and roll songs and then a bomb literally goes off. It’s just regular life, the life that you and I know being young, interrupted. What does that do to you? For a kid to be interrupted? That really stuff with me
Anya: Julian was obsessed with this moment of interruption. For him, it symbolized so much about what life was like during the war. You’re going about your daily life, maybe rocking and rolling, and just experiencing the joys and sorrows that happen every day– the things that make life life– but it’s all punctuated by these singular moments that disrupt the whole balance of your universe. And these moments are the reality of living and loving and rocking and rolling in the middle of a war.
Julian: But the ending of that story is amazing. The CBC band, I think, leave in the early 70s before the fall of Saigon. They kick around Southeast Asia, end up in India for a while, and then eventually get sponsorship to come to Texas as refugees. To this day, they still gig regularly. Now they’re super old and they still super rock all the time. I keep up with them on Facebook and it’s awesome. On the anniversary of that gig, where the drummer’s friend died and Purple Haze got interrupted, some of the soldiers and the band got together in Texas and they put together a concert so they can finish that song which is just amazing
[IMPERIAL TWIST FADES OUT]
Anya: Julian’s own family experienced one of these moments of interruption, which kind of catalyzed his family’s departure from Vietnam.
Julian: In Vinlong, where my family had a country house where my grandparents lived – great grandparents lived, my mom’s grandparents – during the tet offensive, some soldiers, probably teenage kids, targeted my grandfather cause he was part of the south Vietnamese assembly. They assassinated him. They threw a grenade into the house while my mom and everyone else was there and they killed my grandfather.
Anya: Prior to working on his dissertation, Julian didn’t talk to his family much about their lives in Vietnam. Julian knew that they lived in Vietnam during the war and that the war was the reason why his family ended up leaving for France and America. But he didn’t hear much else from his mom growing up.
Julian: But as far as the war, it was really just that she got out, my great grandfather was assassinated and then I learned about it through media. I don’t think we studied it at all in high school. I thought of it through films like “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon.” I thought that Vietnam was just a crisis of white masculinity, that’s what I thought the Vietnam War was.
Anya: When Julian’s mother told him stories about her life before America, it was this weird blend of memories.
[ST. DENIS BEGINS]
Julian: I heard a few personal stories from my mom who got out in 1968. She got out early, compared to a lot of people who came out in the 70s and 80s after the Americans pulled out. So you have these girlhood memories that I got through the eyes of an 8, 10, 12, 14, 16 year old. Some really lovely memories of downtown Saigon where my mom lived getting wonderful French pastries, going to catholic school because we were very imperialized. We were French citizens from Worl War 1 on because of my family’s involvement in the government and being soldiers and stuff. Then you have this one huge traumatic event that ultimately my mom leaves shortly after that on a student visa to go to Penn to go to college. And then it just stops because my mom doesn’t go back until 2013.
[ST. DENIS]
Julian: She never goes back before 1975 when the Americans pulls out and she doesn’t ever see her dad again. By the time I know all my Vietnamese family, South Vietnam, the country of one of their citizenship doesn’t even exist.
Anya: Julian’s family were relatively privileged. Because of their involvement in the government dating back to WW1, they were French and Vietnamese citizens. His mom was lucky to be able to get a student visa to the U.S., that was a pretty rare thing. But, still, even at that class standing, the war was an interruption in their lives. When his mom left for college, she had no idea that she wouldn’t return for decades.
Julian: She didn’t want to not come back. I don’t think she knows the discussions that her parents had, the way that I don’t know the discussions my parents had when I was going off to school, or making young adult decisions. But yeah, the idea of never coming back – never seeing her dad again who died in Vietnam before they could get to France – that was completely unintentional. So my guess would be that the adults could see the writing on the wall better than my mom could who was a teenager and not particularly concerned with war or politics or anything like that. But the circumstances, I would think, were adults probably seeing this is definitely safer given what’s happened in with our family recently and what’s happening all over the country.
Anya: Now we know that after Julian’s mom left in 1968, the U.S. war in Vietnam was only going to escalate and continue to spread into neighboring Southeast Asian countries for years. But at the time, history was still unfolding, which is what struck me as crazy. People had no idea what was going to happen, really, they were just trying to make the best moves for themselves that they could. Who knows if Julian’s mom would have still left if she’d known that she wouldn’t be able to come back for decades? Who knows if she would have left if she’d known that she would never see her father again?
