REAL OR FANTASY? Ariel Bui Sets Record Straight
Indie artist breaks down the story behind single "Sixteen," her new album, Real & Fantasy, and more.
TRIGGER WARNING
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sexual assault, sexual abuse
Ariel Bui poses for her new album campaign. Photo by Jonathan Kingsbury.
“Sixteen” is Nashville veteran Ariel Bui’s first single in six years. Sixteen is also the age that she began writing songs. Now at age thirty-six, “Sixteen” comes out about twenty years after she began songwriting. Perhaps the timing is coincidental. After all, “Sixteen” is the opening track to her upcoming record, Real & Fantasy, in which Ariel describes the subject matter as “chronological.” Nonetheless, Ariel set the record straight, un-peeling the song’s layers for readers to sink teeth into.
Ariel, thank you for sitting down [with me] and taking the time [to answer questions], and congrats on releasing your new single!
Thank you! Thank you for coming out here [and] for wanting to include me [on your blog].
Absolutely! So, what inspired the song?
[T]his whole project is a collaboration with this music library company called Audio Network. So how it all began was out of the blue, an old friend of mine [Wolfy Lonesome] from my. . .middle-school, high-school days in the Florida music scene. . .reaches out to me on Facebook Messenger and was like, “Hey! Can I introduce you to this A&R rep from LA? He said he’s looking for some songwriters in Nashville and you were the first person that I thought of. He works for this label that his company places music in television and film [for].”. . .I’ve been wanting to get into [sync licensing] for a while, and I was, like, “Yeah! Thank you so much for thinking of me! I would love to!” I met up with this A&R rep, Tasso Smith. He came out from LA to Nashville to meet up with a bunch of different songwriters to find songwriters for Audio Network. [W]e had coffee in East Nashville, and he asked me, “Would you consider yourself a country and Western writer?” And I said, “Well, I have written some country and Western songs but I wouldn’t consider myself a country and Western writer because I’ve written [in] many different styles of music. I’ve written different albums, I’ve lived in different places, different vibes.”. . .[An EP] that I wrote in New Mexico was way more inspired by pow-wow rhythms and the time and expansiveness of the New Mexican desert. [I told him] some of my [other] stuff is more folky and some of it’s more rock n’ roll and some of it’s more psychedelic or whatever.
So, we talked for a while and [he] decided to pitch me as a concept artist, which I liked. I was, like, “Okay! I really like that!”. . .And a few weeks later, he got back to me and said, “Hey! Would you be open to writing a female alt-indie rock record, or at least some songs?” We didn’t start with a whole record. [The label was], like, “Maybe a few songs, maybe an EP.” But the more that I submitted to this project, the more chance that we could have placement in television and film, y’know, sync licensing. More opportunities for licensing and, therefore, hopefully make some money off of this, right? And so, [the label had] heard my song “Appraisal” off of my last record. They really wanted to be able to use it, but the lyrics are not mine. It’s set to a poem by Sara Teasdale, so we couldn’t license that to them.
“Sixteen" was the first song that I wrote [for this project]. And I remember coming into [my] kitchen while my partner was asleep on the other side of the house. And I came in here with my electric guitar, unplugged, and I was, like, "Okay, what am I gonna write about?" The last thing I released actually was the tenth anniversary of my first record [Disguised As Fate]. So I did that in 2018, but I wouldn’t say that it was an official release. It was kinda, more, for me commemorating the celebration that my first record [written mostly in my teens] was ten years old, y’know? So, I was thinking about what I’d been watching on T.V. I was thinking about how this deal came about. And it was making me think a lot about… being sixteen, y’know?
Ariel Bui (back & center) at a house show in Brevard County, Florida. Photo by Sarah Simeon circa 2005.
Sixteen was when I started writing music and playing shows. It was almost like I was singing to the group of friends that were in Brevard County in Florida that were resurfacing in my life. One of my best friends and I, we were talking [about] work and Wolfy. . .So, I kinda like, wanted to sing it almost, like, to them, to the people who knew me [from] when [my music career] started to now. The friends who were at the house shows with me and all the American Legion Hall shows and stuff. It was, like, "Hey! Remember? I was just sixteen!" But also it’s, like, “I was just sixteen, you know what I mean.” I was trying to write a simple rock n’ roll song, and that phrase came to me because of The Beatles’s song: “She was just seventeen. You know what I mean.”
