Chinese Non-Identified: a case study of Chinese overseas
undergraduate students' engagement with national signs in Chinese popular music
If cultural identity is a matter of “becoming,” as Stuart
Hall contends, and national identity is (still) an integral part therein, then
Chinese overseas undergraduate students nowadays may have little or no national
identity in general. They are neither sojourners who long to return to their
homeland, as their predecessors once did, nor intended American immigrant who
might become part of the diasporic community. This essay examines the
engagement with signs of nationhood and statehood in Chinese popular music
within an exclusively overseas Chinese student community at University of
California, San Diego.
40 questionnaires, five panel interviews, and participation
in karaoke events have pointed me to certain popular music videos and their
cover versions in the popular singing contest The Voice of China. I focus on Mainland Chinese rock musician Wang
Feng, whose style ranges from patriotic pop rock to soft rock with controlled
screaming that signals lamentation. Interviewees expressed their sympathy with
poor migrant workers after singing or watching Wang’s “Beijing, Beijing,” but
none paid attention to signs of statehood that appear as two-second snapshots
in the music/karaoke video 13 times. The students’ selective assimilation of
texts, images, and sound texture with national signs, I argue, exhibits what
ethnomusicologist Christopher Tonelli calls non-identification, encounters with
signs that we neither identify nor counter-identify. My study grounds nomad adolescence,
previously overlooked, in musical-cultural discourse, and also sheds light on
the politics of non-identification that, in this case, prevents progressive
possibilities in challenging the national-cultural power of the Chinese
statehood.
