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Sounds of belonging: sonic diaspora in overseas Chinese radio stations

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Sounds of belonging: sonic diaspora in overseas Chinese radio stations

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Content SoundsofBelonging
SonicDiasporainOverseasChineseRadioStations
by
Sui Wang
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC DORNSIFE COLLEGE OF
LETTERS, ARTS AND SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(East Asian Area Studies)
December 2021
Copyright 2021 Sui Wang
Acknowledgements
I am grateful for University of Southern California, East Asian Center, and my parents, who have
been supporting my two years and 4 months of graduate studies.
My deepest gratitude goes to my thesis committee, Professor Kerim Yasar, Professor Henry
Jenkins, and Professor Brian Bernards. They are excellent scholars and educators, who have
greatly contributed to my academic trainings. I am very fortunate to work with them, and blessed
by their intellectual virtues. My research would not be completed without their feedbacks and
encouragements.
I would also like to express my gratitude to Professor Josh Kun, who has tuned me in to a
world full of voices and sounds on his class COMM 655. Thanks to Professor Miya Desjardins,
a graceful mentor I always enjoy working with and talking to. She has been encouraging me with
the greatest sincerity since our first meeting by the pool in social science building.
I owe my thanks to our academic advisor Grace Ryu, program officers Jasmine Yu, and Alexan-
dria Wroblewski. They have been generously offering me supports all the way through my grad
school.
Thanks to the director of Chinese Radio Seattle, Xiaoyuan Su, and radio host Ya Qiu and Dan
Dan. They kindly accepted my interview requests and had some good chats with me over the
phone, which proves to be crucial to the body part of my thesis.
I led a bittersweet life during the writing of this thesis, which spanned across my second year
of study. My personal gratitude goes to all my friends, Manqing Yu, Xiaoyu Yin, Xiyan Huang,
Zhenxin Huang, Zhiqing Ye, Wenbin Hou, Seoyeon Lee, Yuwei Liu, Hannah Hunter, Ellen Li,
John Tang, Mosa Lyu, Ziwei Chen, Ziqi Liu, and Zoe. Thank you for your insightful comments,
ii
productive conversations, and countless encouragements that make me feel grounded. You always
inspire me to look for the silver linings.
It is a convention to save the families for the last in the acknowledgment. I want to thank my
dear grandma, who cannot read or write, but she raised me to a person who loves reading and
writing. Being my best friend from my childhood to today, she gives me unconditional love that I
wish to repay in the future.
iii
TableofContents
Acknowledgements ii
Abstract v
Chapter1: Introduction 1
1.1 A sonic encounter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
1.2 Revisit diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.3 Ethnic radio: sounding the diaspora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
1.4 Imagined homeland, imagined identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
1.5 Methodology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
Chapter2: AcasestudyofChineseRadioSeattle: aradiothatlistenstoyou 15
2.1 Self-narratives in story programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19
2.2 Nostalgia, auditory voyeurism, and night-time music programs . . . . . . . . . . . 24
2.3 Civic education in news talk programs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26
2.4 Hearing from the hosts: why radio? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Chapter3: Discussion: listeninginanewether 35
3.1 Fading sounds of radio . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
3.2 Sounds of belonging, or sounds of becoming . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
References 41
iv
Abstract
The multiplication of media forms including music, tv shows, radio programs, and streaming
videos adds to the mediatization of social life. Alongside the flow of capital and people, techno-
logical connectivity facilitates a forming “global diasporic Chinese mediasphere”, which arguably
contributes to the transnational imagination of China and the transformation of the diasporic iden-
tities of overseas Chinese. This dissertation attempts an analysis of sonic Chinese diaspora with
a specific focus on overseas Chinese radio stations: how does listening to Chinese radios make
the diasporic identifications of the immigrant communities? The diasporic media provide a virtual
space in which the borders, identities and belongings are constructed, negotiated, and re-imagined.
Rethinking diaspora in a digital context allows us to examine how the traditional parameters like
“displacement” and “mobility” are mapped onto the contemporary geopolitical dynamics. The
travel of voices afforded by radio waves creates a temporal, virtual home-coming for overseas Chi-
nese. Drawing on interviews with radio producers and transcriptions of Chinese radio programs,
this dissertation adopts a mixed method of textual analysis and sonic ethnography in a bid to parse
out the intricacies of diasporic identity negotiation via the self-narratives of Chinese immigrants.
v
Chapter1
Introduction
1.1 Asonicencounter
“This is Chinese Radio Seattle. Your information center, your safe haven, your spiri-
tual home.”
