Yellow Skin, No Mask:

Deconstructing my diasporic Chinese identity as a

Western classical pianist in a post-Covid world

Critical Project submitted by Aidan Hoi-Jin Chan

in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Master of Music degree in Performance,
Royal College of Music, London
June 2023
 Contents

Page

Introduction 3

Chapter 1 - Constructing an identity

1.1 Perpetually a Guest 7

1.2 Developing in a darkroom 9

1.3 Racialisation of identity 11

1.4 London, COVID-19 and awakening 16

Chapter 2 -Deconstructing an identity

2.1 “A study to unlearn” 20

2.2 Protest, resistance and subversion 23

2.3 Reifying struggle 25

2.4 Positioning my own masculinity 26

2.5 Recontextualisation, reclamation and rehabilitation 30

Conclusion 35

Bibliography 37
 3

Introduction

As a classically-trained pianist of Hong Kong Hakka Chinese descent, born and raised

in Ireland, I have come to realise in recent years that my transcultural identity has not

only been integral to my personal life, but also to the development of my artistic

identity as a performing musician. For this reason, I wished to centre my focus on this

subject as part of my postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Music, collating my

research in the form of a dissertation.

Originally, my dissertation was entitled Yellow Peril in Western Classical Music:

Deconstructing racialised perceptions of Yuja Wang and Lang Lang through the lens

of Said’s Orientalism. As suggested by this title, I initially intended to conduct a

comparative case study of the Chinese concert pianists Yuja Wang and Lang Lang,

with the main research aim being to determine the extent to which Orientalism (as

outlined by Edward Said), and the racial biases that arise from it, influence the way

East Asian classical pianists are perceived by a majority Western audience.

My research for this original dissertation involved a wide reading of literature, with

central texts in the bibliography including Orientalism by Edward Said, Yellow Peril!:

An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats,

Planet Beethoven: Classical Music at the Turn of the Millenium by Mina Yang,

National Abjection by Karen Shimakawa, Musicians from a Different Shore: Asians

and Asian Americans in Classical Music by Mari Yoshihara, and Soundtracks of

Asian America: Navigating Race through Musical Performance by Grace Wang. In

addition to these books, I also consulted articles such as Cultural Imperialism and the

New "Yellow Peril" in Western Classical Music: A Study Day Report by Maiko
 4

Kawabata and Shzr Ee Tan and The ‘Asian Bias’ Illusion in Musical Performance:

Influence of Visual Information by Zehra F. Peynircioğlu, Wenyan Bi, and William

Brent, listened to podcasts such as Is It Recess Yet? by Tricia Yang, and analysed

concert reviews and opinion pieces about Yuja Wang and Lang Lang.1

However, as my research and writing continued, this original dissertation idea

centring around empirical research about other pianists evolved into something much

more personal. In recent months, my performing career as a pianist has also been

unprecedentedly active due to competition successes, and naturally, I began to apply

my research to my own identity as a performer. In treating myself as a case study, I

have learned that as a researching performer it is impossible to keep my academic

research separate from my performance activities. Thanks to the boundless

encouragement, guidance, and patience my dissertation supervisor Mai Kawabata has

offered, I have chosen to deviate away from my original dissertation questions and

instead adapt my research to produce an autobiographical reflection.

1. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978); John Kuo Wei
Tchen and Dylan Yeats, ed., Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear (New York:
Verso, 2014); Mina Yang, Planet Beethoven (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press,
2014); Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body on Stage
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2002); Mari Yoshihara, Musicians from a Different
Shore: Asians and Asian Americans in Classical Music (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2007); Grace Wang, Soundtracks of Asian America: Navigating
Race through Musical Performance (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Maiko
Kawabata and Shzr Ee Tan, “Cultural Imperialism and the New ‘Yellow Peril’ in
Western Classical Music: A Study Day Report,” Asian-European Journal of Music
Research 4 (2019): 87-98; Zehra F. Peynircioğlu, Wenyan Bi, and William Brent,
“The ‘Asian Bias’ Illusion in Musical Performance: Influence of Visual Information,”
The American Journal of Psychology 131, no. 3 (2018): 295-305; Tricia Park and
Mina Yang, “Asians are both the ‘model minority’ and an invisible minority,” Is it
Recess Yet? (podcast), uploaded 3 January 2020, accessed 3 February 2022
https://www.isitrecessyet.com/iiry-podcast-7-asians-are-both-the-model-minority-
and-an-invisible-minority-creating-space-for-conversations-about-racism-against-
east-asians-in-classical-music-a-chat-with-mina-yang-pia/
 5

In my work as a piano teacher, I often encourage my students to listen to themselves

as they practise in order to develop better control, and subsequently, freedom, while

playing the instrument. Likewise, the main purpose of this autobiographical reflection

is to find my voice so that I can learn to listen to myself and strive towards artistic

freedom in the course of my development as a performing musician. Despite East

Asian performing musicians being widely acknowledged as a “majority minority”

within the world of Western classical music, being statistically well-represented on

prizewinner podiums of major competitions and as students in prestigious

conservatory programmes in the Western world, there is also a lack of recorded lived

experiences from this demographic.2 With this deficit in the foreground of my mind,

this is my small contribution towards filling that gap.

