Big Straw Magazine Spring 2010

Big Straw March 2010Volume 6, Issue 1 Page 1

Jane LuiKappa Phi Lambda and ARCC Host the Singer-Songwriter

Plus! a memoir, ballroom dancing, and more!


Jane Lui Meets CMUby Allison Tran

A single light illuminated the elevated Jane Lui. Sitting close to the edge of the stage, she had situated herself within a rather barren set up, an unpretentious composition of keyboard and guitar. She turned to the audience, tucking behind her ears, strong blonde streaks of hair, and asked plainly, what it was that we wanted to hear. Her tone was optimistic, but masked with a softness that could’ve been mistaken for shyness or a reluctance to perform. She quickly erased that impression with the ease of her wide beaming smile. “Hi, I’m Jane Lui.”

As she prepped herself at the keyboard, she unabashedly conversed with the audience, feeling the vibes of those who were watching her, and familiarizing herself with the students that she would be sharing her stories with. She would feed off the energy and presence of the audience to inform her performance and affect the songs she chose to sing. Her entire repertoire would in fact be defined spontaneously, submerged in the experience of being at a comfortable place with the audience. Her program was memorable as it was one patient compilation of songs, woven together seamlessly by her genuine investment in the audience and the humor of her commentary. Often these accompanying stories were opportunities for her to interact with the audience and give them a look at her humor and her ability to mock herself. The cumulative combination of songs, jokes, and laughs from the audience made the entire performance seem like one seamless look into her life.

In being in Jane Lui’s presence, it is easy to understand that her talent lies in her performance. She is capable of fostering a real bond with the audience, and never once does she lose her sense of silliness and good humor, that seemed more and more apparent with every song. She had such a relaxed ability to speak through her music, that she was able to reveal her genuine and clever love for her craft.

Her interests in getting to know her audience and her witty commentary defined her performance, as did the deliriously entertaining and emotional, content and delivery of her songs. To quote Jane, the performance is a way of inviting others into her “nutty life.” With songs about everything from the quirky, imaginary friends and the sound of old music boxes, to the serious, reflections on relationships of love, Jane Lui delivered to us her personal perspectives of her life through memories and revelations. Her lyrics and soulfulness strum us into the sensory space of her memories.

In a song about rediscovering a windup music box in an attic, Jane Lui beautifully faded her voice to the sound of a physical music box, the slowing notes played into the microphone until it slowed to a silence that wrapped McConomy in the haze of Jane’s memory. The ephemeral experience of being immersed in Jane Lui’s beautiful chords and melodies seemed to guide a deeper understanding of a singular and distilled moment.

While she optimistically opened herself to sharing with us her deepest thoughts and cherished remembrances, she was also hopeful in telling us of how real hardships too have informed her songs. As a prelude to one of the songs, Jane spoke of bad relations that she currently maintains with her father, telling us in the frankest and most forward-looking way, that the song was the way she chose to express her deeply composed emotions.

It’s very apparent that emotion is an incredibly large element in each of Jane Lui’s songs and it is impressive how she is capable of translating her sensory laden lyrics with the variations in her voice. Her singing voice is naturally sultry


and soulful; each movement in tone, from repeated notes to quiet pauses, seem intentional and critical to her songs. Seductively earnest, each vocalization seems effortless and representative of the self-realization that Jane is constantly working for in all of her endeavors.

Just as the song and creative musical composition is the medium through which we understand Jane and her sensibility and emotions, it is also the process in which Jane begins to understand herself. Having grown up in Hong Kong, she spoke of how she had always felt as if she didn’t fit in. She spent much of her time differently than her other Chinese classmates, spending much of her time singing or taking piano lessons. “I’m painfully shy and learned that I feel most earnest and understood when I’m in music.” While music has been capable of giving Jane an outlet for expression, she seems incredibly devoted to the art form that has helped her share herself with the world. When audience members asked her about whether she considered herself an Asian American artist, she replied quite happily that music had carried her beyond a point of self-classification, and that she never saw herself as having her culture define her identity.

Instead, she saw her culture as a force that has shaped her to be who she is today, something that the audience felt eager to agree with.