I flipped that on its head [to] be, like, “I was just sixteen. You know what I mean.” And that innuendo. . .I feel like, in general with songwriting and poetry, you wanna leave that open-ended so that the listener [or] the reader can be, like, “Oh, it can mean so many things.” What [does] that even mean to you? But it’s a classic line, so I kinda flipped that classic line from the perspective of a female. And I started off being super light-hearted, y’know? Because we [were] trying to write songs for T.V. I was watching. PEN15, y’know? Asian representation! A lot of the Asian representation in T.V. right now featured a lot of these high school, comedy, romance things, right? PEN15 is less comedy romance. It’s more like friends. But... I mean, there’s a little bit of the romance stuff in there, so, like, middle school, high school dramas. So there was. . .To All The Boys I Ever Loved, and most recently I watched Never Have I Ever. So I’m thinking to myself,
“Okay: teenagers. There’s a lot of youth on television right? Even if it’s not [high schoolers], it’s like, college students [in shows like] Dear White People and those kinds of early college television [shows].”
This dovetails into the fact that I just re-released the tenth anniversary of my first record, which I wrote [the songs for] while I was a teenager. And then on top of that, all these years of living in Nashville, I’ve been working with teenage girls at Southern Girls Rock n’ Roll Camp, Tennessee Teen’s Rock n’ Roll Camp, and through Melodia Studio - my music school - and these kids that are becoming teenagers now, empowering these girls and feeling inspired by them. . .I’m a solo singer-songwriter most of the time and whenever I have a band, it’s like, we’re in the studio and a band is put together or there’s a live show and there’s a band put together. But when I was doing Rock Camp. . .these 11-to-17-year-old girls have one week to learn an instrument and write a song and rock out! And they do it. It’s inspiring. It’s punk rock! Y’know?
I also felt like I wanted to sing a song from the perspective of not only when I was sixteen and having fun and all this stuff. But not only was I also trying to make my. . .voice being heard, my music being respected. . .There are so many girls doing that in my life. These teenage girls who are writing their own music and… we’re teaching them as camp counselors to have a voice and to use that voice. . .I was also thinking about other things going on at the time when I was writing the song in 2019. Y’know, the Greta Thunberg's who are teenage girls leading activism. I think at the beginning of the whole pandemic, with George Floyd and all of these things, there were all these teenage girls that were the ones organizing some of our largest protests here in Nashville. So I just wanted to highlight how powerful [these youth are] and how much these youth have to say.
And then I feel like, towards the end of the song, I also mention some of the darker sides of being a teenage girl. I had my own experiences with sexual assault and sexual abuse at the time. When you’re in a rock n’ roll scene, there’s, like, all these dudes and all these young adoring fans and things like that. There’s a lot of, kinda, seedy stuff that can happen in scenes, but also just, in general, the world kind of preys upon teenage girls and. . .their new sexuality. . .But also, I mean, really, I think that that is what taps into the “you know what I mean.” I mean, you can’t really be like, “I was just sixteen. You know what I mean,” without really addressing how messed up actually that [is]. . .“She was just seventeen and she was hot and I liked her” and whatever. And it can be more innocent than that, obviously. Who knows how old these people were when they’re writing songs so, I mean, it’s fine to like a 17-year-old if you’re an appropriate age, a 17-year-old.