The title of this dissertation, Yellow Skin, No Mask, is a reference to Mina Yang’s

2013 article Yellow Skin, White Masks exploring the positionality of Asian American

musicians and hip hop dancers within contemporary American culture, which is in

turn a reference to Frantz Fanon’s 1952 book Black Skin, White Masks, through which

Fanon writes about his own experiences as an Afro-Carribean man living in France,

relating these experiences to the effects of racism and colonisation, while drawing

from his professional expertise in psychoanalysis.3 My dissertation title is also a

reference to our collective gradual exit from the COVID-19 pandemic, and my

2. Javier C. Hernández, “Asians are represented in Classical Music, but are they seen?”
The New York Times, last updated July 31, 2021, accessed 30 January 2022,
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/arts/music/asians-classical-music.html
3. Mina Yang, “Yellow Skin, White Masks.” Daedalus 142, no. 4 (2013): 24-37;
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann, (New York:
Grove, 1967).
 6

personal endeavour to present my most genuine self as a performing musician, in the

context of a post-COVID, post-BLM, post-#StopAsianHate world.

I was also initially inspired by Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings, a collection of

autobiographical essays published in 2020.4 This book gained popularity in light of

the #StopAsianHate movement formed in response to the steep rise of anti-Asian

racism in Western societies, which saw people of East Asian descent (including

myself) being harassed, attacked and scapegoated as the “cause” of the COVID-19

pandemic worldwide.5

This autobiographical reflection specifically pivots around Knuckleduster, a work for

solo piano composed by the British-Chinese composer Alex Ho which I

commissioned and premiered in 2021, and how it led to new realisations about my

positionality, how I can recontextualise my performance of Western classical music

through rethinking how I present and programme musical works, and most important

how I can reclaim my own narrative as a someone who has been marginalised by the

white Western mainstream.

In summation, this dissertation documents the evolution of my world view and

identity as a result of my personal experiences before, during and after the COVID-19

pandemic, with the overall aim to better understand what it means for me to be an

East Asian pianist, why I am who I am and why I do what I do.

4. Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings (New York: One World, 2020).
5. Human Rights Watch, “Covid-19 Fueling Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia
Worldwide” Human Rights Watch, May 12, 2020, accessed February 2, 2023,
https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/05/12/covid-19-fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-
xenophobia-worldwide
 7

Chapter 1: Constructing an identity

Perpetually a Guest

I was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1999, and raised in the rural-adjacent suburb of

Kilcock in County Kildare. Both of my parents are Hakka Chinese from Hong Kong,

an ethnic Han subgroup traditionally characterised by the high academic achievement

of men, and agrarian self-sustenance primarily led by women (who rejected many

gender norms typical for Han people such as foot-binding).6 Most notably, we

descended from nomadic peoples who fled constant persecution by consecutive

imperial governments and other Chinese ethnic groups and as a result, Hakka people

traditionally lived in village settlements detached from and fortified against

mainstream Han society, speaking their own language (opposed to surrounding

mainstream Chinese languages such as Cantonese or Mandarin), resulting in the name

Hakka (客家) which means “guest people”.7 Because of their perpetual positioning

on the periphery of society, Hakka people were also no strangers to adapting to new

places. Following the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1807, many Hakka people,

including some of my ancestors, were recruited, and in some cases tricked into

working, as indentured servants on plantations in British territories such as Jamaica

6. Mary S. Erbaugh, “The Hakka Paradox in the People’s Republic of China: Exile,
Eminence, and Public Silence,” in Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad,
edited by Nicole Constable (Washington: University of Washington Press, 1996),
196-231.
7. Selina Ching Chan. “Politicizing Tradition: The Identity of Indigenous Inhabitants
in Hong Kong,” Ethnology 37, no. 1 (1998): 39–54.
 8

and British Malaya, settling there in many instances and sometimes even assimilating

into local cultures.8

In writing this, I’ve come to believe it is very well possible that my own feeling of

constant social rejection may be generational. My father grew up in a wai tsuen

(walled village) in the New Territories of Hong Kong and emigrated to Southampton

at age 12. While he is perceived as well-assimilated into Western culture, I certainly

imagine the alienation he was subject to in 1960’s Britain, especially due to his after-

school obligations to help my grandfather by working in his Chinese restaurant. My

father eventually received his Masters degree, which was uncommon for Chinese

immigrants at the time, and entered the workforce in the Midlands. I believe his

experiences as the only Chinese man in the workplace shaped his world view for the

rest of his life, as throughout my upbringing he would constantly remind me that I

would always be perceived as an outsider for as long as I lived in Western society,

especially as I gradually became more involved in Western classical music.

At home we alternated between languages: I would speak to my mother entirely in

Cantonese, my father in both Cantonese and English, and my sister mostly in English,

but also sometimes in Irish if we needed to exclude our parents. My parents spoke

Hakka Chinese with each other, with extended family and with friends, somehow

partially excluding myself and my sister from our Hakka identities on the grounds that

it was less “useful”. I compartmentalised the use of these languages, associating each

one with its own purpose, to and from which I could switch when required, like code.

8. Jessie G. Lutz, “CHINESE EMIGRANTS, INDENTURED WORKERS, AND

CHRISTIANITY IN THE WEST INDIES, BRITISH GUIANA AND HAWAII,”
Caribbean Studies 37, no. 2 (2009): 133–54.
 9

In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon expresses that “To speak a language is to

take on a world, a culture.”9 Despite this, I didn’t inhabit the multiple worlds of these

languages as much I inhabited the liminal space in between. One of my first memories

of this linguistic dissonance was in my early years of primary school when I was

regularly taken out of lessons in order to attend a support class aimed towards

children who spoke English as a foreign language. I didn’t understand why I was

required to attend at the time, and apparently my parents were unaware of this, which

leads me to suspect that my racial identity or multilingualism may have been factors

which caused me to be seen as “foreign enough” to qualify for this support class.