The beauty of Jane’s Lui performance is a combination of her skill in connecting to the audience and her ability to translate personal moments into song. More so than what one can technically assess about all the things she said and all the songs she sang, Jane Lei’s performance is captivating because of the presence of Jane herself. Her love for her music, her humility, and her good sense of humor, make her self-defined and self-developed. The audience, who afterwards walked out of McConomy with a sense of fulfillment, seemed to have sensed this in Jane, and fostered a deeper understanding of who she was, and what she was able to give in song. More than anything, I want honesty between my listeners and me; music should respect intelligence.”

Jane Lui has two self-produced albums, Teargirl, and Barkentine. Find her on Youtube on her channel Luieland.


I joined the Ballroom Dance Club at Carnegie Mellon last year because I wanted to experience new things in college. I quickly became part of the competition team as well as an officer. My fellow clubmates have noted that around half the club, or at least half the officers and competition team, is Asian. I mentioned this one day to a friend who ballroom dances, and his response was, “Asia seems popular for ball-room dancing lately, or at least Singapore does. I know some teachers who have left behind studios here in the States to go teach there.” I decided to ask my Singaporean friend about what ballroom dancing is like in Singapore. I wanted to un-derstand why it is so popular there and in Asia in general.

The first thing my friend wanted to make clear was that, in Singapore, ballroom is something cool and classy to do. There used to be a social taboo about it, à la Shall We Dansu?, where the Japanese treated ballroom dancing with suspicion. Furthermore, in the United States, men who ballroom dance are often considered feminine. However, this is not the case in Singapore any longer. There are many “International” competitions held in Singapore, but there is no single compe-tition that stands out. Most competitors are frotm Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. There is an interesting rivalry between the main schools in Singapore. If someone is a member of one of the dance schools and his/her rival school is hosting a competition, he/she would not attend. This shows the degree to which dancers are extremely loyal to their own school. In America I can imagine that the rival school’s members would not only want to attend a rival’s competition, but they would also try even harder to beat them as a form of humiliation and as a show of dominance.

I’ve noticed differences between the ballroom dance clubs at Carnegie Mellon University and at Singapore Management University. The club there started out just focusing on Salsa and later expanded to do all the Latin dances. Recently, the club opened a branch to teach Standard dances. There is a set order when it comes to the dances one learns. For Latin, one starts off with Cha-cha and Samba. Later, Rumba and Jive are added in, and after a while Paso Doble is introduced. Due to the intensity of the lessons, people often only focus on one style (Standard, Latin, or Salsa). In the lessons, people mainly focus on technique because that makes them stand out, since at competitions everyone from the same dance school will perform the same moves choreographed by the same instruc-tor. This means social dances, or ones where leading and fol-lowing are important, are uncommon. This is quite different

Shall We Dance?by Sara Mackenzie

from the United States, where some people choose to focus on social dancing exclusively, and thus being able to lead or follow is an important skill.

Therefore, it seems that when one ballroom dances in Sin-gapore it is with the intent of competing. And if one is com-peting, then naturally he/she wants to have the best instructor possible. Hence, instructors go to Singapore to start ballroom studios to get more money. If ballroom dancing was more than a mere hobby, like it is here, people would be willing to spend more money. And with the way Singapore terms some of their competitions as “International,” even when it’s mostly Southeast Asians who attend, Singapore clearly has strong aspirations to become well-known in the ballroom dancing world. This drive might have caught on in nearby regions, explaining why other Asians are joining in on this “cool and classy” pastime.



Porkby Angela Wang



Food is one of the biggest parts of Chinese culture; even the most whitewashed Chinese people often still enjoy some warped version of Chinese food in the form of P.F. Chang’s. Chinese food culture is so strong that it has managed to survive in different forms in different countries where there is a large ethnic Chinese population, when many other aspects of Chinese culture, such as religions, arranged marriage, filial piety, etc., struggle to get by.

So it’s no surprise that when I first moved here, it took a while to get used to American food. It was a slow process, since we only ate Chinese food at home. Our family was so devoted to eating only Chinese food that we used to drive two hours to New York’s Chinatown every weekend to buy Asian goods, since back then there were no Chinese super-markets close by in New Jersey. Then one was constructed an hour from our house, and we would religiously go there every weekend instead. Then another one was made 45 minutes from our house, and soon after, yet another one was made 40 minutes from our house. We now interchange between these last two every weekend.