[“Sixteen”] kind of ends with that [notion] and is a lot more powerful than the beginning. It’s kinda, like… it kinda takes the lightness of being a teenager and the darkness of being a teenager. And [Andrija Tokic and I] were worried that it would be too dark for T.V. or whatever. But so far. . .[“Sixteen” has been] hands down the song that everybody’s loved the most. [That feedback] just reminds me that people can handle a message. Even on the sheet where [it states], “These are different topics that you can write songs about for sync licensing,” one of the many items like, “Love, [etc]." It’s a funny list, actually. But one of them was “female empowerment,” and I’m like, “Okay! If female empowerment is an acceptable topic for music for television, then [I’ll] do it!” ‘Cause, there’s a lot of T.V. like that, outside of the teenage stuff… I was [thinking, for example] Game of Thrones and, like, y’know… what is it? The Handmaid’s Tale and, like… all of these, kind of, dystopian things where ultimately, even though there’s a lot of violence against women there’s also a lot of, like, “Women are the main heroines,” and fighting against the power. So, yeah! That’s a long answer but…
No, I definitely appreciate it! The complexity of being sixteen, of being an adolescent, especially growing up in music scenes… Is that the reason why the single is the first single to promote the album, outside of being the first track on the album?
I think it just made sense for a bunch of different reasons.
A. It was the first song I wrote for the project.
B. The rest of the album kind of goes from youth to adulthood, so a couple of songs, [like] “Sixteen” and “Young Love,” kind of kick off the record.
It’s funny because, like, “Sixteen” is such a[n], “I have a statement. I have something to say” [song], and then the next song on the record goes to “Young Love,” which is just like… literally, I tried to write a pop song that had the most simple lyrics. ‘Cause you know how a lot of pop songs and hip-hop songs these days are really into rhyming super simple words with super simple words. Super. Simple. Lyrics. Super colloquial. So literally the opening line [of "Young Love"] is, “I have a high-school crush / I still like him so much / Did you think our love would last?” This is after I’m like, “I have something to say! I’m a really powerful woman!” or whatever. So yeah, it kind of intros into… There’s youth, there’s something deeper, there’s complexity. Let’s lighten it up a little bit. After I wrote [“Sixteen”] as the first song, [My team and I] weren’t sure if it would be too heavy. So I lightened it up with “Young Love.” Just once again, thinking about those, like, high-school dramas, like, having high-school crushes and then, like, “What does that look like?". . .The story kind of goes into, like, “Well, now we’re growing older. What does that start to look like?”
And it starts to get a little more adult-themed. "What happens when we barely have time for our loved ones because we have work and jobs, deadlines, taxes?" Y’know? "Then what happens when you’re exploring your sexuality and like, whether it’s compatible with someone else’s or not or with yourself?" Or, "What about things that are kind of somewhere in this grey area?" Because we have such rigid societal norms to what relationships look like. So then, how do you explore that, and how do you explain, like, different relationships in your life that don’t fall within those confounds? So, like, I think that “Sixteen,” because it’s so open-ended with the hook being “I have something to say,” it opens [the listener] up to, “Well, okay! Listen to the rest of the album. You’ll hear some other things that I have to say.” And then all the songs [except for one] were written before the pandemic. A couple of them… I wrote them in 2016. So they were really old songs, and I used a couple of old songs. Because when the pandemic hit, I got writer’s block. I got writer’s block because. . .the world literally felt like it was ending. There was [the] pandemic. There was shutdown. People were losing their jobs. People were losing their minds. People were dying. And there was, like, all that George Floyd stuff. There was the tornado [in Nashville], the Christmas bombing. I mean, it was super intense and I had all of these songs about, like, high-school crushes or whatever. And so I do have one song that I wrote that was kinda, like, more addressing [the year 2020].
But I feel like [“Sixteen”] became the single and the first track on the album, not only because the album is mostly chronological. It’s almost like a concept album that. . .has a beginning and an end, and it has an arc and a storyline. But at the same time too, I surveyed a lot of friends and people in the music industry that I respected [for] their opinions. I shared all of the songs with them. . .and I surveyed them about which songs they thought were the first single and the second single. Every single person picked “Sixteen” as a single. . .Almost everyone picked a different song for the second single, which luckily I had already anticipated. When [Andrija and I] were in the studio, we had to pick one song that we thought might be a single, and we thought “Real & Fantasy.” It used to be called “On The Edge,” but Audio Network already had a song on their catalog called “On The Edge,” so we titled the song–and the album–Real & Fantasy. And we were anticipating that would be the single. And it didn’t end up being the one everyone picked, but nobody picked a second single that was the same.