“Much that is personal, where biographical and autobiographical narratives crisscross
the grander demographic histories and in doing so provide the light and shade of the
diasporas, illuminating the processes of individual loss, redemption and identification
... [which have] ... to do with communication, and the capacity of the displaced
to construct communities, to create traditions and to sustain the links that make life
meaningful both in relation to the local, the daily pattern of living in a new and distant
world; and in relation to the global, the ties to be constructed with the home left behind
or the one that is still longed for (Silverstone 19).”
The first time visiting abroad, I spent the very first thirty minutes listening to a Chinese radio
in Vancouver on a chauffer’s car. She hummed along to the song played on the radio, Anita Mui
Yim-fong’s As If an Old Friend’s Coming. Hearing this song from television as I grew up, I was
instantly drawn to the tune. “Beautiful song, huh?” She looked at me in the rear-view mirror.
Amazed by the fact that I could listen to Chinese-language radio in a foreign country, I asked her
if she listens to them on a daily basis. “Yes, there are a couple of them. I always turn on the radio
1
when I’m driving. Sometimes, I listened to them on the phone.” Later she added, “we Chinese
people listen to Chinese radio stations.”
Similar radio sounds in Chinese greeted my ears years later, when I came to United States for
my graduate study. The listenership of Chinese radio stations mainly consists of the first-generation
Chinese speaking immigrants (including Mandarin and Cantonese), who are mostly from the radio
generation (circa 1920 – 2000). They grew up with radio being the major ambience at home. The
radio sounds, mixed with parents’ fight, tapping and cracking sounds in the kitchen, accompany
their childhood, adolescence, and an early phase of adulthood. “When I was at high school, I
listened to radio every night when doing my homework. Most of our classmate listened to the
same program, so we discussed the content later together at school (Ya Qiu).” An interviewee
recalls. Years of listening to radio validates their instinct to seek for aural company after moving
to a new country. The Chinese voices from radios, albeit technologized and disembodied, speak to
and comfort the listeners in the most linguistically familiar, sensorially intimate way.
Locating radio in a larger context of diasporic media, we can paint a mosaic picture of over-
seas Chinese imagination. The emerging information technologies provide a fascinating arena
for analyzing diasporic media consumption. The access to media resources not only transforms
the migration experience but also the later processes of relocation, social inclusion, participation,
and gaining visibility in the residing country. Substantial literature has expounded on migration
histories and identity construction, but few studies has discussed the digital diaspora and con-
ceived the concept of “diaspora” in a new light, which Tsagarousianou frames as “constellations of
economic, technological, cultural and ideological and communication flows and networks (61).”
All these linkages converge at the nexus of human mobility and complicate the configuration of
transnational diaspora. Some scholars contend that the transnational flow against a globalization
context produces groups of “flexible citizen (Ong 1999)”, or “rootless tourist (Bauman 1998)”,
who develop their identity awareness in multilocal narratives as they travel from place to place.
Chinese immigrants are a good representative of above groups given that Chinese migration rate
has kept increasing since 1995; overseas Chinese population reached 49 million worldwide by
2
2020 (Statista 2020). According to Chua, the diasporic Chinese mediascape is materially and sym-
bolically de-centered from mainland China (39). “Pop Culture China” brings together overseas
Chinese communities through shared media consumptions, such as pop music, films, tv series,
and radios, while these media images, in turn, “have also proliferated and multiplied, reinforc-
ing, destabilizing, and challenging prior understanding of what it means to be Chinese (Sun 66).”
Functioning as the primary link between global and local, media virtually reconnects the dias-
poric communities with their homelands through technological infrastructures thus creates what
Ajun Appadurai called “diasporic sphere” – “...as mass mediation becomes increasingly domi-
nated by electronic media (and thus delinked from the capacity to read and write), and as such
media increasingly link producers and audiences across national boundaries, and as these audi-
ences themselves start new conversations between those who move and those who stay, we find a
growing number of diasporic public spheres (Appadurai 13).” Albeit dispersed and anchorless, the
diasporic public spheres are, in his words, “no longer small, marginal, or exceptional. They are
part of the cultural dynamic of urban life in most countries and continents, in which migration and
mass mediation constitute a new sense of the global as modern and the modern as global (10).”
However, viewed from a global media landscape, Chinese media occupies a rather marginal space
thus is easily dismissed as “ethnic media”. Struggled to claim a presence in global media space,
Chinese/Sinophone communities worldwide confront the plight by continually speaking out in the
niche mediasphere of their own.
