Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back. We took a bit of a hiatus, but thank you for your patience. We are back this week. Check out this episode from the HER archives from the before times where I talk with musician, filmmaker and emerging theologian, SueAnn Shiah. SueAnn shares the journey of making her documentary HuanDao about her return to her parents' home country, Taiwan for a biking pilgrimage. Listen in as we discuss the power of indigenous music and how returning to a familial home can help us define what's been lost. Check it out.
Amena Brown:
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to HER with Amena Brown. In my feelings, I think that if you have been listening to this podcast, you know that I have a habit of that. But in particular, I have reasons to be deeply in my feelings today because as our guest is Taiwanese American musician, filmmaker, emerging theologian specializing in identity formation, racial justice, gender and sexuality. Her first feature linked documentary HuanDao, which I just watched. I've feelings. Also, her debut solo album of reclaimed named A Liturgy for the Perseverance of the Saints just released June of 2018. Welcome SueAnn Shiah to the podcast.
SueAnn Shiah:
Thank you so much for having me Amena.
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh. SueAnn. Y'all for real, we had scheduled the time we were supposed to do this and I was late because I'm watching this documentary. I was watching it like, then what happened? Where did they bike to next? Oh my gosh. I just feel the feeling. So we are going to talk about the documentary, but I have to talk about how you and I met SueAnn. We actually met at a women's retreat and-
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah, we did.
Amena Brown:
... I don't remember if we were just sitting next to each other or what made us start chit chatting.
SueAnn Shiah:
Oh, I went up and talked to you.
Amena Brown:
Oh, right. Okay.
SueAnn Shiah:
Because you performed and then I was like, I got to talk to her. Also, I think I posted about you and our mutual friend, Emily Joy was like, "Amena's so awesome. She's amazing." And I was like, "I should go talk to her."
Amena Brown:
Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay. So you're giving me the backstory right there, because my remembrance of it is you walking up and somehow we started talking about what you do when you were talking about your work and music production and sound.
SueAnn Shiah:
I remember that conversation very thoroughly myself.
Amena Brown:
I mean, I love that stuff anyway, but I love hearing a woman talk about it and hearing a woman that works in that field and industry, because I know only a few women who do, and so I was just immediately like, "This woman's brilliant." Yes. I'm here for everything.
SueAnn Shiah:
Did you know the statistic is actually 95% of audio engineers and producers are men?
Amena Brown:
Wow.
SueAnn Shiah:
95%.
Amena Brown:
No.
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah. It's pretty bad.
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh. That's why every time I hear a woman talking about it... I have a sister who... We didn't grow up in the same house, but she grew up in California and she is also into song production and composition and audio production as well. Whenever I meet another woman doing that, I'm just like, "Yes, girl. Yes. We need you really." But now I know about the statistics, I'm like, "No, really?" Like we real.
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah. There's the Women's Audio Mission, which is an organization out of San Francisco. They do a lot of stuff to promote women and audio and stuff. So they've got the statistics. They've got the receipts.
Amena Brown:
Oh my gosh. So I basically have been very excited about knowing you since then, Sue Ann. Every now and then we run into each other at an event, but I started following you after that day. And have just been like, oh my, my gosh, she's brilliant all the time. Oh my gosh. So I need to talk about this documentary just because I have a lot of feelings.
SueAnn Shiah:
Go in.
Amena Brown:
I have feelings about it, so we need to discuss it.
SueAnn Shiah:
Let's have a little live therapy. Let's go in.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. Let's just get in there because I was just like, I just feel like I'm brimming over with emotion. And I'm curious to know if you were feeling those emotions in the moments of experiencing what was filmed and then feeling those emotions after having to go through the editing process and seeing how the documentary formed itself. But for people who are just showing up to the scene here that are like, what's this documentary I need to watch? Link will be in this show notes. Please tell the people, describe to the people this documentary, the journey. Just give me a little background information.
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah. So the documentary follows my two week bike trip around the... I guess it's called a circumnavigation, by the perimeter of the island of Taiwan. And so it's about around 500 miles of biking. We took a train at certain points that were a little bit more dangerous, but we talked to locals, we eat food, we see the sites and it's a travel film, but there's also interwoven in all of these do deeper themes about bicultural identity and belonging and home. Like liminal experiences, especially as an Asian American. So that's my little synopsis.
