In this week’s readings, the meaning of “home” and connections to it are the main topic. In Kieu Linh Caroline Valverde’s book, “Popular Music: Sound of Home Resistance and Change,” she discusses how music serves as cultural bridge for the diasporic Vietnamese community to build ties to the homeland while simultaneously creating a hybrid life in their host countries. Valverde suggests that the nostalgic appeal of Vietnamese music, despite legal restrictions enforced by both the American and Vietnamese governments, enabled the permeation of Vietnamese pop culture into the lives of the Vietnamese diaspora. With improving communication technologies, Vietnamese singers and celebrities have now become able to travel worldwide to perform for members of the diaspora, furthering connections between the homeland and the new host country.
As a member of the Filipino diaspora, I relate to this topic immensely. I grew up solely watching the Filipino Channel (TFC), listening to OPM (Original Pinoy Music) singers such as Gary Valenciano, Regine Velasquez, and Ogie Alcasid. My parents, grandparents, and older cousins would play and hum their songs almost everyday and I learned how to understand/speak Tagalog through these mediums. Even though I grew up in the United States, I felt a close connection to “home”, and it enabled me to ground myself closely to my Filipino identity. I distinctly remember coming home from school everyday, plopping on the couch with a warm bowl of pinakbet (Ilokano vegetable stew) and watching teleseryes with my grandparents, eager to listen to the “theme song” of the show at the end of the episode. To this day, I still fondly listen to a lot of Filipino songs while doing arbitrary tasks like studying, driving, and cooking — mostly because it gives me a strong sense of comfort and nostalgia for a childhood that is permanently lost.
Question: How do second-generation (host-country born and raised) people perceive music from their homeland country? Do they feel apathetic? Nostalgic? Bored?
Sources:
Valverde, Kieu-Linh Caroline. Transnationalizing Viet Nam: Community, culture, and politics in the diaspora. Temple University Press, 2012.
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