ABSTRACT
I was returning to my seat during the intermission break of David Henry Hwang’s play Chinglish at East West Players—the venerable Asian American theater group located in Los Angeles—when “The Bund,” an instrumental track from Shanghai Restoration Project, began filling the theater. A reference to Shanghai’s famed riverfront and the legendary nightclubs and dance halls that flourished there during the city’s swinging jazz era in the 1930s, the song channels the spirit of that time and place through a heady mix of musical referents. Chinese traditional instruments layer onto hip-hop beats that weave into synthesizers and jazz piano riffs. Listening to the song in the context of Chinglish—a play that explores the manifold mistranslations that impede cultural understanding between China and the United States—it struck me how well it serves as a musical counterpart to the play. While Hwang plays with the chasm between meanings and words, using the sometimes humorous gaffes found in mistranslated “Chinglish” signs as a springboard to meditate on the limits of cross-cultural understanding, Dave Liang, the artist and producer who records as Shanghai Restoration Project, remixes bits and samples of Chinese traditional instruments onto beat-driven, electronic soundscapes that create new contexts for hearing those sounds. In so doing, both artists invite reflection on the place of China in the U.S. public imaginary, negotiating the fears, projections, and fantasies that structure U.S. narratives of China’s ascent as a global superpower as well as their own attachments and identifications to China and Chineseness within these changing global relationships.