Developing in a darkroom

Kilcock was a relatively homogenous community in my early years of childhood, and

at any given time, my family was one of less than a handful of East Asian families in

the community. I attended the local primary and secondary schools, and while I don’t

recall experiencing much overt racism growing up, I was hyperaware of my

foreignness as an East Asian person. My parents were also highly protective of me so

my social interactions with peers were often limited to within school hours. As such,

my childhood was relatively isolated and mostly spent at home.

At six years of age, I was exposed to yet another language at home: music. I began

piano lessons with my sister, ten years my senior, as my first teacher. I vaguely

remember my learning process as similar to that of learning a language, in that I

didn’t necessarily understand the intricacies at first, but I was still able to play.

Curiously, I also picked up certain idiosyncrasies such as excessive pedalling from

9. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9.

 10

my sister, which became a sort of ingrained “accent” that I had to spend a

considerable amount of time correcting years later. After my first year and a half of

lessons, I began studying with the local teacher who had taught my sister, who was

encouraging but offered little guidance, often leaving me to develop my own

understanding of playing the piano. The following years were slow and unremarkable;

I progressed through grade exams and that was the extent of my musical activity until

this teacher introduced me to playing popular music hits, which I often picked out by

ear (partially due to poor sight reading). My ability to relate to this music led to an

increased enthusiasm for playing the piano.

In 2010, at the encouragement of a family friend, I successfully auditioned to the

junior department of what was then known as the Dublin Institute of Technology

(DIT) Conservatory of Music and Drama. This was of course life-changing, but

looking back, it was also a result of multiple coincidences. For example, my parents

were reluctant to drive me to the audition but changed their mind as my sister was

sitting exams at her university nearby, and after auditioning, I was only permitted to

attend because I had been awarded an entrance scholarship. Most memorably, I had

played two grade exam pieces before being asked if I had something “different” to

play, to which I responded by performing a semi-improvised rendition of Hey Jude by

The Beatles. It seemed that I had fallen onto this road by accident.

It was from my piano lessons with Catherina Lemoni O’Doherty at the Junior

Conservatory that I developed a passion for music. In addition to being my first point

of exposure to Western classical music, she taught me to always value communication

 11

over technical precision in performance and to never compromise my artistic vision in

order to seek validation from others.

As I entered both my teenage years and secondary school, I became increasing self-

aware of my foreignness and developed a low self-esteem as a result. However, at the

same time I had started becoming successful in youth piano competitions, and I

inevitably found refuge in Western classical music, where I believed I had earned my

place. Western classical music became my identity: I began participating in

international competitions and masterclass courses, and was constantly on the internet

listening to recordings and reading articles, reviews and forum posts.

Racialisation of identity:

As I waded deeper into the world of Western classical music, I also learned what it

meant to be an “East Asian musician”, according to a Western audience. In

Soundtracks of Asian America, Grace Wang discusses the notion of one’s “innate

capacity” to understand Western classical music, which is “an inheritance that accrues

value as an essence one is born into” and therefore intrinsically tied to the musician’s

racialised identity.10 According to this idea, East Asian musicians cannot inherit this

innate capacity to fully understand the music of European composers who effectively

form the Western classical music canon. While East Asian musicians are statistically

well-represented within the world of Western classical music, this seemingly positive

representation is often construed as a modern-day yellow peril within the confines of

10. Wang, Soundtracks of Asian America, 93-96.

 12

Western classical music, with East Asian musicians often described as inauthentic,

calculative and emotionless but technically polished and apt at mimicry.11

For example, whilst giving a public masterclass at the Juilliard School in New York in

2021, renowned violinist and violist Pinchas Zukerman made a number of

controversial and racially-charged remarks towards two students of part Asian descent,

telling them that their playing was too “perfect” and that it needed “a little more

vinegar - or soy sauce”.12 He also questioned their ability to play lyrically, making

reference to the commonly-perpetuated stereotype of East Asian musicians being

unable to play with emotion by claiming, “I know in Korea they don’t sing.” When

one of the students explained that she wasn’t Korean and was instead of Japanese

descent, he replied, “In Japan, they don’t sing either.” This particular interaction

upholds the “interchangeable Asian” myth which perpetuates a monotlithic view of

East Asian people, assuming their lack of individuality and erasing the diversity of

East Asian cultures, which in turn reinforces other racialised biases towards them.13 It

is worth noting that this controversy occurred months after the publishing of the

opinion piece Asians are represented in Classical Music, but are they seen? by Javier

C. Hernandéz in the New York Times (who later reported on this in the same

publication).14

11. Hernández, “Asians are represented in Classical Music, but are they seen?”
12. Laurie Niles, “Juilliard acts after Pinchas Zukerman uses ‘offensive cultural
stereotypes’,” violinist.com, June 27, 2021, accessed 30 January 2022,
https://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20216/28825/
13. Lisa Ko, “Harvard and the Myth of the Interchangeable Asian,” The New York
Times, October 13, 2018, accessed June 10, 2023,
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/13/opinion/sunday/harvard-and-the-myth-of-the-
interchangeable-asian.html
14. Javier C. Hernández, “Violinist Apologises for ‘Culturally Insensitive’ Remarks
About Asians,” The New York Times, last updated November 31, 2021, accessed 30
January 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/arts/music/pinchas-zukerman-
 13

However, these stereotypes are not modern inventions or restricted within the bounds

of Western classical music, and as documented by Tchen and Yeats in Yellow Peril!:

An Archive on Anti-Asian Fear, yellow peril and Orientalist stereotypes have

historically reflected on the psyche of the Western mind which fears retribution for

colonialism by the colonised, often in the form of reverse colonisation or world

domination (see Figure 1), which in a cyclical fashion justifies imperialism as a way

for the West to survive.15 The prevalence of such fears can be traced back in Western

history such as the implementation of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned

Chinese labourers from immigrating to the U.S.A. due to fears of unemployment of

white Americans (as a result of Chinese people taking their job opportunities) and

declining wages for American workers.16 Perhaps the tropes of Asian “hordes”

invading Western classical music mirror Western musicians’ own fears of being

replaced.17

violinist-asians.html; Hernández, “Asians are represented in Classical Music, but are

they seen?”
15. Gary Okihiro, “Perilous Frontiers,” in Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian
Fear, edited by John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, (New York: Verso, 2014),
195-200.
16. Erika Lee, “The Chinese Exclusion Example: Race, Immigration, and American
Gatekeeping, 1882-1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History, Vol. 21, no. 3 (2002):
36-62.
17. Tchen and Yeats, ed., “Introduction: Yellow Peril Incarnate,” in Yellow Peril!, 31;
Joseph Polisi, “Juilliard in the Postmodern World,” in Juilliard: A History, edited by
Andrea Olmstead (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 281–82.
 14

Figure 1: “The Mongolian Octopus - His Grip on Australia”, by Philip May, The Bulletin, August 21, 1886

As argued by Edward Said in Orientalism, Orientalist tropes such as those above exist

as part of a system of representations that consolidates biases and beliefs about the

Orient into “knowledge” over time.18 Being insecure about my own Otherness in my

mid-teen years and having seen these stereotypes about East Asian musicians

constantly perpetuated in online spaces and often in person, I also believed this

representation to be “knowledge” to some extent.

In her seminal book Powers of Horror (1982), the French-Bulgarian philosopher and

psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva develops the concept of abjection in order to understand

the feeling of disgust caused by the lack or breakdown of distinction between the Self

18. Said, Orientalism, 203.

 15

and the Other.19 The cognitive dissonance behind my inability to reject this

representation while being subject to it may have well come from the disgust at

finding myself constantly abjected and existing in between cultures. Drawing upon

Kristeva’s concept, Karen Shimakawa discusses in her book National Abjection the

consistent exclusion and othering of Asian and Asian American identity in U.S.

culture, leaving those who have been “abjected” to be permanently culturally

displaced, shunned from the mainstream, positioned as perpetually foreign, or

absorbed into “honorary whiteness”.20 Perhaps because I did not possess an “innate

capacity” to understand the music I was performing, I believed that my legitimacy as

a Western classical musician had to be earned. Consequently, I tried to absorb into

“honorary whiteness” by developing a negative identity through which I could

somehow avoid racialised biases and signal to others that I was different from other

East Asian pianists.

Edward Said posits that Orientalism serves as a foil to construct a Western self-

identity through binary opposition.21 Mina Yang comments on the trope of the Asian

automaton, noting how it “casts Asians on the other side of a binary opposition vis-à-

vis Westerners: Asians have the technique, Westerners have the heart, the soul.”22 In

this scenario, I saw other East Asian pianists as a monolith (and myself conveniently

as an exception), and attempted to define who I was by defining who I was not. To

take the formation of negative identity as an example, I attempted to escape being

associated with the technically proficient but emotionless automaton stereotype by

19. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 9.
20. Shimakawa, National abjection.
21. Said, Orientalism, 44.
22. Mina Yang, “East Meets West in the Concert Hall,” in Planet Beethoven
(Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2014), 79.
 16

unconsciously avoiding fast, bravura repertoire and instead opting to perform works

which were considered to be more musically or emotionally complex. In trying to

avoid being pigeon-holed by others, I ultimately pigeon-holed myself, albeit

voluntarily.

London, COVID-19 and awakening

At the age of 18, I began my undergraduate studies at the Royal College of Music in

London. It was during the first year of my life in London that I gradually became

more comfortable with my Otherness, being situated in a large metropolitan city with

a culturally diverse population. It was also when I began to truly witness the extent of

the bias faced by East Asian students at the College, who make up a relatively large

demographic of the student population. In my first year, I recall a white English

student asking why there were so many East Asian students in what was “supposed”

to be a British conservatoire, not aware that I was sitting at the same table. In 2020, a

video made by a group of students circulated on social media, with its caption making

derogatory references to a “bat-eating” Chinese person being the cause for the

cancellation of exams that year. A more recent example was when a female Chinese

violin student had progressed to the final round of a certain internal competition, and

two of her Western colleagues were heard to be complaining that her success was

solely due to her being an East Asian woman, as though her sexuality preceded her

musicianship. This hypersexualisation of East Asian female performers is also

exemplified by Norman Lebrecht’s “Spare us the skintight sonata” article in The

Critic in which Lebrecht criticises Yuja Wang extensively for her choice in concert
 17

attire and makes little reference to her performance.23 I understood from this that there

was no use distancing myself from my racialised identity because I would be

perceived as an East Asian pianist regardless of where I was raised, or how

“assimilated” into Western culture I presented myself to be.

That July, I attended the Mozarteum Summer Academy in Salzburg with those

questions at the front of my mind. Having experienced the Western classical music

tradition at its historical epicentre, the birthplace of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, I also

began asking myself to what extent I could personally relate to an art tradition

originating from medieval Western Europe, which has both benefited from and

furthered Western imperialism around the world, and has changed the course of my

family history.