[ST. DENIS FADES OUT]
Anya: The war divided Julian’s family physically, it spread them across the world. But it also divided his family politically.
Julian: Yeah, I mean it’s still muddy. We had family that went up to fight for the North. That just decided that Ho Chi Minh was the liberator of our country. He got the French out of North Vietnam and he wanted to get the Americans out and reunify the country. So I think I have uncles who went off and weren’t heard from again, probably died.
Anya: But, most of Julian’s family ended up going to France. They fled after the fall of Saigon in 1975.
Julian: I think my aunt got out with my uncle, her 2nd husband, Laurent who was a journalist for Agene France Presse. He was a conflict journalist and so he had connections to get him, my aunt, and her two sons out – my cousins Pascal and Patoo*. They were able to leave very shortly after the fall of Saigon. My grandma could have come too but they couldn’t get clearance for her sister to come, so she stayed a year and then went overland to Thailand and then flew out of Bangkok to Paris I guess in 76’.
Anya: Their experience fleeing Vietnam was not typical. Around 800,000 Vietnamese refugees left the country aboard rickety fishing boats. They were called Boat People, which is, fittingly, the title of a song Julian dedicated to their experiences.
[BOAT PEOPLE BEGINS]
Julian: Yeah I mean that song was written just being inundated by the Muslim ban a few years ago when Trump just canceled seven or eight countries with a pen stroke. Seeing pictures of hundreds of Syrians packed into these little rickety boats, that looked exactly like the boat people coming from Southeast Asia in the 70s and 80s. I was like, “We did not learn from the hundreds of thousands of people who died on the South China Sea, these Vietnamese and Cambodians boats people. We did not learn that you can’t leave people stranded.”
Anya: Julian saw ties between Vietnamese refugees’ experiences and the experiences of refugees today.
Julian: Especially as a historian and especially as someone who comes from a people who went through this, it’s just very insulting. And yeah, I mean in the grand scheme of things these histories, they not only overlap, but they happen at the same time. When you really pull back, it’s just these policies of not wanting people to come in, whether that’s fear of the immigrant, whether that’s racism and prejudice, fear of religion. Over and over we keep doing the same things to different people who all are coincidentally are brown and have black hair.
Anya: Julian is looking at these refugee crises from a birds’ eye view, but he chose to write Boat People fully zoomed in.
Julian: Once again, I really like the individual stories rather than the larger big numbers because we talk about hundreds of thousands of people having to leave on these rickety fishing boats. That’s sad. That makes most people sad, it makes the liberal Minnesotans sad and they pledge to NPR after they hear this story. But I want you to know individuals and so I wrote this song almost verbatim, except for the present moments where I’m considering my own family and life, about this guy Dr. Tran who did this late 70s interview with the Canadian broadcasting corporation. I found it in an archive and his story was insane. He has to basically take several different taxis, leave his wife behind, he takes his two kids. He’s in a Chinese safe house and then has contact for this fishing boat, crams on with hundreds of other people. Just all this kind of sneaking around because the Vietnamese did not want them to leave. And then eventually the boat gets barded by pirates.
[BOAT PEOPLE]
Julian: Like all these pirates from Thailand were just roaming the South China Sea…
[BOAT PEOPLE]
Julian: People get killed…
[BOAT PEOPLE FADES OUT]
Julian: Eventually he survives, his kids survive, and they make it to Pulau Bidong, which at the time was the most crowded place in the world. It was a little island off the coast of Malaysia where thousands of people were all crammed together, the people who survived these boat trips.
Anya: Zooming into Dr. Tran’s life like this allows Julian to explore the realities of the journey from Vietnam to North America.
Julian: And so that’s just one guy’s story. I mean it’s… it’s like a movie and I just think about that, once again, expanded by the hundreds of thousands. You know… death, holding onto everything you have in the world, holding onto your kids.
Anya: Julian thinks it’s important to see things from that zoomed-in perspective to try to understand what it was really like, living through something like that.