But “Sixteen” was the one, hands down, that everyone was, like, “Yeah! This one.”
Nice. So, you mentioned that many of these songs on your upcoming album were written around the same time as your previous release.
Not many. Just a couple.
A couple. But a lot of these songs were written before the pandemic in general. Which previous release would you compare Real & Fantasy to the most?
Honestly, I would say it’s the departure from all of them because all of the previous [releases] were way more folky, country. Even if they were psychedelic or weird or whatever, they were all pretty what now people would call maybe, like, Americana or something like that. I hate that word for some reason though, and it’s [Americana Fest right now]. . .I didn’t know Americana as a concept until my last record when people were just describing [my self-titled record]. I didn’t know it was a genre. But if anything, I mean honestly, the song “Appraisal” from my self-titled record is a rock n’ roll song. It’s my most rock n’ roll song, and that was what [Audio Network] referenced when they asked, “Can you write more songs like this?” It’s funny; I had a cousin once tell me, “Oh, you know [“Appraisal”] is really awesome. [For your] next album, you should make an album full of songs kind of like [that].” And I was, like, “Yeah, yeah, easy for people to say what they think I should do or whatever. Costs so much money to do all this stuff.” And so now when we joke, I’m like, “Oh, guess what? Remember when you were, like, ‘Hey, for your next record, you should make a record full of songs like [“Appraisal”]? That’s what the label [ended] up paying for, y’know. [laughs] Like, ‘Hey, can you write a bunch of rock n’ roll songs like this?’”
But I love rock n’ roll! I’ve always loved rock n’ roll, and so I think it’s really fun. It’s fun that I get to. I’ve always been in a rock n’ roll scene as kind of a more folk artist. And especially, yeah it was one thing in the Florida music scene where I established myself for such a long time in those spaces, but I just felt like when I got [to Nashville], either it was too folk for the rock scene or too weird for the Americana scene. And so I feel like I'm always in this weird in-between space. I feel like all my friends are just very one or the other and I’m kind of somewhere in the middle. So it’s fun for me to make a rock record and have that opportunity to make some rock songs. I think that one of the reasons why I hadn’t written so many before was because the guitar parts and stuff are, in terms of the songwriting, really simple actually. And what fleshes it out is having a band. If I don’t have a band to play with all the time, it’s more fun for me as a solo artist to make folk songs because they’re more fleshed out in that way. Vocally, guitar-wise whatever, stylistically sound okay being that stripped down. So it was fun for me to be prompted, "Can you write some rock songs?" And I tried to keep them as simple as possible so I could eventually play these songs with rock camp campers [and] that they weren’t too complicated.
When [Audio Network asked], “We want more songs like “Appraisal,”” I was like, “Well, what were the aspects of 'Appraisal'?" "Appraisal" was super simple, in terms of [guitar chord progressions]. Simple, simple chord progressions. The structure. Super simple song structure. It’s just an ABA song structure with the same three chords the whole time and it’s female empowerment. So I was like, “Alright! What can I do to write more songs like that?" One thing that was different was, once again, "Appraisal" was set to a poem by Sara Teasdale. I mean, her poetry is very old-sounding. It’s from the 20s and 30s, so a different way of writing. And I did not use a very poetic, lyrical style for this record. I used a very colloquial, simple pop style.
That’s very interesting. Let’s dive into production. How would you compare producing this album for sync licensing compared to your previous releases, which were releasing them for the sake of releasing music?