Over half a year later, in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic put the world to a

grinding halt, and government-imposed lockdowns worldwide caused immense

anxiety and tension to surface in society. The virus is thought to have originated in

Wuhan, China, and as a result, East and Southeast Asian (ESEA) diaspora

communities in the West were racially scapegoated as the cause for the global

pandemic. According to UK police data, in the first quarter of 2020 there was a 300%

rise in hate crimes reported by members of the ESEA diaspora, compared to 2018 and

2019.24 I encountered multiple instances of racial harassment during the pandemic,

23. Norman Lebrecht, “Spare us the skintight sonata,” The Critic, November 2021,
accessed May 10, 2023, https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2021/spare-us-the-
skintight-sonata/
24. Protection Approaches, “COVID-related hate: East and Southeast Asian
communities’ experiences of racism during the COVID-19 pandemic,” Protection
Approaches, October 2020, https://img1.wsimg.com/blobby/go/131c96cc-7e6f-4c06-
ae37-6550dbd85dde/Covid-related%20hate%20briefing%20FINAL.pdf
 18

and because of this I also began to re-evaluate my positionality as an East Asian

person not only existing in the world of Western classical music, but also existing in a

Western society. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon observes, “The colonised is

elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country’s

cultural standards.”25 While my perceived high level of assimilation as a diasporic

East Asian person makes me somewhat less foreign to a Westerner (compared to if I

were an international student who spoke English with a non-native accent), my

positionality and within a white Western society is completely based on conditions

out of my control, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. With that said, I also recognise

that in my position, I am offered a certain degree of privilege due to the model

minority myth, which suggests that certain minority groups such as East Asians are

inherently less problematic (for white Western society) than others, which ultimately

reduces these groups to a monolithic status and undermines efforts to dismantle

systemic inequalities faced in Western society.26

Because the COVID-19 pandemic forced the majority of the world to exist

temporarily in an online space, I was able to find many resources to learn more about

my diasporic identity, racism and its surrounding issues. One of the books which

became popular during this time was Cathy Park Hong’s 2020 book Minor Feelings, a

collection of seven essays written by Park, an award winning poet, through which she

examines her experiences as a Korean American woman who has throughout her

upbringing, adult life and professional life existed as a marginalised person in

predominantly white spaces.27 The publication of this book and the cultural context in

25. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 9.

26. Okihiro, “Perilous Frontiers,” 195.
27. Hong, Minor Feelings.
 19

which it garnered popular recognition is a statement of its cultural significance and

necessity for the East Asian diaspora worldwide, with the British-Japanese singer-

songwriter Rina Sawayama releasing a song entitled Minor Feelings in 2022. What

resonated with me the most in Hong’s writing was how she foregrounds her own

suffering and mental health, often a neglected subject for East Asian artists, which in

turn made me more aware of my own position.

 20

Chapter 2: Deconstructing an identity

“A study to unlearn”:

The completion of my reading of Minor Feelings was marked by the easing of

COVID-19 lockdown restrictions in the UK in August 2020, and having been isolated

socially and artistically for the past 4 months, I was particularly invigorated to

collaborate with someone who would understand the constant feeling of being in

cultural purgatory. As such, I approached the British-Chinese composer Alex Ho, who

is also a student at the Royal College of Music, through Facebook Messenger to

commission a piece for solo piano to be performed as part of my Bachelor in Music

graduation recital exam programme in the summer of 2021. I distinctly remember first

encountering Alex’s music when I watched a live YouTube broadcast of his cross-

cultural stagework Untold, and subsequently discovered that much of his

compositional output was driven by his exploration of his transcultural identity, which

was similar to mine. For the first time in my life I had actually felt represented not

only by seeing a classical musician with the same yellow skin as mine, but by a

musician who was aware of the white mask they had to don in order to navigate the

world of Western classical music safely.

Our online conversations immediately became a safe space to discuss our similar

transcultural identities. We discussed literature such as Hong’s Minor Feelings and

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s genre-bending Dictée; our postcolonial positionality (both

as people born to parents from Hong Kong who had emigrated to the UK); and the

feeling of perpetual foreignness in the Western World and, by extension, the world of
 21

Western classical music.28 When Alex began work on the commissioned piece, he

asked me to collect some of my thoughts and frustrations as journal entries, which

served as inspiration during the compositional process, at the end of which he

completed Knuckleduster.

Subtitled “a study to unlearn”, the introductory notes of Knuckleduster poses the

question: “what can we do when the language we distrust is the only one we know?”.

The piece, which lasts 5 minutes in duration, is marked “violent”, and is characterised

by an extensive employment of scales and arpeggio figurations and constantly varying

dynamics. What is most noticeable about Knuckleduster is its use of a light extended

technique which involves the pianist striking the body of the piano (i.e. not the

keyboard) with their palm to create a non-pitched, percussive sound which resonates

through the instrument (Example 1).

Example 1: Alex Ho, Knuckleduster, bars 76-77

The beginning of the piece is highly chromatic and tonally ambiguous, especially with

the palm strikes which interject the pitched notes (Example 2).

28. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
 22

Example 2: Alex Ho, Knuckleduster, bars 11-15

However, the piece becomes increasingly diatonic, revealing itself to what is almost a

sarcastic rendition of Hanon-like technical exercises “complimented” by the palm

strikes (Example 3) and violent cluster chords (Example 4) which are also struck with

the performer’s palm, ending with an instruction to “slam upper arms across keyboard”

(Example 5).