Julian: Taking a ferry from the mainland to Martha’s vineyard has made me sick, in my life before. Being crowded, like sardines, with all these people, fearful, having no idea where they’ll end up. Maybe Australia, maybe Canada, maybe the U.S., maybe they’ll pass a generation in these refugee camps. Some people spent 20 years there.
Anya: I wanted to know, from someone whose family left Vietnam, the difference he saw between people who left and people who stayed. After talking to Professor Aguilar San Juan last episode, I no longer saw it as a choice people made to leave. Of course, Vietnamese people had agency, but their choices were constrained by the boundaries of what the war allowed them to do. Julian reminded me that it’s hard to say why any one person left or stayed because the moment they ventured down either path was such a complicated moment to understand.
Julian: And you know you ask the reason why people left and why people stayed… when the communists came down, my aunt remembers this, she has a journal entry I’ve read that she wrote down in French… The soldiers, she was watching the North Vietnamese soldiers descend upon Saigon. People just wanted to start waving North Vietnamese flags and not be part of the South Vietnamese army because they’d get in trouble. They’d get put in re-education camps and they’d get tortured and stuff like that, in horrible horrible ways. So some people were probably like, “Yeah okay, new boss. We dealt with the old boss, let’s see how it goes.” And then some poeple, especially if they were found to be allied with the Americans, like my family was. You would probably be killed or at least re-educated if you stayed behind. That’s what a lot of people were running from.
Then a lot of lower class people, lot of people in the countryside were running towards better economic opportunity. They heard, “Oh the Americans out of guilt for losing this war and fleeing, are letting all these refugees in, and if you go to America you can make more money than you can under a fledge link communist country that’s not open to trade with the United States and other people.” That’s the question you have to ask at the individual level. I think that’s something that is important to do. Like why did your family go? Even in my family, there’s probably 100 different reasons.
[TELL HANOI I LOVE HER INTRO]
Anya: When people left, they were leaving behind their home. It was the language, the food, and the landscape they loved. Sometimes it was their family members, too. And they didn’t always know they weren’t coming back. Like we talked about, Julian’s mom left in 1968 and she had no idea she wouldn’t return for almost fifty years.
[TELL HANOI I LOVE HER]
Julian: From 68’ to 13’, that’s an insane amount of time. That’s a lifetime.
Anya: Julian took his mom on a trip back to Vietnam in 2013, expecting to experience her country with her. But what they found together was different.
Julian: It was a weird experience because she saw reflections of a childhood in a country that doesn’t exist anymore, but those buildings are still there, especially some of the nice hotels and the opera house in downtown Saigon where she grew up nearby.
Anya: The city his mom was from, Saigon, it didn’t even exist anymore. The day that Saigon fell in 1975, the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.
Julian: So the landmarks are there, but they’re almost ghostly and hollowed out of their mid-century meaning. There’s communist propaganda everywhere, it’s a one-party state. But the kids there definitely don’t have the hang-ups of refugee kids or refugees in the United States who still hold a grudge.
Anya: I asked Julian what he meant by that.
Julian: I know so many people who have told me, “I won’t go back to Vietnam until my parents are dead because they would just not like it.” And it’s like damn, that’s some heavy hang-up.
Anya: When people fled Vietnam, they sometimes left with very few physical possessions, but a lot of baggage. And they didn’t always get to leave the country on their own terms. The war, what people lost, the wounds didn’t just disappear when Vietnamese refugees ended up wherever they ended up. In Julian’s song, Tell Hanoi I Love Her, he talks about these hang-ups.
[TELL HANOI I LOVE HER]
Anya: There were a lot of changes after the war ended. Like I said, when Saigon fell it was renamed Ho Chi Minh City, after the communist revolutionary leader. Hanoi became the new capital when the North and South were reunited after the war under the new communist government. Vietnam today has some capitalistic leanings, but they’re still a communist country. Julian thinks they’re processing the war in their own way, in a way that a lot of Vietnamese refugees can’t.
[TELL HANOI I LOVE HER FADES OUT]
Anya: But Julian isn’t just stuck in the past.