In fourth grade, my teacher would have a sort of “bond-ing time” every week by posing a question to the entire class, which we would answer in turn. I remember vividly when

my answers were considerably different from everyone else’s. “What’s your favorite way to eat an Oreo?” People responded with taking apart the cookie, licking the insides, dunking them in milk, etc., and when it was my turn, I had to respond that I had never had an Oreo. Everyone stared at me. “How is that even possible?” my teacher asked, in all seriousness. An-other time, the teacher asked, “What’s your favorite kind of bagel?” Onion, plain, poppyseed came up. My turn. I admit-ted that I had never had a bagel. Another week, “What’s your favorite Pop Tart flavor?” Chocolate, strawberry, blueberry. I’d never had a Pop Tart. “What’s your favorite ice cream flavor?” Finally, something I could answer. Other kids went first. Va-nilla, chocolate, Neapolitan. My turn. I said proudly that my favorite flavor was mango. The teacher and the class looked puzzled. Apparently this flavor, so common in Hong Kong, was unheard of (at that time) in the U.S. By the end of the year, I think my classmates considered me an alien.

The first time I got to try “delicious American goodness” was in first grade, when I started buying lunch at school. I re-member I was confounded by a lot of these mysterious foods when they were presented to me. When I first saw mashed po-tatoes as an option on the hot food line, I eagerly asked for a scoop of it, thinking it was vanilla ice cream. What luck! Did I want some of this brown stuff on it? No, why would I want

Culture Shock via Food

Robin Chen


to spoil my ice cream with that? I went back to my seat and tried a bit of the ice cream. Yuck! The texture was all wrong, and of course it was not sweet at all. I would not try mashed potatoes again until high school.

I remember that usually, I would get a hot dog, because I was wary of the other options on the menu. One day, I decided to branch out, and I got a tuna sandwich. I had seen many of my classmates devouring these with relish. Even though I could smell the reek of the processed fish, I decided that if so many people ate it so eagerly the taste couldn’t be bad. Boy was I wrong. I took one bite and I was com-pletely grossed out. To this day, even eating anything with a similar texture makes me nauseated. Two years ago, I was with some friends on Craig Street and I ordered a chicken sandwich from Eat Unique. They had shredded up the chicken to resemble processed tuna. I was nauseated. I didn’t eat my lunch even though I was starving, and I have never gone back to Eat Unique.

When I was in elementary school, Lunchables were all the rage. These were prepackaged lunches with either nachos or pizza or mini sandwiches. All of these choices required a liberal application of cheese. My classmates would often have cheese left over after eating their mini pizzas and whatnot, and others would clamor over sharing the cheese. One day, a classmate offered some of his extra cheese to me. I figured, “Sure, why not,” and ate the shred of mozzarella. Gross! How people consumed cheese on its own was beyond me.

Over the years, cheese would continue to displease my taste buds many times. I don’t remember eating my first mac and cheese, but I must have had it at some point to have devel-oped such an intense hatred for it. I tried it again two years ago at one of my friend’s urging and reaffirmed my hatred for it. Another friend, Sasha, crashed my high school gradu-ation party and tried to apologize for it with a gift of Kraft microwaveable mac and cheese. I didn’t mind her crashing my party, but I was repulsed by the gift. I left it on the counter untouched. Eventually my sister consumed it for me, thank-fully.

My conflict with cheesecake is probably the funniest cheese story I have. My then-boyfriend Kevin is great at baking, and his masterpiece is cheesecake. In sophomore year of high school, he offered to let me try his delicious cheesecake. “Sure,” I said, thinking that people can’t be mad enough to

actually use cheese in a dessert dish. I took one bite of his prized masterpiece and spit it out, hacking and coughing. I thought the cheese in cheesecake was a misnomer, much like how sweetbreads are neither sweet nor doughy but rather calf intestine. Poor Kevin never offered me cheesecake again. This past year has been quite trying. My roommate loves baking, and she loves making cheesecake. It pained me to see her make such beautiful cakes, knowing that if I tried them I would probably offend her by spitting it out after a bite. I’m still confused by the idea that cheese could be put in dessert.

I think the best way to sum up my attitude toward cheese comes in this anecdote from Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife. Two Chinese women are attending an American party for the first time. They come upon a table with snacks on it, and they decide to try crackers with some sort of paste on top. The first woman takes a bite and declares that the paste on top of her cracker is surely rotten. The second

woman takes a bite out of hers to affirm, and she deduces that actually, the paste is supposed to taste that way. And that was their first encounter with cheese.