Well, say, for example, I can definitely compare the process of having made this record with the last one, with the self-titled record. Because they were both produced by Andrija Tokic, and they were both recorded at The Bomb Shelter. So they were both really different in the fact that say, for example, the first record that Andrija and I made together. . .Of course, I wanted it to have some form of success but it was deeply personal. I wanted it to be a showcase of who I was as an artist at the time and really showcase that professionally and showcase it well. We wanted to highlight the nuance of my vocal delivery. . .I wanted jazz musicians because I felt like jazz musicians can play any style of music whereas say, for example, rock musicians or like any other type of musicians might not be able to do the nuances of, say for example, jazz. Jazz players often have very… a lot of finesse and also the ability to play literally any style. Whereas someone who plays a different style might not be able to play every style. They might just stick with their one style. Sometimes people are really loud, like drummers who can’t play quiet and stuff like that. . .I had never worked with a producer before [my self-titled record], and we were really closely working on pre-production. “Hey, all I know is that I hear an acoustic upright bass on these songs.” It was very organic. I wanted everything to be analog from start to finish. I wanted to make my first vinyl record, and I wanted it to be completely cut from tape to lathe. I wanted it to be this kind of transcendental organic sound waves kind of like music therapy if you listened to the vinyl. We had spaghetti Western vibes, kind of more like “cowboy in the desert” vibes, sitting on the porch, and I have friends doing backup harmonies. We were, like, playing together a lot all of the time. So it was the culmination of many years of writing, and [the sound] was very carefully curated.
Andrija Tokic (left) and Ariel Bui (right) during the studio sessions for Ariel Bui. Shot by Ben Grimes circa 2015.
[Real & Fantasy] was thrown together, I feel like, much more quickly. It’s still taken years from writing to recording to putting it out. But I felt like. . .there were so many members of the team. It was, like, everyone had opinions. The label wanted to make sure that. . .things would get sent to the team in London, and they’d be like, “We approve of these songs. We think they’re great.” “Okay, we’re worried this one might be too slow." Or like, “Okay, now that you’re writing a whole album, we can have some slow songs. We can have an arc.” And then, I sent a lot of ideas of what I wanted things to sound like to Andrija, the producer, but I felt like when we were in the studio that he also wanted to make sure that the songs that he was producing were going to be commercially viable. So it was a different vibe in the studio, where we were like, “Okay, how do we make some hits? Or like some bangers?” ‘Cause I don’t think that either of us does that that often. [Andrija] left the world of producing people like Taylor Swift and stuff. Like, he used to be kinda in that world and he left it and went on to do less of the pop. . .Not saying that pop isn’t good, but we wanna do things that are unique and personal and tasteful in an artful way. So for us, to come from that background, like, let’s make something unique and tasteful in an artful way. . .while also making it commercially viable.
I felt like [Andrija] had these ideas of what could be commercially viable while I still kind of wanted certain nuances. I wanted to make, like, a whole surf-punk record. So it’s weird. . .[With Ariel Bui] I felt like we kinda were on the same wavelength and made something that we were totally on the same page of. Whereas [with Real & Fantasy], I felt like both of us were kinda doing our thing to make the [record] that we believed would be successful. I wrote the songs that I felt like could be successful, and he produced it and it kind of just took on a life of its own. . .[Ariel Bui] was a whole bunch of, “How many different Southern roots style songs and styles can we put altogether,” whether it’s jazz, blues, rock n’ roll, folk, country. And [Real & Fantasy] is like, “How many different styles of rock can we showcase?” We have some 80s synthy dance songs. We got some surf rock. We have some. . .more straightforward indie rock. Country rock. We have different styles of rock. The last [record] was almost, like, different styles of folk. This one’s, like, different styles of rock. Not all of them for sure. There are so many [rock styles]. But yeah, that’s kind of the difference. There’s many differences, but those are a couple of them.
Thank you so much for sharing about the album and especially your first single. To close off our interview, my last question to you is…
As an API woman and as someone who’s been in the music industry for years, what advice do you have [for] other API women in the music industry? Live music, whether it’s behind the scenes [or not]. What advice would you give to other API women in the industry?
Oh my gosh! That’s, like, a pretty big… big question! Well, I think first and foremost, make sure that your art is good. You know what I mean?
I feel like as an Asian-American woman in the arts, you don’t see yourself hardly ever represented. There’s a little bit more of it now, but then it feels really… like, any time I saw representation I felt like, instead of it being, like, “Oh you can do this too,” it was like, “Aw, man. They already have an Asian person now. They met their quota.” You know what I mean? It almost… it’s like, it had the opposite effect sometimes. . .You don’t see yourself, so then you don’t think that you have that possibility of even gaining that type of success. And then when you see other people have it you’re like, “Well, that’s for them and not for me.”