Julian: Doing work about Southeast Asian refugees or Japanese American incarceration camps has inevitably led me to the camps in our own country that are popping up today or that have been there for a while. I spent a lot of the last few tours routing my gigs down to the Texas border or down to Tijuana to meet with a lot of the refugees. Because like I said earlier, it’s not necessarily a connection through blood, but it’s a connection through bloodshed or hardship or stuff like this.
Anya: Julian uses his music to process his community’s own refugee experience, but also to look beyond his community. Learning about Southeast Asian refugees and Japanese American incarceration has helped him see why people leave their lives behind, it’s given him insight into what makes them arrive at the American borders asking for asylum.
Julian: I have maybe a better understanding of what a lot of the Central American, Mexican folks, and folks fleeing from Africa coming all the way here, walking up Mexico just to get to the United States are going through. And that’s fleeing gang violence that extorts them, has murdered members of their family, because of a government that is not strong and cannot properly police the state. People just without an opportunity to make a living. Those are the stories of people my age and people younger than I’m hearing today. In a state like Vietnam, after the war, people have been devastated by this war. Just so many people died in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. After reunification, I gotta imagine it’s a similar story.
Anya: His family’s experiences also offer him context and perspective for his own life. He’s grappling with the contradictions of being so close to the violence of the. war, never having experienced that violence himself. And sometimes, knowing what his family went through, leads him to be kind of unforgiving.
Julian: I remember one day I was asking the students, “Hey how are you feeling?” It was the second day of class and one student, I think they were a sophomore, was like.. just look like their parents had died. Couldn’t even lift their head and was like “I’m so jaded…” and I was like, “Wait hold on a second. You go to brown university! It’s one of the 10 best schools in the country! Have you just walked outside and seen how nice they cut the grass? It looks like a movie here! What do you mean you’re jaded, it’s the second day of class? This is an incredible place.”
That’s not to push aside the real mental health aspects of being a college kid or a person in general. I’ve gone through all of that stuff, I know how it is. But if you’re jaded after one year and two days after college at one of the most elite universities in the world, maybe you should check your privilege a little bit and not necessarily go so deep into these books about the oppression of marginalized community, which you yourself may come from.
Anya: Today, as we process our families’ stories and the stories of other oppressed peoples in the world, it’s easy to get wrapped up in feeling and wallowing in those traumas. What Julian tries to remember is that the perspective from inside these stories is much different than the perspective he has reflecting on this history.
Julian: The people in these books, like my mom who lived through a war, she wasn’t like walking home from school and hearing explosions going off and internalizing that and thinking “I’m so oppressed, oh my god.. These Americans… blah blah blah,” she was thinking, “I should get home! I want to go get ice cream, I want to get on with my life.”
Anya: What Julian is saying was really important for me to hear. Those in the Asian diaspora who are second or third-generation kids have an opportunity to explore their family’s place in history and the complexities of the immigrant and refugee experience in ways that the first-generation didn’t get to. But it’s easy to get lost in what we find. It’s easy to forget about the joyful moments in our immigrant histories, the big triumphs, and the simple things.
Julian: So many of us who are, you know the kids of refugees or the kids of immigrants, it’s always the second generation that is more politically active. And that’s great, but sometimes we should look to our parents and be like, “Oh it’s not that you didn’t get it mom, but just living and making the best life possible was enough.”
[LITTLE SAIGON BEGINS]
Julian: But then you get assholes like me who have to go make a big deal of everything …the truth is somewhere in between, let’s put it that way
Anya: But yeah, Julian is a total hypocrite. Because dwelling on the difficult past is like the whole point of his music. Even if Julian makes fun of the fact that he’s obsessed with the past, I think his music has a lot of healing power for people in the present. I’ve experienced this, being brought to tears in my college auditorium. Julian says the connections his songs make bring him closer to people all over the country.
Julian: But inevitably, there’s one sneaky Vietnamese person who’s in the crowd. I remember this one gig in Chicago, I did this whole sad intro that I just talked about, like looked down, I’m a performer and I’m like, “This next song is called boat ppl”. And I just hear from the back of the crowd this “Woo!” like a real drunk college woo. And I was like, “Oh that’s really disrespectful. Og my god.” And after the show, this woman comes up to me and she’s like, “I’m the one who woo-ed during boat people! I’m a boat person!” And I was like, “Aw, that’s amazing.” And a song like that has allowed me to connect with Vietnamese people.