Amena Brown:
Okay. I like to ask every guest an origin story question. And one of the things that I have loved about just following you and also that I see in this documentary is your ability to tell a story. I think it takes being a good storyteller to not only make a great film, but also to make great music. Whether the music has-
SueAnn Shiah:
And I would argue to be a theologian.
Amena Brown:
... Same. Same.
SueAnn Shiah:
It's the same thing.
Amena Brown:
You need the skill right there. The skill, the want to tell a good story, to tell the important story. So did you grow up being a person that was interested in storytelling? Did you grow up in a family or in your community where you were hearing storytelling all the time? Do you feel like when you were younger, that there was this interest in you about wanting to tell or share a good story?
SueAnn Shiah:
I think so. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad putting me to bed at night and just telling me stories, not reading from a book. So my dad was born in Burma. He's Chinese. His parents escaped China when the communists took over after World War II. I used to always get him to tell me, we call them Jade stories because there's a lot of Jade in Burma for people who don't know. It's almost like strike it rich gold. You're just like in a field digging and then you find a giant Jade and strike it rich. It's your little rags to richest stories. So I used to always let my dad tell me Jade stories from Burma or China, I guess. And then we just were voracious readers, like books everywhere constantly.
SueAnn Shiah:
As soon as I could start reading chapter books on my own, my face was always buried in a book. There were a couple years where I literally carried at least a book or two around with me everywhere. I would like read while I brushed my teeth. I would read at the dinner table to the chagrin with my parents. I've just always loved a story. I didn't grow up in a Christian home and sometimes I reflect back on the time my growing up time before I became a Christian at 13. I think that my love of stories really just laid spiritual groundwork for me to become a Christian in a lot of ways, because, there was always a sense that there was a writer.
SueAnn Shiah:
There's someone who's telling the story and there's good and there's evil and there's destiny. And there's like this arc. There's just this sense that you're living in a story yourself. I wanted he one of the good guys, right? So of course that naturally gravitated towards God. And even though my parents aren't Christians, my mom raised us were the really in strong sense of moral, right and wrong. I think that combined with this being inclined, being someone drawn to art, whether that's music or film or literature or poetry. Those are the things that have always just captured my attention.
SueAnn Shiah:
My development as a young artist happened at the same time that I was becoming a Christian. I think I see those things as intertwined inseparable in a lot of ways. When I got to college, I made friends with this writer, poet, musician, her name's, Katie Bowser. She's part of our local like music hymns, Belmont RUF world and she introduced the phrase to me, meta narrative. I started to use to talk about the Bible, the meta narrative of the Bible. So in terms of the film itself, like it was really hard to tell a cohesive story arc. Because you have all these days, like all these individual days set up and you have to tell these mini stories while then also telling a larger story for the whole film.
SueAnn Shiah:
And the balance between that was really difficult because there were so many interesting little story arcs that happened throughout the days, but I had to edit to figure out what was going to make it, so it was ultimately cohesive as a whole film and not just 14 episodes of different days. So that is like the interaction of the concept of the meta narrative, which is what the Bible is too. Is a bunch of smaller stories that then tell a bigger story and how do you sift through that and how do you find the themes that link all of these little things together?
Amena Brown:
I'm just still in my feelings about it, because I think I'm really glad you introduced me now to the phrase meta narrative, because I think watching your documentary, I just felt like I was welling up with all these feelings. I think I really identified with this theme of home and how we define home. And home is with our people. It is in our ethnicity, it's in our homeland, even when we were not born in what would've been the Homeland of our people. And all of that journey of return, and there's one scene that I was like, if I don't stop watching this, I'm going to be ugly crying. And that's not great for a podcast recording because I don't know that anyone enjoys listening to someone ugly cry. But there was a scene where you were on the bike ride with your friend, Rachel. I didn't make that up, right?
SueAnn Shiah:
That's her name. Yes, you're right.
Amena Brown:
So you and Rachel are riding by and there's a family out in front of their home and they invite you to eat with them.
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah, man.
Amena Brown:
And you stop and eat with them and they're sharing with you what it's like for them being Aboriginal people in Taiwan. You're telling them your journey in America. You're telling them the background of your parents and just the interplay of that conversation and them welcoming you home, them saying to you are always home here. You are home here anytime with us. And I just could have cried my eyes out. I mean, I'm watching it, on a screen here having a very emotional experience. What was that like for you just deciding, "Hey, we're going to make this stop right here." Which to me is not a super American thing to do, because you'd be like, "We don't know these people." We don't know what they're doing.