One final example of food-related culture shock lies in my Thanksgiving experiences over the years. In elementary school they taught us the quaint image of “Indians” helping the Pil-grims grow corn and squash and everyone was happy. Starting in second or third grade, they would ask us to donate to the food drive so some poor family could have a real Thanksgiv-ing feast. They would go down the list of foods and ask kids to volunteer to grab this or that from their family pantries. Every year, I donated the same thing - napkins. We never had any of the other stuff - cranberries, yams, turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, etc. - because we did not celebrate Thanks-giving, at least not in the American way. We started celebrat-ing Thanksgiving over the years, but it was very gradual. At first, we just had a bigger than usual meal on Thanksgiving, although that might have just been the result of it coinciding with my sister’s birthday. Then, we started having turkey pre-pared in a Chinese way. About seven years ago we upgraded to roasting an entire bird. Only a couple years ago did we start doing it with stuffing and mashed potatoes and all the traditional American foods.

Living in two culinary worlds has been interesting and eye-opening. For the most part, it’s been a good experience, but I don’t think I will ever be able to reconcile my taste buds with cheese.

I thought the cheese in cheesecake was a mis-nomer, much like how sweetbreads are neither sweet nor doughy but rather calf intestine.


Looking into my sister’s round face and apparent eyes remind me that it is the last real physical remainder of my mom, who died when both of us were not even in the double digits. The few fragmented memories of her are not much more vivid than the faded Polaroids in shoe boxes and no more coherent than our choppy home videos. On family trips to Hong Kong during our awkward pubescent youth, aunties who used to know my mom would fawn over my sister’s resemblance to my mom, aun-ties who, over steaming plates of dim sum, would talk about the priceless shared memories they had with her, speaking Can-tonese so fast and so loud that I could never understand.

The language barrier was only the beginning of obstacles to come. My dad doesn’t talk a lot about my mom, even though they had been together since high school. When I do ask him about their relationship, he is almost austere with the details, perhaps to save himself from remembering too much. Denied the knowledge of my mom’s past, I started to subconsciously find that past in other things. In the eighth grade, I appropriately fell in love with Wong Kar Wai’s In the Mood for Love—the film supplied more than just a plot; it became both a replacement of the Hong Kong I never really knew, and a substitute for the detailed scenes of a developing love I’ll never know.

~~~The movie starts with the story of how my parents became young lovers. It is a restless moment. She kept her head lowered, to

give him a chance to come closer. Hong Kong 1962, reads a title card at the beginning of “In the Mood for Love”, and a restive-ness that’s almost voluptuous, like that first blush of love when you can barely concentrate on anything else and the world seems new and strange, fills the screen and hovers in my mind. Maggie Cheung, who is in a luminescent floral qipao, first meets Tony Leung in front of a noodle takeout shop while escaping an evening summer rain. A sweet violin serenades them as they both stand silently under a hanging lamp. Maggie Cheung glances at him, and the story begins.

Hong Kong 1969. The usual humidity of the city fills the air that evening, and it begins to rain. Somehow the dad that I see every day changes into the athletically built youth dressed in a sweater vest and aviator sunglasses seen in frayed photos placed in dust-covered albums in our basement. He is walking back home from his part-time job at a printing publication when it starts to rain. Seeking shelter, my dad runs to the closest building with a roof. My mom is already standing in front of the noodle shop, her cheeks glistening in the rain, her long hair down and unconstrained. She brushes her wet arm the same way Maggie Cheung does. The hanging lamp creates a cone of light that highlights the heavy droplets of water.

The patter of the rain relieves the otherwise awkward silence as both of them recognize each other from the few classes they share—but neither of them says anything to the other. My mom keeps her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. As the rain persists, my dad gathers up his courage to speak.

“It doesn’t look like the rain is going to stop anytime soon. Where do you live? I’ll walk you back home,” he says, as both of them run into the rain under the shelter of my dad’s jacket. So, the story begins.

~~~~My dad and my mom are walking back home from school, down the narrow streets with laundry hanging overhead. The

elderly sit on stools congregated outside bakeries and shop corners reminiscing about their own first loves as they watch my parents pass by.