But I think that [my] number one [advice] is, like, making sure that [] honing in on your craft, first and foremost, is super important. ‘Cause everything else outside of that is just whatever. It’s the system or it’s the this or the that or whatever. [‘Cause] first, you’ve got to make sure that what you’re making is good. And how do you qualify that? I don’t know. But y’know? You work on it! You work on your songwriting and you listen to yourself. You work on recording and you listen back to yourself. You work on your craft, first and foremost.
[Next] you work on building community. It’s all about building community. Which is really cool [that] you’re doing Shoes Off. But, like, I definitely - now during the pandemic and everything else, feeling burnt out - I don’t build community as much as I feel like I used to. I don’t go out as much as I used to or don’t… y’know? But I guess I still am though. I’m running a school. I do communicate with people on the internet.
First, there’s building your craft. Honing in on your craft. Honing in on your voice. Honing in on your art. Because that’s gonna have to speak for itself at some point, no matter what. That’s the bottom line of it. But just like with any industry, it’s not what you know. It’s who you know. . .I used to live in this house in Germantown. . .and we always had this third room that needed a roommate. And I had a soft spot in my heart for people moving to Nashville wanting to pursue music, which happens every day! It happened to me!. . .I can’t tell you how many people [coming] to Nashville have these big dreams. They would be like, “I wanna become a session guitarist and play for all the bla-bla-bla-bla-blah’s!” And l’m like, “First of all, your competition are people who’ve played with Bob Dylan.” Y’know, like Johnny Cash and stuff. “Your competition is high and you haven’t left your home since you moved here three months ago! And now you’re moving away because you’re homesick, and you are like, ‘Oh, my dreams are squashed because nobody wants to play shows with me!’” I’m like, “You haven’t left the house, you haven’t met anybody, you haven’t started building and developing relationships.” And those relationships don’t just happen overnight.
That was another thing that would happen. People would move here and they would assume [I’ve] been here for a while. “Why don’t you set me up with a show. Why don’t you connect me with your friends?” It’s like, you have to build relationships with people long-term and be a part of that community. So that when you do need each other, to support each other, they’re there! You’ve got to create and maintain relationships. And the more genuine, the better! ‘Cause the more real your friends are - that you’ve made who are making cool stuff - you just surround yourself by people who have the same goals and things as you and have the same kind of spirit and drive for what it is that you guys are wanting to do. And it’s really helpful too, because then when you’re experiencing hardships and burning out and stuff, you can also have each other to talk to and support each other through the hard times, too. The good times and the hard times.
When it comes to the race aspect of it, I think that… once again, when you hone in on your craft, and then you build your community, I think that that’s when it starts to feel like it doesn’t matter what your race is. Because you are a respected person known for who you are and what you create. But then there’s always gonna be, y’know… And we talked about this–I mentioned this when we were at that API Middle Tennessee artist conversation–where for me, a lot of that balance now is. . .We’ve spent a lot of our lives trying to assimilate into White culture, I would say. Or even Black culture, honestly! Because I feel like there isn’t much of, “What is Asian-Asian culture?” There’s no, “this is Asian-American music,” or, “this is Asian-American whatever.” I feel like we’ve spent a lot of our lives assimilating into either White or Black culture.
I know a lot of Asian-American people, especially in California and stuff, [who are] really into hip-hop culture and stuff like that. Which is cool! But I think that a lot of the times, it’s made it hard, especially as women, y’know. Asian people and women both have this thing, I think, where for a long time, we are taught to be like, “Well I’m not like other girls. I’m cooler than them.” And then you hang out with the guys more and be like, “I’m cooler than other women.” Y’know, this competition and not wanting to be lumped in with other women. And it was the same with Asian-American stuff. Like, “Well, I’m cooler than other Asian-American people.” In the South, you don’t even know anybody so you’re like, “I’m the only Asian person.” So how do you create community with other Asian-American people? And you just reject that notion for a long time. Sometimes, you’ll reject throughout [your] younger years; I’m sure many of us rejected our Asian-American culture and we rejected being women in lots of ways. I think that now that I’m on this other side of this journey of actually wanting to honor my heritage, [I] understand who I am fully. I am American, yes, but I also have other aspects of my heritage that I wanna honor and not just throw away.