Amena Brown:
Whatever but I noticed more when I'm traveling outside of America that I am more inclined to do things like that just to be like, oh, they've invited us here. Let's pull these bikes over. Just go over here and eat a meal and hang out for a while. What was that experience like living it? And then what was it like when you went back to what you were referring to the editing process there that you knew that was a moment that needed to make the film?
SueAnn Shiah:
That day and that that scene is literally one of my favorites in the entire documentary. It was one of those things that you can hope will happen, but you can't plan will happen. I spend probably three, maybe four hours hanging out with them. So you're seeing a 10 minute edited down of like... There were so many conversations we had and so many other things we talked about and they were all such a gift. I really had to like parrot down for the film because literally just I could probably just edit those conversations with them and put that out as an entire interview series. But it was interesting. It was such a tense day because every day on the road you just didn't know what was going to happen. There's so much uncertainty and tension.
SueAnn Shiah:
So it's interesting because I had wanted to bike to that the Taitung village, because I wanted to make sure that the narratives of Aboriginal Taiwanese people were included in our documentary because a lot of Taiwanese Chinese people, people of Han like Chinese descent, they don't usually talk about that when they talk about what it means to be Taiwanese. I think it's similar to the way when white Americans talk about what it means to be American, they don't really talk about indigenous native people. I didn't want to like perpetuate this false narrative that we as Chinese people have a claim to this land when there were indigenous people there before.
SueAnn Shiah:
So my director of photography, she and I were making the schedule and she was like, what are you going to do? You're just going to show up and talk to random people. She just felt very skeptical of the way I wanted to structure our shooting and our time. And she grew up in New York born and raised. So even more, I think she is a really cynical view of the world of people. And I was like, yeah, because that's what you do. Like you just talk to random strangers and you make friends. Don't you do that? And she looked at me like I was crazy, but I think even living in... I've lived in Nashville for the last eight years and it really is just like that in Nashville too. You just start conversations with the randomest people and get to know each other.
SueAnn Shiah:
I'm glad that's where I grew up and as an adult becoming into my own because I think it gave me an outlook on how people do want to share their stories if you give them the chance. But yeah, mostly when I think back to that time, I just think of how fun it was. We just sat around and talked. I was starving. We had biked, probably like 35 miles that day. But like I feel the hunger because I was just so excited that we were getting to have this moment. This very organic and raw and honest moment with one another.
SueAnn Shiah:
The conversation was flowing so easily. I think in my life there's times when... I don't know if you have this where you feel like you are almost outside of your body and you're looking at the scene that you're living in. It's almost like the meta narrative concept of you're so aware of the story that you're living in. I like to call it the television show of your life. But as I've gotten older, I had that really increased awareness, especially when I was younger, when I first started writing and whether it's poetry or music or stories, but as I've gotten older, I've realized how important it is to be present and to put yourself back into the body and to actually experience it instead of always having the third person camera view of your life.
SueAnn Shiah:
So when I think of that moment, or those hours I spent, they didn't feel like hours. We just talked and then the time went way, and of course my director of photography and my parents were both like, where are you? You're not answering your phone. I totally shut like my phone off when we were recording that conversation. Because I wasn't answering any of the text, Rachel was like, "Your mom just called you wants to know where you are because you're not answering your phone."
SueAnn Shiah:
So I think I just felt so present. Like, so in my body so alive, just with the people. And I don't know... I haven't really found the words to explain what that's like, but when you forget everything else in the world melts away and you're just in a moment completely. That's how it felt is so fully alive, so fully present, so fully human.
Amena Brown:
It really comes across SueAnn. It really comes across. You can feel the soul of this film watching it. And that is just a huge kudos to you and your team because you can watch many things about people traveling, this, that the third place, but to be able to capture on film, not only traveling to a place, but the different nuances of what that means. I mean, it's so beautiful. I was watching for a while and then realized like, oh, there's one scene where you and Rachel and your dad are sitting eating food together in Taiwan and then I realized, oh, her parents are with her. I mean, wow. If it was just you and Rachel biking, that's still a great story.