Example 3: Alex Ho, Knuckleduster, bars 51-55

 23

Example 4: Alex Ho, Knuckleduster, bars 146-148

Example 5: Alex Ho, Knuckleduster, bar 150

Protest, resistance and subversion

Knuckleduster was the first musical work in my repertoire through whose study and

performance I was able to explore my political identity and outwardly express my

positionality as a performer of Western classical music. The late Frederic Rzewski,

who as a Marxist composer was acutely aware of the didactic and political power of

music and musicians to affect change, asserted:

 24

…one has to imagine the piece of music as consisting not only of notes or

sounds, but as a process of communication involving groups of human beings

on a very basic level of course involving the collaborative activity of

composers, performers, and audience, but also as a larger process of

communication which involves a much larger and more general context.29

In addition to being a postmodern piano showpiece, Knuckleduster is inherently

political in nature. It is a protest piece which in its performance actively seeks to

deconstruct and destroy negative stereotypes forcefully imposed onto East Asian

musicians. The piece rejects the Western audience’s racialised expectations of not

only the performer - myself, an East Asian male pianist - but also Alex Ho, an East

Asian composer. It is also the synthesis of a collaboration between two like-minded

individuals with a common goal to create their own space in an existing system which

in its nature does not create space for them.

As seen in Examples 3 and 4, this “study to unlearn” presents itself as a tongue-in-

cheek homage to technical exercises for piano students, reminiscent of those written

by Carl Czerny or Hanon, through the extensive and almost on-the-nose featuring of

scales and arpeggios. By alluding to technical studies, Alex acknowledges a

stereotype of East Asian performers being perceived as mindless automatons who are

technically proficient but not musically genuine, and in postmodern ironic humour he

challenges this trope by corrupting these references with violent cluster chords,

29. Frederic Rzewski, “Music and Political Ideals,” in Nonsequiturs: Writings &
Lectures on Improvisation, Composition and Interpretation, edited by Gisela
Gronemeyer and Reinhard Oehlschlägel (Cologne: Edition MusikTexte, 2007), 198-
200.
 25

barbaric palm strikes to the body of the piano, and the work’s overall chaotic structure.

He also challenges racist expectations of East Asian composers to be dour, unoriginal

or even subservient to the establishment through the irreverent self-awareness of his

compositional style, and subverts norms surrounding the composition of performer-

commissioned works by inviting the performer to take an active role throughout the

conceptualisation of the composition .

Reifying struggle:

From the performer’s perspective of Knuckleduster, I find this to be a physically

taxing piece to perform, challenging the physical capabilities of the performer and to

some extent actualising the struggle against systemic biases imposed on East Asian

musicians by Western audiences. This idea of reifying struggle through music is not

dissimilar to Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated! for

piano (1975), an hour-long set of 36 variations on ¡El pueblo unido jamás será

vencido!, a Chilean protest song which became the anthem of the leftist resistance to

the miltary junta regime under Augusto Pinochet. As pointed out by the composer-

pianist Conrad Tao (who is American of Chinese descent), “Rzewski believed in

recording the piece as a single take, because, to paraphrase him, ‘You’re supposed to

hear the pianist getting exhausted.’.”30 Due to lockdown restrictions at the time, the

first time I performed this piece on a grand piano (and subsequently the first time I

could execute the required extended techniques) was when I recorded this work for its

online premiere at the 2021 Chinese Arts Now Festival. I recall only being able to

30. Conrad Tao, “Remembering Frederic Rzewski,” Conrad Tao, June 26, 2021,
accessed June 3, 2023, https://www.conradtao.com/news/remembering-frederic-
rzewski
 26

record three takes, as my palms became red, swollen and numb from the striking of

the piano body.

The use of both the keyboard and the piano body in Knuckleduster is also a comment

on abjection, as outlined by Kristeva, forcing both the performer and audience to

experience the sonic and visual breakdown of the distinction between the Self (the

keyboard) and the Other (the piano body), the latter of which is rarely included (and

therefore marginalised) in the performance of piano music.31 In performing this work

and executing its extended techniques, I subvert the audience’s expectations of what a

solo piano work should be, both visually and sonically. It also occasionally challenges

me to cause some degree of friction with concert organisers and performance venue

stage managers whenever I propose to perform it, which in turn challenges the model

minority myth.

Positioning my own masculinity

The sheer physicality and abrasiveness associated with performing Knuckleduster has

also led me to consider how I and others may perceive my masculine identity,

especially considering the intersection of my race and gender as an ethnically Chinese

man. In New Masculinities on the Piano, Shzr Ee Tan examines a video of a young

Lang Lang in the practice room, positing how visible “kung-fu inpired” physicality

“may situate him within the gender-neutral category of a freak-show animal” or even

reinforce “his early reputation as a hothouse enfant terrible”.32 My own interpretation

is that Knuckleduster defies the historical yet constantly-perpetuated Orientalist trope

31. Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, 9.

32. Shzr Ee Tan, “New Chinese Masculinities on the Piano: Lang Lang and Li Yundi,”
in Gender in Chinese Music, edited by Rachel Harris, Rowan Pease and Shzr Ee Tan
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press), 139.
 27

of the emasculated Asian male, which others Asian men by portraying them as

physically and sexually inferior, with the aim to reinforce racial hierarchies and

justify colonialist subjugation by the hypermasculine West.33 Instead, this work draws

upon an assertive, martial wǔ ( 武) element of Chinese masculinity in which Tan also

situates Lang Lang, in comparison to the softer, literary wén ( 文 ) presentation of

Chinese masculinity which is embodied by Yundi Li according to Tan.34 This

interpretation is further exacerbated by the fact that I chose to shun the formal

Western suit in favour of a tangzhuang for the live premiere of this piece at my

Bachelor of Music final year recital exam (as seen in Figure 2). My attire, coupled

with the physical palm strikes of the piano body (Figure 3), evoke images of someone

practising Chinese martial arts, or more specifically, the flurried Wing Chun “chain-

punches” highlighted in the Ip Man film franchise starring Donnie Yen (Figure 4).