The hard part, I think, in terms of being an Asian-American woman in the arts is… Where do you find the balance between Asian representation and being that face and that voice for others, so that they can see that they can also do it? But also, how do you avoid being tokenized? How do you avoid the token diversity, and then basically get pigeonholed into being an Asian-American artist? How do you avoid being defined as that? It’s really frustrating, and I think people from all POC [backgrounds] experience this. It’s like, “Oh, this is the first Black woman council person.” Like, you don’t see everybody being like, “Oh, this White male councilman,” y’know? But they’re always like, “Oh, but this African-American,” or, “Asian-American songwriter.” How do you represent without being tokenized? And I think that’s deeply personal for everyone.
But I guess that’s less of advice and more of just acknowledging that that is one of the challenges. . .Especially when I read articles of Thao Nguyen from The Get Down Stay Down or Mitski. They do also experience a lot of. . .racism in journalism when describing their art. I think that that means that in order to really be able to navigate that space, if you start gain success and all of that, I think it has to do with a lot of self-reflection. Where do you feel comfortable with your identity? Do a lot of self-work and therapy. Even though it’s hard to find API therapists, right? That’s a challenge and a problem in and of itself. A systemic problem. But, y’know, work on those hard things. Do the self-care and the self-work and the self-identity. Find out where that feels comfortable for you and try to protect that. It’s really easy to get steered into whatever direction. And if you don’t know what direction you wanna go in, it’s really easy to get lost in it.
So, yeah! Just [continue] to get to know yourself and get to know your art and get to know your community. So that when you have to go out there in the world and represent yourself and your art, then you know how you wanna represent your identity. I think that’s a continual journey and it evolves.
I also want to say that I know a lot of people who are multiracial, I have a lot of cousins that are [multiracial], and… a lot of [them], I feel like, consider themselves White. Which is interesting to me. That’s not my identity so I can’t judge. But what I notice about Whiteness - or the construct of Whiteness - is that a lot of the construct of Whiteness is an erasure of culture–. That they don’t have a place that they’re from, that they’re just from America. Whether they have Irish or German or anything, it’s literally just an erasure of ancestry and past. And then, people get to go around being like, “Well, I did this 23andMe” or like ancestry.com thing. “I did a DNA test and I found out that I’m [from] all these places!” I feel like it’s a privilege, for me, I find it to be a privilege that I have such a close connection to my origin. I used to feel alienated because of it. And there are times that I [still] do. It depends on who’s asking, right? You don’t want other people to only see you because you don’t look White and they’re like, “Where are you from?” But for me, I get to be like, “Where am I from? Well, I’m from here.” And I get to explore that deeply. But I also am only one generation removed from the food and the language and the culture, the traditions of my ancestry. I don’t have to go on 23andMe to be like, “I’m Vietnamese. This is how I was raised.”
And I wanna, I feel like, encourage people… Once again, it’s up to every individual what they feel like their identity is, but I feel like it’s a shame to lose your culture, especially when people who’ve already forsaken their culture feel so lost. I think that it’s a privilege and a responsibility to connect with [your heritage]. It’s like a decolonizing of myself, y’know? The decolonizing of myself is to be like, “Yeah, they wanna take over and they wanna erase it. I’m not gonna erase my own culture or myself voluntarily anymore.” I let American culture make me feel like if I erased my culture enough that I would be accepted. And that didn’t work either.
I would say: Don’t let them erase who you are on any level. Be you, and make that ring true in your art. And hopefully that will speak for itself. And get out of your room and talk to people. I should give myself that advice, too. [laughs]
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Article written by Benn Park. Copyediting by Ariel Bui.