Music overcomes Asian emotional restraint
- By Andrew Lam
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E-mail Shanghai Daily, October 27, 2014
Confucian ideals
And I saw myself stuttering that evening long ago, a few years after college, unable to form Vietnamese words when my mother asked, "What's wrong?" Everything was wrong, I had wanted to tell her. The love of my life had left and I was bleeding inside. But that was not our way, and my Vietnamese is unruly, refusing to give lyrics to the murmurs and pangs of the heart. All I managed to say was, "Nothing, mom, I'm just tired."
"Hugging, kissing, some loving words should be simple but in my parents' world they don't exist," complains a Chinese American friend whose parents came from Shanghai. "I don't think my parents ever said 'I love you,'" noted another whose parents come from Taipei.
Affection, he observes, comes in strange ways within his family. "They might say vaguely: How can parents not love their children? But to say it directly it's jut too difficult."
If emotional restraint is still considered the utmost beauty in some Confucian mindsets, and endurance without complaints a virtue, these ideals, when practiced blindly, fail many of us who now live in the complex, modern world called the West. "Show, don't tell" is our millennia-old ethos. But despite my mother's subtle way of saying "I love you" in the impeccable dishes she serves whenever I visit, the lack of verbal communication leaves me wanting.
What song did I sing at my Uncle's birthday party? I sang many. Songs about broken hearts, about lost innocence. But the one I dedicated to my entire clan was Carole King's "You've Got a Friend."
You know the lyrics: "When you're down and troubled and you need some loving care, and nothing, nothing is going right. Close your eyes and think of me. And soon I will be there."
It was the sentiment I felt, and in front of my family I, too, sang my heart out.
Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media and author of "Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora," and "East Eats West: Writing in Two Hemispheres." His latest book is "Birds of Paradise Lost," a short story collection published in 2013 that won a Pen/Josephine Miles Literary Award in 2014.
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