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah. They took the train.
Amena Brown:
But your parents even being present there while you and Rachel are doing the biking. When you were coming up with the idea that you knew, like, "Okay, I'm taking this trip." Did you go to your parents and say to them, "This is what I'm doing." And they were wanting to go, or how did it come about that they also...
SueAnn Shiah:
Decided to tag along on my great adventure?
Amena Brown:
Yes.
SueAnn Shiah:
So totally my plan was never to have them there. I was just going to do it also, because I didn't expect my parents to train on a bike for four months and then go, do all of that. But they were so intrigued by the idea and they were like, "That sounds really fun. We want to come do stuff." So, they didn't do the biking, they took the train and they would meet us at certain locations where we would ended up sleeping that night usually. They also didn't come for the whole thing. They did go back to Taipei from a lot of stretches of it. Especially you can see like, oh you haven't seen because you haven't gotten to the end, especially for the latter end of the documentary they're not there.
SueAnn Shiah:
So it really was just like, I gave them a schedule and they were like, well we want to do this stuff and this stuff and we can take the train. So we'll just meet you there. We'll do this with you here or there. They were really supportive of the film. I think, I tell people sometimes my life in Nashville, my music industry life, my Belmont world, my Nashville existence it doesn't really make sense to my immigrant parents. They don't really understand what I do, the industry, the art, the world that I live in.
SueAnn Shiah:
But this is the first time I created a piece of art that made sense to them. That they could understand and they were extremely supportive throughout the whole process, especially in helping reach out to their own network of Taiwanese community to get the money raised on Kickstarter. And that's something for me too, is thinking about what is Asian American art going to be? We're still building this cannon because there isn't a lot of work and what are the themes that we should and need to address. And some of it is a tension between a first and second generation.
SueAnn Shiah:
I intuitively sense that a lot of my parents generation, they so deeply want to be understood by their children, but because of this immigration process, because of raising us in America and wanting to give us different economic and social opportunities, they haven't really thought about the cost of what they lost in that immigration process of a generational gap between us and them. So much of the healing process for myself and doing my racial awareness identity stuff has been trying to heal some of those chasms with my parents.
SueAnn Shiah:
It's very difficult. It's like, I'm not going to pretend that like it's like I have a flawless relationship with my parents. I certainly don't. But when I talk to my other Asian American friends about the things I talk to my parents about, they're like what? Like you can talk to your parents about politics and about philosophy and about identity and sociology. And they're also like, "Wait, you have all those conversations in Chinese?" Because most of us don't have great language skills because English is our primary language. But yeah, I think there's a lot of healing to be done generationally and so be the change what you want to see in the world.
SueAnn Shiah:
I just knew that for me, it meant investing in language skills and investing in understanding our heritage and culture because as long as my parents have lived in America, their hearts are Chinese and they're never going to be able to understand American culture the way that I do. But I do have the tools to learn Chinese and Taiwanese culture. It's about putting in the work to learn how to use those tools.
Amena Brown:
I love hearing, just thinking about almost like the conversation between generations there, but those of us who are in the generation of children, that it also requires something of us. Requires a commitment of us to want to be able to speak back to our parents, to be in conversation with a generation that's very different from ours and has some different narratives too, and had different nuances and layers of that experience. I think I also felt a very visceral response to watching just the beginnings of this story unfold.
Amena Brown:
I didn't want to be super late for our podcast interview y'all. That's why I was like, "Oh, Amena, come on now." I would've been like four hours later I'm like SueAnn ugly cries through the entire episode, but just the parts with your parents and your dad talking through some of that history with you. There was a scene where you are sitting on a couch with your mom and you're hearing her talk to you about just what her upbringing was like and some of what it was like for her to be back there now. I think I had a really visceral response to that because I've been digging around into my family tree in the last couple of years.
Amena Brown:
And on my mom's side up to four generations of my family all have lived in North Carolina, including our ancestors who were enslaved. And really within a very small mile radius from my grandmother's hometown. I had the opportunity to return to that town with my grandmother and go back to some of the buildings that she remembered. And there's just some very visceral response I had to being in this place that even though I didn't grow up there, it is home, it is roots for me. there was this one moment that I think was why I was like, "About to ugly cry watching this film." Because my great-grandfather on my dad's side, he was a Bishop in their church denomination, but he also had a business where he made pulpits. He made sure furniture him and his sons.