Bengawan Solo - Reminiscing on a Pastby Audrey Tse


My mom’s small apartment is surprisingly empty that day, but she is still careful not to let the neighbors see her sneak in my dad. The view from the doorway frames her warmly lit room into a picture. The record player in the corner of the room sings out.

Bengawan SoloRiver of love, behold

Where the palms are swaying lowAnd lovers get so enthralled

They dance with their arms around each other, their silhouettes on the wall conjoined as one. My mom rests her head on his

shoulder, and he feels the softness of her skin. To them, at that moment, their love will never change. ~~~

The movie’s ending is bittersweet, and like all tragic love stories, the couple cannot be together, and part to live their own lives alone. Years after their parting, Tony Leung becomes attached to a story of how a man with great burden and heartache climbs to the top of a mountain to whisper his troubles into a hole of a tree. Even though Leung successfully tries to find Cheung in the metropolis of Hong Kong, he realizes their relationship would never work out. He travels to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and whispers into the ancient vestiges. The title cards tie together the end of the story.

That era has passed.

Nothing that belonged to it exists any more.

He remembers those vanished years.As though looking through a dusty window pane,the past is something he could see, but not touch.And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

~~~The brilliant morning light shines through the windows into the kitchen as my dad sits across from me with the New York

Times spread out all around him. He must remember those vanished years with my mom, his first and last love. Looking at him makes me realize that the romanticized version of their relationship is nothing compared to the real one they shared. My dad is no more like Tony Leung than the dusty window pane is like our lucid kitchen windows. But the era that has passed still lies hidden somewhere in his mind, the past that only he could see, and I can imagine.


Staff List Spring 10Editor-in-Chief: Robin Chen

Staff members: James Chan, Michael Chen, Raymond Fung, David Hsu, Lily Hwang, Young Kim, Jinyu Liu, Michelle Liu, Eddie Lu, Stephen Ma, Sara Mackenzie, Kevin Tian, Allison Tran, Benson Tsai, Audrey Tse, David Tu

Want to be a part of Big Straw? Become a full-time board member, or just contribute your writing or art! We accept musings on any Asian-American-related topic! E-mail Robin (rschen@andrew) to find out more!

Editor’s NoteHi, Big Straw Readers!

Big Straw is bigger and better (straw-ier?) than ever! This will be the first of two issues you see this semester. In the past, Big Straw printed one issue a semester, and that was all you ever heard from us. Not anymore! Not only are we printing two issues a semester now, but we are also online! Check out our sleek new website, bigstrawmagazine.com. A big shout-out to our talented webmaster, Raymond Fung!

Other than the website, what else is going on with Big Straw? Well, we have some talented new writers and editors, but don’t let that hinder you from joining us! We enjoy engaging discussions at our weekly meetings and we are full of friendly fun!

We’ve also been busy planning events on campus. On March 19, Big Straw will be cohosting Night Market with Awareness of Roots in Chinese Culture. We will be providing a number of Asian games, so come out and have fun at this free Late Night event! We will also be holding a movie night sometime in March, so keep an eye out for our event posters!

Are you interested in keeping up with Big Straw’s developments? Visit our blog at bigstrawmagazine.com or become a fan on Facebook at facebook.com/CMUBigStraw. You can also subscribe to our d-list - just drop me a line at rschen@andrew.

Yours,

Robin Chen

Want to advertise your event here?Big Straw now offers ad space!If you are affiliated with Carnegie Mellon University,

advertising is free!If you are an outside organization, advertising is a low

price, depending on size.Contact [email protected] for more

details or to reserve your ad space.

What do you think?Author Malcolm Gladwell did some research and

discovered that Asian children in general learn to count and remember numbers much faster than their English-speaking counterparts. He surmised that this was because our memory can store things most easily when it fits within two seconds, and numbers in Asian languages take a shorter time to pronounce than numbers in English. He also says that the non-intuitiveness of the English numbering system hinders children when learning about math. Do you agree or disagree? Is it all centered in language differences, or do cultural factors play a bigger role?

Tell us what you think! E-mail us at [email protected], and the most thought-provoking responses will be published in our next issue!

Big Straw Magazine Spring 2010

Documents

elevated jane lui

im jane lui

jane luis presence

entire performance

jane luis beautiful

jane luikappa phi lambda

physical music box

windup music box