Figure 2

33. David L. Eng, "Introduction. Racial Castration," in Racial Castration: Managing

Masculinity in Asian America, edited by Judith Halberstam and Lisa Lowe (New
York: Duke University Press, 2001), 1-34.
34. Tan, “New Chinese Masculinities on the Piano,” 132-148.
 28

Figure 3

Figure 4

With that said, instead of thinking about how I perform my gender specifically as an

ethnically Chinese male and how it influences others’ perceptions of me as a

performing musician, it might be more appropriate to imagine my performance of

masculinity beyond the Chinese wén wǔ dichotomy and consider my positionality in a

postnational context, especially given my diasporic identity. In recent years, there has

been an emerging prevalence of East Asian media presence within the Western

mainstream, be it with the increased visibility and recognition of diasporic East

 29

Asians in a predominantly white entertainment industry in the U.S., or with the

increase in white Western consumption of cultural exports directly from the continent

of East Asia.35

For East Asian men in particular, due to the immense popularity of K-Pop boy band

acts such as BTS and TV shows such as the recent South Korean-produced reality

competition Physical: 100 which extensively features athletic, muscular East Asian

men engaged in intense physical activity, the hegemonic view of the emasculated

Asian male has been challenged, leading to the broadening of how “Asian masculinity”

is defined through a Eurocentric lens.36 In the realm of Western classical music,

perhaps this cultural shift and the normalisation of East Asian men in the mainstream

is reflected by the recent string of high-profile competition victories by the pianists

Yunchan Lim (Cliburn 2022), Eric Lu (Leeds 2018), Yekwon Sunwoo (Cliburn 2017)

and Seong-Jin Cho (Chopin 2015), three of whom (Lim, Sunwoo and Cho) also

happen to hail from South Korea. From a brief survey of concert reviews and social

media comments, I have noticed that these pianists are generally not perceived as part

of an “Asian invasion” of Western classical music, and that their racialised identities

are rarely considered relevant to their success as pianists, as opposed to general

perceptions about Lang Lang or Yundi Li who represent a preceding generation of

East Asian male pianists.

35. Julia Hollingsworth, “Why the past decade saw the rise and rise of East Asian pop
culture,” CNN, December 28, 2019, accessed June 10, 2023,
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/12/28/entertainment/east-asia-pop-culture-rise-intl-
hnk/index.html
36. Kirsten Younghee Song and Victoria Velding, “Transnational Masculinity in the
Eyes of Local Beholders? Young Americans’ Perception of K-Pop Masculinities,”
The Journal of Men’s Studies 28 No.1 (2020): 3–21.
 30

In terms of where I position myself in relation to this, while I feel that normalisation

within the mainstream is important for marginalised groups, I am also wary of how

acceptance into “honorary whiteness” may place one into cultural limbo, as per

Shimakawa’s National Abjection.37 In light of this, I have been making a conscious

effort to deliberately reify my cultural identity on my own terms not only through how

I present myself (e.g. by performing in a tangzhuang or referring to myself as Irish-

Chinese on my website), but more importantly, through what I do as a performing

artist.

Recontextualisation, reclamation and rehabilitation

In the opening essay of Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong writes on the difficulty of

feeling perpetually excluded while existing in a predominantly white space:

For as long as I could remember, I have struggled to prove myself into

existence. I, the modern-day scrivener, working five times as hard as others

and still I saw my hand dissolve, then my arm.38

As an East Asian person with no familial background in Western classical music, born

centuries after the creation of the “canon” of the art tradition, despite spending the

majority of my life honing the mastery of the only artistic discipline I know, one of

my greatest frustrations was my inability to personally connect with what I was doing

as I felt that it didn’t necessarily reflect on any aspect of either my own identity or

contemporary culture. Like Hong, I saw my own hand “dissolve” under the

movements of hundreds of white artists before me whose work I was replicating,

37. Shimakawa, National Abjection.

38. Hong, Minor Feelings, 9.
 31

having realised the white mask I had donned. For a long period of time, I held onto

this frustration of not feeling represented by Western classical music, rejecting it as

permanently inaccessible, until I realised that I had the agency to somehow make it

more accessible (at the very least to myself) and express it in my own terms.

Knuckleduster was the first step I took in the process of shedding the mask.

Knuckleduster was premiered at my Bachelor of Music final year recital at the Royal

College of Music in 2021, for which I presented a programme of the four Chopin

Ballades, each paired carefully with works by East Asian composers (Tan Dun, Karen

Tanaka and Alex Ho), with Ho’s Knuckleduster following Chopin’s Ballade No.4 and

concluding the recital. The reason for this particular programming was firstly to

present music by East Asian composers (which in my opinion is severely

underperformed in the West) as “equal” to something as seminal as Chopin’s Ballades.

Secondly, I wished to subvert expectations of how the Ballades are presented through

their recontextualisation, as they are usually programmed one after another if

performed as a whole set. Concluding my recital with Knuckleduster was also a

statement of values which reflected not only on my educational journey within the

Royal College of Music, but also on my rather complex relationship with Western

classical music tradition, as someone who is a product of two cultures (Irish and Hong

Kong Hakka Chinese) whose histories have been shaped significantly by the effects of

Western imperialism.

