Why I Stopped Singing

Racism, Capitalism, and the Impossibility of my Arts Career

cw: racism, depression

This month, I performed my first ever solo show. I keep asking myself: why haven’t I done this before?

It didn’t feel like a milestone, but looking back, I’d done nothing like it before. I have a lot of performance experience, though. My first time singing on stage, as the youngest member of the Joseph children’s chorus, was to an audience of a thousand. As a teenager, I was a featured soloist at the Kennedy Center. I’ve sung on tv, and performance the national anthem in multiple stadiums. But I’d never been a headlining act, doing a set completely on my own. 

What took so long?

I hate to say this but,
It was my cute little Asian face :(

Performing music never occurred to me as a viable career path. It didn’t feel available to me. As a kid, I was told directly and indirectly that I didn’t look the part. For some reason, I just couldn’t picture myself on Broadway. Obviously to me now, it’s because, in a pre-Hamilton world, no one on Broadway looked like me. I literally couldn’t see it because it didn’t exist. I wasn’t Asian enough to play Miss Saigon and I wasn’t white enough to play 99% of other roles. If this sounds harsh, that’s because it is. It still disgusts me. 

I want to emphasise how bizarre and heartbreaking this was to realise over my lifetime. Growing up, I did not understand what was happening to me. I didn’t realise I looked different. I didn’t know racism applied to me. Because there’s no way I could turn it into a career, music became something pure that I did for love, joy, and life. Performing would never ‘get’ me anything or anywhere. This was strangely freeing, to never consider commodifying my art. I cherish this freedom, even if the reason that it happened is terrible. 

I remember as a little kid, like 7 years old, my theatre friends would be low-key stressed about their eventual CAREERS. And I was like, I dunno, I just like being here. I remember a conversation with a friend’s dad about how I sang and played instruments. Wistfully, he recalled how he used to play saxophone and loved it so much. I was so confused why he stopped. He wasn’t good enough to be a pro sax player, he said. But I was like, dude. Just play your saxophone. You’re a grown man. 

The trouble is, even if you’re performing for the fun of it, there is an element of competition to get to play. 

My vocal range and ability gained me access sometimes. I was cast in high school musicals as a middle schooler, and admitted to university-level conservatory trainings as a high schooler. I was the only child student of multiple voice teachers who taught only adults with professional opera careers. My mom was raised with the immigrant mentality that if you can prove that you have something no one else does, then you get to participate. In my family so far, this applied to sports and academics, and here I was, a little artist, who got this treatment too. 

I was reminded: ‘The arts are subjective’. It’s not up to you, now matter how good you are. People have to like you. But something else was at play, beyond the arts being subjective, because I was likeable. Perhaps I grew to be more stressed and less likeable when I started to sense that I wasn’t wanted. It’s hard to be likeable when I’m questioning my inner sense of belonging.  

I would go back and tell my younger self: The arts are subjective, AND white supremacy is real. You are not doing anything wrong. Some doors will never open for you because they were designed to keep you out.

In high school, the musical theatre director only ever consider me for explicitly Asian characters, and these were all stereotypical and racist. I played a Chinese tourist, and felt so icky about it that I stopped doing musical theatre altogether. Now that I think about it, I have not been in a musical since. That was the end. He begged me to play Oriental No.1 or Oriental No.2 in Thoroughly Modern Millie, a musical that also has yellowface. I would not be considered for any other roles. I turned this ‘opportunity’ down. 

Finally though, I was able to see racism for what it was. This new knowing unravelled in depression, as I pieced together the truth of similar instances of my past. Most of the time, racism doesn’t announce itself. You’re treated differently, held to unattainable standards, and told that YOU’RE not good enough and YOU have to try harder next time. Most of the time, you can’t quite label it, and feel badly for even questioning, because you’ve been gaslit so hard by people telling you that YOU’RE the problem. Then they’ll say she was playing the ‘race card’. But here’s the truth: You’re not being rejected because you didn’t work hard enough or weren’t talented enough. You’re rejected for how you look, which isn’t white enough. Therefore, you’re rejected for being you and for existing. This is devastating. And even if you aren’t told it to your face, and your mind can’t work out what’s happening, you feel it deep down and it eats you.

Suddenly it made sense. 

At theatre camp, age 10, I was told my singing wasn’t good enough to be a von Trapp kid with everyone else. They ‘let me’ sing backstage, so I ‘wouldn’t feel left out’. Ten years later my mom told me what really happened: the director said it would be ‘confusing’ to the audience and ‘unbelievable’ that I would be in the von Trapp family, but they needed me to sing the high part no one else could reach, so that’s why I sang from backstage. This was for one song in a musical review, not even a full production, although that shouldn’t have mattered either. My response was: ‘By that logic, Getting to Know You from the King and I should have been a duet with me playing ALL the Siamese kids’. I was proud of this joke but the situation is not funny. White supremacy cuts so deep that the subtleties of an anti-exclusionary musical doesn’t get through to musical theatre directors. 