Amena Brown:
I was going around trying to find this church where he'd pastored and the church had gone to a different church community. So it was no longer the church that my great-grandfather had pastored, but the building itself was still there. And we go in, of course, this is the summer shortly after the Charleston nine were murdered. So even walking into that church building and trying to explain to them why we wanted to go into the sanctuary and my husband being a white man and all of us feeling their moment of caution in that moment of, is this going to be okay? Do we let you in? I told them the names of my grandparents, all these things.
Amena Brown:
They let us into the sanctuary SueAnn and the original furniture was still there. This hand carved, hand etched furniture that this man that I met when I was a very young child, but don't have a lot of memories of him that this is furniture he made with his hands. So in this way to be present in his space, as an adult. I think there was something so reflective of that for me in this journey where you are there in this place, that your parents know or that some things that they knew, but also they are removed it in these certain ways from having gone to America. I mean, there were just so many nuances to the story that had tensions and beauty and so much combined together.
Amena Brown:
One of the reasons why I wanted to interview is because this season on the podcast is lost and found. I chose that because it's reflective of my life right now just like the feelings of there being some things that I have lost. Even in the losses, I have found maybe some parts of myself or some parts of my identity that the losing and the finding go together in these interesting ways. I liked that in your story, in the art that you make, there is always this theme of identity and home and where we find that and how we discover or that. How do the words identity and home, those themes, how do they play out in the art that you make? Is that a true statement for you? Would you say that those themes tend to come up in the art that you make?
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah. I definitely, I think they do. I think they come up again and again and maybe this is because of my own background and experience, but I see them consistently and constantly in my faith. When I look at the Bible, when I think about what it means to me to be a Christian, what the good news is, what is the gospel? I think it resonated with me because I always had a sense that I didn't know where I belonged and I didn't know where my home was. As a Asian American it's like, even though I was born here in the United States, my passport says, American citizen, socially and even in certain ways, systematically, I'm constantly being told that I don't belong here. And that was something I internalized as a kid.
SueAnn Shiah:
And you go back to wherever your parents immigrated from, and then they tell you, no you're not Taiwanese. You're American. Then you come to America and they say, you are Taiwanese. You're not American. And so you just feel like, well, is there a place where I could belong? Is there a place that I could call home? And when I became a Christian and I learned that that there was a place that I could call fully home, that I had citizenship in the kingdom of God. That no matter what happens on earth, no matter how corrupt a government, no matter what countries and governments get destroyed or created, this part didn't make it into the film, but I did a long interview with my father about his experience growing up in Burma.
SueAnn Shiah:
It just didn't really fit into the arc, but something he told me that I didn't know was that growing up because his parents had fled China and settled in Burma they were countryless people because there was a turnover of government. So there was the Republic of China, which is like a government of Taiwan that was in power. That was like the democratic elected community that came up after the fall of the Chinese Empire. But a little bit after World War II ended, the nationalists and the communists fought and the communist won. So that's the government that is in power in China. Now their government is called the People's Republic of China. And so like citizenship to the Republic of China is a totally different passport than citizenship to the peoples. They're different.
SueAnn Shiah:
And so my grandparents, when they fled China, they basically forfeited whatever existence they had in China and they went to Burma, but then Burma wasn't going to give them citizenship. So my dad said they had papers that just said, no country, no land. Literally like, where do you belong? And in the '70s, I believe Taiwan offered citizenship to any displaced Chinese nationals. Because there were Chinese people all over the world that didn't have citizenship, that they were displaced because of the cycles of war and the overturning of governments. So anyone of Chinese ethnic heritage could come and they could get citizenship in Taiwan and that's how my dad's side ended up in Taiwan.
SueAnn Shiah:
Yeah, I think about what it feels like, like my dad, literally not having any papers that say you don't belong anywhere and growing up here in the states, but yeah, no matter what government's topple are erected. And like I have citizenship in Christ and that's my home and I can take that with me wherever I go. And nothing on earth, no power on earth can threaten that. I guess that's my way of also saying like my album, the music that I made, those are the themes of home that are there is I've been thinking a lot about Sukkot, which is the of booths. Sometimes it's called the feast of Tabernacles, the Hebrew children are called to celebrate in the Old Testament. It's a celebration time of remembrance of their wandering in the desert.