Among the various media forms, radio appears to be the least popular and under-researched.
There is a stark contrast between the amount of research on visual culture and sonic/aural cul-
ture. This might be attributed to the limited availability of sonic archives and the tenuous, fleeting
nature of sound on the one hand. The underlying ocular-centrism accounts for the unbalanced
scholarly attention, on the other. Visuality has dominated the discursive space of modernity since
the 19th century. Philosophers like Walter Benjamin, Baudelaire and John Berger left sizeable
monographs investigating the relationship between visual regime, modernity and capitalism, while
sound/listening remained a relatively peripheral approach to sociality and activism until recent
3
decades. Studies on ethnic media or transnational communication have a greater focus on ethnic
writing, TV programs, movies, and other forms of cultural products. I argue that sound/listening
proves an enlightening lens through which we can tap into the border space (given its fluidity)
and interpret the communion and belongings of diasporic communities. In Kunreuther’s research
on Nepali radio, she conceives the diaspora based on temporality and affect rather than a shared
territory. “...the emergence of this diaspora occurs not primarily through attachment to place but
rather through specific temporalities and relations of affect, each of which are effects of technolog-
ical mediation (Kunreuther 325).” She argues that the “punctuated time of radio programs” allows
listeners to experience the “thinning of time (339)”, which could liberate them temporally from
social and political constraints and evokes “feeling of closeness and reciprocity to unknown par-
ticipants exist only in imagination (339).” Kunreuther’s idea fleshes out what Benedict Anderson
called “imagined community”, who are tuning in to the radio voice in the same ether.
The rhetoric developed around voice and listening, which is frequently applied to minorities
or subaltern, further extends the political implications of sonic media research. Nick Couldry
conceives voice to be a process of “giving an account of one’s life and its conditions... telling a
story, providing a narrative (1).” The denial of voice means the deprivation of a basic dimension
of human life. He points out that it takes resources (both practical and symbolic) to be recognized
as “having a voice.” As Don Ihde states, “the mute object does not reveal its own voice, it must
be given a voice (67).” V oice is also an embodied process. The distinct material quality of voice
registers the uniqueness of narratives. When radio gathers voices, it collects an interlocking set
of narratives that are continuingly in exchange. “The inherent internal plurality of each voice
encompasses the processes whereby we reflect from one narrative stream on to another, and think
about what one strand of our lives mean for other strands (Couldry 9).”
Listening, after long being painted in a passive sense, is recognized as a communicative activ-
ity in the public sphere. The popularization of radio built the early studies of listenership, despite
that the audience research regarded listeners as passive subjects. McLuhan argues that electronic
4
culture has reversed the attributes of print culture and sent us into a world that favors “partiality, in-
volvement, experience, simultaneity, collectivity and globalism (Lacey 6)” instead, where listening
lends itself well to accommodating the new condition. Kate Lacey invents the “listening public”
by “identifying listening as a category that bridges both the realm of sensory, embodied experience
and the political realm of debate and deliberation (8).” In her ideas, the verb “listening” implies a
state of anticipation, an openness to others, and a readiness to respond. Listening is always latently
public, though the ears never share. Radio broadcasting gathers small, diverse, intimate “listening
publics” around airwaves that exercise political agency via listening.
Built on previous scholarships examining diaspora, ethnic media, sound studies, and aural cul-
ture, this dissertation hopes to contribute to research on sonic diaspora through a close examination
of the uses of sound technology and every day aural experience of immigrants.
1.2 Revisitdiaspora
Rogers Brubaker’s article “The ‘Diaspora’ Diaspora” discusses the overuses of “diaspora” in the
past decade and traces the dispersion and appropriations of this term in “semantic, conceptual and
disciplinary space (1).” Clearly, the proliferation of use has stretched this concept in multiple di-
rections and accommodated it to different cultural and political agendas. Some scholars lamented
on the loss of its theoretical rigor, while I believe broader applications and discussions of dias-
pora demonstrated its theoretical depth and richness, further gesturing towards the necessity of
reframing diaspora in an ever-changing intellectual climate.