I have always been dedicated to music, but never believed I could get paid for it. 

I did manage to escape capitalist pressures of commodifying my art as a goal. I never considered it as a career. This was not sad. It just was. And so, I put on elaborate living-room Christmas shows with my sister. I choreographed songs from my favourite musicals on the playground with my friends. I wrote pop songs on my guitar in my bedroom. In high school, I founded my own Shakespeare troupe and composed original music for our shows. They wouldn’t let me sing on stage, but I would go into empty classrooms at lunch and sing and sing and sing and it felt good. 

In my vocal training, I was steered away from genres I loved to sing, like pop and musical theatre. Only a ‘highly skilled’ genre like opera or classical theatre studies would get me a shot. That is, until Lin-Manuel Miranda refused to give away his shot, and it suddenly, people were telling me ‘I look like Phillippa Soo’ and huh, white characters don’t have to be played by white people, and why are all the stories about white people anyway? 

I had this moment in 2016 like, oh no, if I had stuck to the performance route, I would be trained and ready now that everyone’s like, quick! Find an Asian person!

I’m happy for Ashley Park though, and now, there’s room for both of us. And honestly, arts school would have stifled me. Instead, I took an alternative path. I learned how to write my way onto the stage because it was the only way I was allowed. As a kid, I loved reading chapter books, and started to write my own. I abandoned writing fiction because my mixed race experience didn’t feel welcome (grateful for Jenny Han, grateful there’s room for both of us). Instead, I turned to non-fiction. I told my story. I let myself be the main character, because no one* was going to cast me as such. 

*No one is an exaggeration. I played Wilbur in Charlotte’s Web and Lucy in You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown. I also got to play Prince John, the lead in a kids opera version of Robin Hood, and this was sick and I got to use a sword. I love playing male characters! Cast me as George Washington! 

I’ve had confidence and training. I have never doubted my self, because my family normalised my talent.  

An oft told story in my family is how my Halmoni could tell I was a singer since I was a toddler. My parents believed in me in a way that I assumed all parents are biased and believe in their kids. I am grateful for the privilege of confidence they instilled in me. I knew I could sing any part I was given. In middle school choir, I bounced between voice parts, because I could hit the lowest and highest notes. I learned every part for fun. I even did vocal percussion in high school and university a cappella. I filled every void, doing whatever I could for the music to come through. 

I have never had stage fright. At my first ever music camp, everyone got to sing a solo. But the other youngest singer was too scared to sing by herself, so we did a duet. It was assumed that I was also too scared to sing by myself but I wasn’t. I knew I was supposed to be, so I didn’t contradict anyone. The next year, I sang my first solo, and I chose Corner of the Sky from Pippin. Th’e lyrics are: ‘why do I feel I don’t fit in anywhere I go?’. I felt so seen by this song. I was 6. 

In lockdown, I wrote an album of songs from the perspective of Jane Austen characters. I performed some at a virtual fan activist conference. They paid me. I’d never been paid for leading workshops at the same conference, but did get paid to sing? And then, two years later, here I am, with another paid gig. I have never tried to get paid to sing. I have tried, a lot, to get paid to teach. To be useful. But the universe keeps sending me money for what feels most pure and fun to me. I am listening now, receiving this lesson:  I’m here to show that there is another way. You don’t have to put down your saxophone because it never became a career. It isn’t over yet.

Keep playing, and it will pay, in unexpected ways.

It hasn’t paid very much, but it does feel like a significant message. What if I receive everything that has been given to me as a resource? Every blessing, and every shitty thing. I am not sugar coating it. I am calling it out. I am calling out how harmful it is to tell every little white kid who likes singing that they should be pursuing an arts career ASAP. I am calling out how harmful it is to tell every Asian kid that they better play into the stereotype or shut up and go away or sing behind the curtain out of sight. Both of these parts are an insult to the arts. Fuck that. 

So as I carry on, I keep that in mind. WHAT DO I WANT?

What art do I want to make? What do I have to say? What do I have to sing, to express? What is the Truth? I have gone rogue, because it was the only option available to me. I could have pushed harder to fit into the system, but it was killing me. So I have no choice but to tear it down. I will keep singing my songs. I sing with an unshakable knowing that my voice is the power of the universe. It is not me and it is me. It is bigger than me. I didn’t choose that; that’s just how voices work. Yours is too, beneath it all. I am pure, I am tainted, I am tamed. I am wronged, I am angry, I am free. I may have slowed down, in the industry’s eyes, but there is no stopping me. 

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