SueAnn Shiah:
And so what they do is they erect these tents or booths and then they sleep and eat in them during the time of this feast. Everything in the Sukkot is just to be holy or blessed. There's prayers you say over everything and it's like, wait, this is like holy camping. You're like, well, that's what the children of Israel did for 40 years. And you can see that as exile, but you can also see as a time when God was teaching them things and providing for them and that those are things to be remembered and celebrated. So I feel like I've lived my life in a lot of ways in a tent wandering. But the glorious thing about that is knowing that it's temporary. That the promise land is real, that God is leading us to and repairing our hearts for, and that God is biting for us during this time.
SueAnn Shiah:
When else do you get to see a cloud by day and the fire by night, like literally having a visual confirmation of presence of the kingdom of God. I think of all this wilderness time. A lot of us who are without churches now or faith communities because of issues of racism and homophobia or misogyny and sexism and all that stuff. And the thing that I've learned in the wilderness is that God is real. There are trade offs, but all of it is good and all of it is preparing us to go home to a final home.
Amena Brown:
I told you not to make me cry SueAnn, and I feel like throughout this conversation, you are testing me. You are testing me on my tears right now.
SueAnn Shiah:
I think a lot of my Black friends feel the same way because it's like Africa, you can't go back to the end but the places of trauma that your family only has been for generations are on indigenous people's lands. You got to find a way to find home and to make home even as you travel in a tent and you're wondering. And you know that there's nothing on earth that will ever be able to give you the satisfaction that you long for. And that's why I think that my heart is always turned to anchored in the home that God is making for me, because that's something nobody and no one can ever take away from me.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. I love that. To me that sounds like you live in your present life, but you are also rooted in eternity. You are rooted also in a life that is beyond the life we see right now. And there is such groundedness in that. You worded that so beautifully. So I now know that you are returning to Taiwan for your masters at National Taiwan University.
SueAnn Shiah:
That's right.
Amena Brown:
I mean, I feel I was about to say sip the tea, but I feel like when you say you're going to sip the tea, it's like, tell me some forbidden thing you weren't going to tell anyone. So I don't know if it's tea.
SueAnn Shiah:
It's out in public everywhere.
Amena Brown:
Yeah. So it's not like...
SueAnn Shiah:
I made some announcements.
Amena Brown:
I want you to tell me more about this and what is it feeling like right now to think about returning to Taiwan? And now in this case, you'll be returning there for a longer period of time. How did that come about and how are you processing this new part of your journey?
SueAnn Shiah:
Well, the funny thing is that it does go back to the same weekend that we met each other because I was in LA for the CCDA Conference and the women of color retreat. And it was such an important life changing week for me, that time in LA. My church helped me to pay for my plane ticket. My girl Zekia got me a free pass to the conference. One of my friends offered me to place to stay. It was just one of those amazing everything God provided and it fell together moments I got to go to LA. And I was so excited that there were so many Asians because my life is pretty Asian less. And especially in Nashville and to be surrounded by so many other justice loving Asian Christians was a gift.
SueAnn Shiah:
I literally didn't go to any other workshops. I just was like, I'm just going to only to the Asian ones and talking to people who were asking similar questions that I was and thinking about justice and theology and the Asian American experience and it was amazing. I met a lot of people from Fuller during that time too, and heard about the Asian American Center there and I was like, that sounds like something I want to do. And thinking about where my gifts and my calling was. I'd been in Nashville for six years and I thought that I was going to live there for the rest of my life and build a recording studio and just be a producer and do whatever other fun stuff I wanted to do. But I in that weekend realized that I had a calling to go and write Asian American theology.
SueAnn Shiah:
And as I thought through what that was going to look like, what the preparation I needed to do in order to do that job well. I wanted go to seminary but I had also always had this longing to go back to Taiwan. So after I finished my documentary, I answered so many questions. I learned so many things, but it ended up giving me more questions than it answered. I realized that there was a limitation to what I could learn and study on my own without literally moving to Taiwan and doing more formal intentional study.
