Beginnings

The concept for Family Association has its start as a grant proposal submitted to the Alarm Will Sound Matt Marks Impact Fund. In early 2020, the Museum of Chinese in America’s archives were almost all lost to a devastating fire in a historical building on Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Chinatown. The incident highlighted the fragile nature of the things that we hold on to – the trinkets, newspaper clippings, photos, recordings, videotapes – and the way that we all try to remember the past as we continue to construct our own identities.

As a member of the Asian-American community, but also as someone who was born in the Hong Kong and moved to the United States at a young age, I constantly found myself switching among identities: Hong Kong, Chinese, American. Growing up in Boston, I have always found Boston’s Chinatown to be both familiar and foreign: there is an ornate gate with a pagoda-styled roof that announces the entrance to the neighborhood, and yet, I don’t ordinarily see such a structure in Hong Kong. There are shops and restaurants where everyone spoke Cantonese, but it also felt foreign, especially when Chinatown ended and downtown Boston starkly began.

Now, as a New Yorker who is also currently working back in my first home of Hong Kong and looking to keep a connection with the United States through music, I am interested in the stories of today’s Chinese Americans: how do we connect with our past, how do we reconcile our connections with the two “homes” on either side of the Pacific, and how can these stories be disseminated in new ways. As a composer, I’m interested in connecting music with place, and Family Association is my way of not only continuing my relationship with New York City even from my vantage point in Hong Kong, but also creating a work that focuses on how we use our memory of the past as a way to construct communities across generations.