Anya: At the end of the day, it’s important for Julian to connect with this history, too. He writes his songs to understand himself.
Julian: As we talked about, this was not a history I learned about in school. Really limited history talking to my own family cause it’s something that they wanna forget and certainly something they don’t wanna study at an academic level. And I didn’t grow up around any other Vietnamese kids besides my little brother. To the point when I got to Brown, any Vietnamese person I’d met I’d be like “Hey, wanna get lunch? Wanna get a bowl of pho?” I’d be hanging out with the Vietnamese food truck guy and his mom during my breaks just because I wanted to know more about these people and myself through these people.
[LITTLE SAIGON]
Anya: I understand this crazy desire. I, too, am guilty of trying to learn more about my heritage by cornering any Korean person I meet. And I don’t really know why or how my family came to America. A whole chunk of my family tree is just a big blank in my mind, and sometimes that makes me feel rootless. Lately, the longing to know that part of myself has been difficult to grapple with. And maybe that’s why I’m here, making this podcast for you, just like Julian writes his songs.
Julian: That’s part of what I want to do with the project. I wish as a 12-year-old, a 16-year-old, or a college kid, I has heard these songs. Folk music or rock music, music I like or I could relate to. Not some abstract performance art piece or some big production, but just simple songs played by a simple Asian. No one said here’s a story of these really resilient women in a Japanese incarceration camp. Or here’s a story of this doctor who left Vietnam on a boat and had no idea where he was gonna go. Here’s a story of the people who didn’t make it.
[LITTLE SAIGON FADES OUT]
Julian: You know it’s often said Asian Americans have an invisibility problem and that’s largely true I guess. So these little stories, they mean a lot more to me than people learning the big history in the intro to ethnic studies classes. If there’s someone you can hold onto to like someone’s grandmother’s story that you’re like that’s really profound and powerful. So then you go ask your own grandmother or your aunty her story and then you go fill in the blanks of the Asian side you never really wanted to learn about because the white side was so much easier.
Anya: These small stories, hidden in the diaspora, they’re messy. There aren’t always easy answers to questions like: Where are we from? Why did you leave? And what was it like to live through that? But when Julian investigates these histories, when he tells these stories, they’re like armor against the world. They help Julian feel grounded and proud of the people he came from.
Julian: I think for me, all looking into this history does, looking into Asian American history does, is to find some ancestors. People who looked like me, people who really struggled to make a life in this place or didn’t make it. To put some ancestors behind my back or to stand on the shoulders of them and to feel good about myself.
[DRAGON PARK BEGINS]
Julian: I don’t know how your experience was but for me, I just hid away from it. I literally had moments that I wished I was white like the other Julian in class. And that’s a really messed up, a deeply messed up thing that I think a lot of immigrant kids, minority kids go through. Where you just want to change your eyes or your face so you don’t get beat up on the playground.
[DRAGON PARK]
Julian: Like I said I hope that’s different now for a lot of high schoolers and middle schoolers and stuff. For me, that was the case and it sucked and thus you have a giant dissertation worth of overreaction to being a marginalized Asian person. Come hang with me for an hour at a concert if those ever happen again. You might not get some really airtight political or historical argument the way my colleagues will be able to deliver it to you, but you’ll have more fun, it will be more emotional, it will be interesting. Cause I just want you to sit with these images, I just want you to sit with these songs and these narratives that are confusing and messy because that is what history is. It’s just a mess.
[DRAGON PARK]
Julian: Just to sit down and start to think about that. If there’s any shame with being a kid who didn’t quite fit in because of how you looked, hopefully, some of that thaws. And maybe some of those difficult questions with your family become easier to ask.
Anya: And that’s a wrap for this episode of New Narratives. Special thanks to Julian Saporiti, who was featured in today’s story. Music featured in this episode is by No No Boy. You can find his stuff on Spotify. This episode was written, edited, and produced by your host, Anya Steinberg, storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project. More information about AAOP can be found at our website, aaopmn.org. Thanks for listening.
[DRAGON PARK FADES OUT]
*Uncertain about the spelling of these two names