Before diving into the typologies of diaspora, it would be productive to revisit some scholarly
attempts to define the field and classify some systemic features of this phenomenon. American po-
litical scientist William Safran has delineated some shared characteristics of diasporic communities
in his monograph:
First, the original community has spread from a homeland to two or more countries; they are
bound from their disparate geographical locations by a common vision, memory or myth about
5
their homelands; secondly, they have a belief that they will never be accepted by their host so-
cieties and therefore develop their autonomous cultural and social needs; also, they or their de-
scendants will return to the homeland should the conditions prove favorable; lastly, they should
continue to maintain support for homeland and therefore the communal consciousness and solidar-
ity enables them to continue these activities (83–84). Safran’s summary essentializes the character
of diaspora, that is, the attachment to the homeland and the perceived marginalization in hosting
countries. Furthermore, the attachment to homeland is accompanied by the hopes of an eventual
return. Tenable as it sounds, this theorization later proved to be limiting in explaining the diasporic
settlement (Tsagarousianou 55). In 1997, Robin Cohen revised Safran’s formula and added several
illuminating points to the list. Compared to Safran’s version, his set of characteristics significantly
broadens the descriptive scope of diaspora and attaches more attention to the diasporic condition.
According to Cohen, the idea of diaspora should include both groups that scatter voluntarily and
as a result of fleeing aggression, persecution or extreme hardship. We need to take into account
the necessity for a sufficient time period before any community can be described as a diaspora. In
Cohen’s views, diasporic community’s identifications with homelands should be validated by their
strong links to the past thus obstructs their assimilation into the residing countries. Cohen also
proposes to consider more positive aspects of diaspora (50). For example, the possible creative
formulations brought by the multiplications and performances of identities and perceived tensions.
He recognizes that diasporic communities not only form a collective identity at the places of
settlement or with their homelands, but also share a common identity with members of same ethnic-
ity in other countries. In the case of Chinese diaspora, “Pop Culture China” convenes the Chinese
communities scattered around the globe and enables a transnational communication through shared
languages and cultural symbols.
These attempts to (re)formulate diaspora have sharpened the current theoretical focus when ap-
proaching this phenomenon. Central tenets to this field of research, as stated, are “displacement”
and “settlement”, both encompass nostalgia, loss, and (re)imagination embedded in the transna-
tional/diasporic experience. It is also worth noting that diasporic communities, or individuals are
6
capable of and adept at developing their particular philosophies to negotiate among the national,
political, cultural tensions emerging between their homelands and the hosting countries. This plu-
rality entails the nuances that the commonly held image of diaspora fails to capture. To further
unpack the nuances, we may look closely at the two definitive coordinators of “home” and “resid-
ing lands” and analyze how the link between the two has changed.
Stories of diaspora struggle with questions of “home.” What is home, how to find, locate,
secure, and restore it? For immigrants who have left homes, what have become of their homes?
Since their departure, home is designated as immaterial relations, such as the hopes for return
and emotional belonging, both are precarious and mainly exist in memory and imagination. “But
it is not only ‘back home’ that has been caught up in the process of modernization – diasporas
themselves are deeply affected by their position at the nexus of the flow of capital, populations,
culture, information. In that sense, there is no going ‘home’ again (Tsagarousianou 56–57).” By
this logic, home itself should not be fixed with geography, nation-state, or ethnicity. Avtar Brah
describes home in an affectionate fashion, “home is a lived experience of a locality. Its sounds and
smells, its heat and dust, balmy summer evenings, sombre grey skies in the middle of the day...all
this, as mediated by the historically specific of everyday social relations (192).” The sensory details
of home are underscored by social regulations and cultural politics, providing the ambience where
inclusion and exclusion operate together. Belonging to the homeland versus the role of being
“the other” perpetuate the diasporic life. Nonetheless, the role of “other” is constantly oscillating
during the processes of inclusion and exclusion. As Tsagarousianou states, “diasporic identity can
often draw much more on the experience of migrancy and settlement, of ‘making’ one’s home
than on a fixation to a ‘homeland’ (58).” This statement echoes precisely what Cohen attempts to
foreground in his argument: the diasporic home-making. Brah’s work parallels the home-making
idea, containing that “diasporas are site of hope and new beginnings (34).”
Under the influence of globalization, diaspora has witnessed a paradigmatic shift from “dis-
placement” to “connectivity”. Transnational circulations of capital, commodity, cultural products,
and media technologies spawn diasporas consumed by not only immigrants, but wider diasporic
7
communities including those who temporally go abroad for study or living as well. Meanwhile,
the cost of homecoming becomes unprecedentedly low due to the cheap airfare. Widespread In-
ternet networks offer a gateway to various forms of virtual homecomings. Scholar Sun Wanning
describes her diasporic experience in the digital era as follows:
“On a daily basis, I maintain my Chineseness through a range of choices I make in
media consumption. Should I want to keep myself abreast of news and current affairs
in the “homeland” or want the world affairs interpreted from a PRC perspective, I can
turn on SBS TV (Australia’s free-to-air special broadcasting station with a strong mul-
ticultural and ethnic dimension) to watch CCTV (China Central Television) Channel
4 which broadcasts a Mandarin news bulletin for half an hour every day (Sinclair et al.