Since then, I have begun to develop my ability to create programmes which curate

contemporary and canonical works in order to examine themes and experiences of

which I have first-hand knowledge. Most recently, for my Master of Music graduation
 32

recital I presented a programme which explored the deconstruction and reconstruction

of tradition and language, incorporating traditional Irish sean-nós singing, pre-

recorded electronics, improvisation and the recitation of poetry by the Korean-

American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, whose multilingual, multi-disciplinary book

Dictée has been instrumental in the construction of my artistic identity.39

In recontexualising my own performance and perspective of Western classical music,

I have been able to reclaim the art form for myself as something which finally not

only represents but also corporalises my existence, as someone who has historically

been excluded from the tradition (without the need to suppress the expression of my

identity). Commissioning and performing Knuckleduster also opened my eyes to the

potential of being a performer of Western classical music capable of generating

something productive and new instead of solely reconstructing the historical past.

Since then I’ve collaborated with other composers of East Asian descent, and in 2022

I commissioned the Welsh-Japanese composer Delyth Field to write Polygon, a solo

piano piece which paid homage to our mutual interest in math rock, a genre itself

which has been pioneered by the virtuoso guitarist Yvette Young (of the band Covet)

who is also an East Asian performer with a musical background as a classically-

trained pianist. Being able to commission and perform a more diverse body of works

with which I can personally identify has led to a greater feeling of ownership of

myself as an artist.

It wasn’t until one particular therapy session I attended earlier this year, shortly before

I decided to focus my dissertation research on my own artistic journey, that I came to

39. Cha, Dictée.

 33

the realisation that so much of my musical life had been driven by feelings of anger

and resentment of having to constantly make space for myself, while the majority of

my white colleagues didn’t have nearly the same burden to carry. It was extremely

difficult to acknowledge and accept my frustration at first, but in doing so, I was able

to understand what made me an artist and build something positive out of that.

With this in mind, I’m reminded of how the genre of hip hop evolved as a tool for

many Black Americans to reclaim their own narratives and to reckon with their

positionality in a post-Reagan, post crack-epidemic society in the late 1980s and early

1990s.40 The music of N.W.A. was instrumental in defining outsider perceptions of

West Coast popular culture and reflected on the growing discontentment among urban

youth against white American authority. Tupac Shakur, inspired by the political ethos

of his Black Panther family members, often utilised his music as a vehicle to spread

political awareness to his audience. The Atlanta duo OutKast reclaimed and

recontextualised the “Southern hustler” image and the characteristic “drawl” common

in Southern U.S. accents through their music and accompanying music videos (which

are interpreted as homages to blaxploitation films), heavily subverting often-

degrading expectations of America’s Deep South through a genre dominated by the

West and East Coasts at the time.41 The subversiveness and political significance of

hip hop music is built upon both Black and white audiences’ expectations and

40. Pablo Lopez, “The Reagan Era’s Effect on Hip Hop (and Vice Versa): How Hip
Hop Gained Consciousness,” Historical Perspectives: Santa Clara University
Undergraduate Journal of History, Series II Vol. 23, Article 12 (2019).
41. Leah Rosenberger, “The Southern Variety of Outkast and DJ Skrew,” by leah!,
November 25, 2018, accessed June 6, 2023,
http://sites.utexas.edu/leahkatelynrose/2018/11/25/the-southern-variety-of-outkast-
and-dj-screw/
 34

understanding of who is performing, where they represent, and their ability to present

their experiences with authenticity.42

Similarly, the weight of the context behind Knuckleduster relies on the positionality

of the performer and its connotations in order to be communicated and understood,

which also says much about the unspoken Eurocentric assumptions about the

universality of the Western classical canon. Through performing this work and

recontextualising the only “language” I know which is Western classical music, I

have been able to reclaim my own narrative and struggle against abjection from the

Western world. As a result of being able to deconstruct my disenfranchisement

through art, I have been able to turn my resentment into healing.

42. Felicia Angeja Viator, "A Very Brief History of Authenticity in Hip-Hop," Los
Angeles Review of Books, June 5, 2020, accessed June 6, 2023,
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-very-brief-lesson-on-authenticity-and-hip-hop/
 35

Conclusion

The initial purpose of this autobiographical reflection was to examine my musical life

so far, how others perceive me and how I perceive myself through the lens of my

racialised identity as a diasporic Chinese classical pianist. In the first chapter, I

primarily discussed my early life and development as a young pianist before the

COVID-19 pandemic, through which I introduced key concepts such as Orientalism,

yellow peril stereotypes and abjection through the reference of sources from my

bibliography. In the second chapter, I explored the evolution of my identity as a

performer, with a particular emphasis on how, through my collaboration with Alex Ho

and performance of his solo piano work Knuckleduster, I was able to recontextualise a

language which I previously felt perpetually excluded from and reclaim it in order to

take control of my own narrative.

The process of writing this autobiographical reflection has revealed to me that the

development of my world view is dependent on the fact that nothing is ever constant.

This dissertation began as a research project which aimed to find hard truths about

other pianists through empirical sources, and instead evolved to become an

examination of myself. Commissioning and performing Knuckleduster was supposed

to be an answer to my doubts about Western classical music, and instead it gave rise

to even more questions about where I stand. Through this, I’ve learned that in my

very core, I am often better suited to ask questions than to answer them, and perhaps

that is something worth celebrating and building upon rather than being frustrated

about.
 36

Knuckleduster symbolises the culmination of a particular chapter in my life, which

has opened the door to a new chapter which is centred around my liberation as a

performer. The impact of my research and my reflexivity as a pianist, which has been

cultivated by my many experiences in my musical life, has led me to become aware of

the possibilities presented by this newly found liberation and as such, I now look

forward to exploring the world around me with even more rigour, proudly in my

yellow skin without the burden of having to hide behind a mask.

 37

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