SueAnn Shiah:
So I always wanted to go back. I always wanted to improve my Chinese. I always wanted to deepen my understanding, but once I realized I wanted to go to seminary, I wanted to write and published Asian American theology, all these little pieces that have been floating around for years clicked into place and I was like, I'm going to go back to Taiwan to do grad school in Asian studies, and then I'm going to come back and I'm going to seminary and then I'm going to write and publish theology. That's the bigger picture of how I ended up deciding I wanted to go back. I looked at a couple different programs, all Taiwan history program, Asian study, Asian Pacific, global studies, whatever a lot of programs like that.
SueAnn Shiah:
People often ask me like, "Oh, why go all the way back to Taiwan to do this?" I'm like, "Well, I want to learn Asian studies from a non-Western perspective." I want to learn Asian studies from Asian people. I want to learn history and philosophy from the traditions to which they've been passed down, not like translated interpreted through a Western lens and regurgitated. I want to just learn from my own people and a big part of my like decolonization process with my faith and with my life and my worldview. I wanted to be specifically in that context and not only learn Chinese philosophy in a Christian seminary, I wanted to just learn Chinese philosophy from people who study that and then do the work of course, on my own of seeing how that integrates and doesn't integrate with my faith as a Christian.
SueAnn Shiah:
I wanted to do all of those things and going back to school in Taiwan made sense. The reason I decided to do this musicology program, National Taiwan University is the number one university in Taiwan and I wanted to go there. It's where I studied before when I studied abroad in college. It's where my dad did his undergrad, but they don't have an Asian studies program. And so I was looking for other programs in the cultural studies, history, literature, philosophy, language that it would give me the freedom to do an interdisciplinary approach and their musicology program looked amazing.
SueAnn Shiah:
Music is my primary medium, even though I do a lot of work in a lot of different mediums. And a lot of my philosophical theological work, my critical media, like analysis stuff is rooted in my understanding and fluency in music and music history. So the musicology program just made a lot of sense. I actually just registered for my class two nights ago, and I was looking through the course list and I felt very good about my decision because I was like, "This is so dope. Look at this music and gender class. Look at this like mind, body spirituality and music course. Look at like recordings in east Asia pre 1945. This is just so...." I was like, "These are the classes I get to take." This is my primary curriculum and these are professors who have been addressing what is colonialism? How has it affected culture and art and music in particular specifically?
SueAnn Shiah:
So one other thing that I think I just want to note is that in Asia, we have a lot of history of colonialism, whether it was the Chinese colonizing Taiwan or the Japanese colonizing the Chinese who were colonizing Taiwan or Japanese colonizing Korea. All of these different instances and I fascinated to examine what that process and indoctrination looks like when race isn't the issue, when it's intrarace, intraracial. We have just a really American view of colonization of race, of all these claims to land claims, to cultural genocide, what does that look like?
SueAnn Shiah:
So I was really excited to be able to examine. I feel like in order to do Asian American theology or Asian American studies at all, you both have to understand the context of what it means to be Asian and America, but also the histories of trauma that our communities bring with us from our home countries. And it's often a barrier within Asian American organizing is that everybody's family was all killed by the Japanese during World War II. So everyone hates the Japanese, but in America, because we're all racialized in a similar way, we end up making friends with the same people that our parents all like hate. So those are often barriers to organizing and it's like, how do we even reconcile that stuff when there's no context for understanding it in America, because they all think we look the same.
Amena Brown:
This is so powerful, Sue Anne, just to hear you articulating the layers of this. And it's super exciting to think about what you're going to get to study. I'm just like, oh my gosh, just thinking when you're naming the classes, just now I'm like, I don't even know music that well. I mean, I love it as a fan, but the technical parts of it and the theory and those things, I don't know those parts, but just thinking about getting to dive into that deeply and getting to dive into it in your homeland and wow.
SueAnn Shiah:
Music education in the states is so Eurocentric, and I feel like if you take any world music class, it's like you're expected to learn everything about the rest of the world's music, but everything is always Eurocentric. And so just reading through the syllabus. The syllabi that I was scanning through, I was just like, there's so many texts and so many concepts like we're going to of course address some Western ideas, but largely it seems like they're very rooted. This is one of the core competencies of this department is wanting a uniquely Asian approach to music college and not just trying to like one up whatever the Western world's way of doing things like uniquely Asian way. I told them in my interview, I was like, that's why I want to go here, because that's what I want and that's what I can't get in the states.
Amena Brown:
Wow. For listeners who may be sitting at the inner a section of a lot of different identities, whether that is cultural or gender or just all these different layers we have, what's the advice or the words of care that you would say to someone who's sitting at this inner section of all these identities trying to make sense of that, trying to embrace parts of it. Like you said, also trying to decenter some parts of it. What would be the words you would say for the person that may be feeling lost right now in trying to grapple through all of however that looks for them in their life?
SueAnn Shiah:
So my freshman year at Belmont... Well, so we have this program called the first year seminar program. So everyone takes this class and you read this book and then they bring in a speaker who talks to everyone. So the great gift I had was the speaker was Makoto Fujimura and I was actually already familiar with his work in Christian art world. I was totally geeking out and his entire presentation was on the concept of liminality and talking about his own experiences as a Japanese American artist and the ostracization, the marginalization you experience as a liminal person, but also your ability to synthesize, your ability to see from multiple perspectives.
SueAnn Shiah:
I think that for everybody who, for instance, doesn't know where to call home, something about how to make home, wherever you are. And for somebody who feels different and marginalized wherever they go, you have the ability to find what you have in common with other people, even when you don't have everything in common. I think that all of our greatest strengths are also our greatest weaknesses. And as I was going through my racial identity, process my... Or we call it a racial awakening or my queer awakening, I was realizing God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong and the foolish things to shame the wise. And so all the things the world tells me about myself or that marginalizes me for are also like things that are gifts. I just have to learn how to use them. But nobody's going to teach me how to do that because the world isn't designed to teach me how to thrive like that.
SueAnn Shiah:
I'm going to have to invest in myself and look for art and look for writers and women of color and queer women of color and Christian queer theology, like all of this stuff, I'm going to have to make a lot of it myself, but I'm also going to have to go find it because no one is going to find it for me. So I think that that's how you change your identity from being a victim to being someone who is a survivor. I'm using that phrasing because I actually had the privilege of getting to hear Tarana Burke speak in Detroit in June, she was speaking at the Allied Media Conference and I was presenting a workshop. And so for those who don't know, Burke is the founder of the #MeToo and movement.
SueAnn Shiah:
She talked about that concept. People are like, survivor versus victim. She said she doesn't really like the idea that people use is like a thing you arrive at rather it's you're surviving and you're learning to do that. But I do think there's a lot of redemption to be had. There's a lot of reclamation to be had and mourn. I definitely think we need to mourn and lament, but also know that what you can get out of your life in the world is not all only what the world is promising you, which is not very much. I think that all of us, whether you are like a straight white cyst heterosexual, like man, or you're a queer trans woman of color. We all have multiple intersecting identities and they all interact with each other in unique ways. It's just that when your intersecting identities are marginalized, it's when you realize that they exist.
SueAnn Shiah:
We don't operate out of the assumption that people who have quote intersectional identities are the marginalized. No, the people in power have them too. The only thing is they aren't forced to confront them because their experiences are centered and normalized. So that's the other thing too, is like, you're not weird or different. You just live in a world that is structured to make you feel that way. Everybody has a lot of stuff they have to deal with. Everybody's life is complex. It's just that privilege is written in invisible ink. And it's until you turn up the heat that you can start to see it on the paper.
Amena Brown:
Goes to write poem about these quotes that SueAnn is saying, please takes [crosstalk].
SueAnn Shiah:
Have you ever done that with the lemon juice? Like write invisible ink, the lemon juice thing?
Amena Brown:
No. I need the education.
SueAnn Shiah:
I'm just being a super nerd. So you can write messages with lemon juice and then you can take a blow dryer. You can use an iron and then once... So you can send it to somebody and it looks like a blank page, but then they put heat on it and then the words will appear on it because the juice will oxidize or something. It'll turn brown. So that was what I was trying to say about privilege is written in an invisible ink is like you'll get this piece of paper. It looks blank, but once you turn up the heat on it, then you'll start to see all the stuff that's written there.
Amena Brown:
SueAnn, speak a word. Speak a word today.
SueAnn Shiah:
I've spoken so many words.
Amena Brown:
It is a word. I'm like tries to write poem about lemon juice and invisible ink. Okay. Yes. HER With Amena Brown is produced by Matt Owen for Sol Graffiti Productions, as a part of the Seneca Women Podcast Network, in partnership with iHeart Radio. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to subscribe, rate and review the podcast.