2000). If I want to spend my recreational time watching Chinese films or television
programs instead of local or American productions, I can do so in a number of ways...
Confronted with endless media choices, my dilemma is not whether I can continue to
be Chinese in another country, but how Chinese or what kind of Chinese I want to be
(67–68).”
When displacement is manifested in connectivity, the diasporic identifications become even
more ambivalent. On the one hand, the connective possibilities reinforce their link with the home-
land. The temporal simultaneity and synchronicity foster a co-presence that heals the sentiment
of displacement. On the other hand, the sense of belonging is tested, since they are provided with
abundant resources that possibly construct inconsistent narratives about identities and belongings.
As Sun stated, the choice of media consumption would shape how overseas Chinese imagine their
home country.
8
1.3 Ethnicradio: soundingthediaspora
Compared with visual image, sound displays a different set of affective features. Sound is sur-
rounding but decentered, transparent, unmediated, and immediate, conveying an emotional direct-
ness. It feels proximate and easily invokes the sensation of presence. In “audiovisual litany”,
Jonathan Sterne writes: “hearing tends toward subjectivity; vision tends toward objectivity hearing
is about affect; vision is about intellect hearing is a sense that immerses us in the world, while vi-
sion removes us from it (9).” These medium-specific qualities make it appropriate for embodying
the sense of community and belonging. The invisibility of sound could be mobilized to inves-
tigate the unseen subjectivity among peripheral social groups and be utilized as “the basis for a
set of emancipatory practices,” as LaBelle explains: “if understandings of public life and political
agency are often based on making visible that which is hidden or refused entry, what formations
of subjectivity and social empowerment might the disappeared, the missing, or the hidden take?
(17)” Kunreuther compares radio to mobile communication, “FM radio appropriates the intimate
form of communication on the telephone, but it is fundamentally transformed by the presence of
an invisible imagined audience (336).” As recent studies note, diaspora is not any longer confined
to a territorialized community, or groups of shared nationality, ethnicity or language, but radiates
in the “imagined communities”, as Benedict Anderson aptly points out. He argues that the national
identity is socially constructed and imagined by the people who identify themselves as a group.
In his book, he explores how print media forms the shared ground that grows national sentiments.
These shared connections are “distinguished not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in
which they are imagined (7).” Anderson cites the novel and newspaper as two major examples of
“print capitalism” that promote simultaneity which, according to him, is “transverse, cross-time,
marked not by prefiguring and fulfilment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and
calendar (24).” The simultaneity plays out more acutely in the case of radio in that radio programs
are often on live, streaming 24 hours.
9
Diasporic radio, or community radio has its roots in self-empowerment and local engagement.
Overseas Chinese radio stations function similarly as ethnic organizations, supporting local Chi-
nese communities, and addressing local issues such as civic engagement, health care, legal con-
sulting, and job searching. Sun summarizes the “three pillars of diasporic Chinese communities”,
which are “1) Chinese social and business networks in the form of the chamber of commerce,
origin-specific associations, clans and kinship organizations, 2) an education system which per-
mits or even supports Chinese-language schools, and 3) a Chinese-language media industry with a
creditable claim to sizable circulation/rating and community representation. (68)” Working in tan-
dem with the other two pillars, Chinese language media carve out a discursive space where over-
seas Chinese can voice their concerns and represent themselves without pandering to the dominant
stereotypes of Asian/Chinese in western mainstream media. The everyday communal consump-
tion of Chinese radio programs forms an ambience for diasporic social life, mediating between the
human body and its surrounding world. Kelman’s study on Yiddish radio demonstrates that, lis-
tening to a language is as important as speaking since it could be wielded as a means to participate
in ethnic culture or “discipline”, or police the listeners (Anguiano 139). Paul Roquet explains the
subjective tint of ambience in his book, “unlike its more objective sibling, ambience always im-
plies a more subjective element of mediation at work: some kind of agency behind the production
of mood and a focus on the human body attuning to it (3).” Through what Roquet terms “ambi-
ent subjectivation”, people learn to use ambience as a strategy for self-imagining and self-creation
in contemporary media environment. The listeners, too, practice a flexible citizenship through a
habitual radio listening.
As previously stated, listening is never a passive act. Radio programs expect a critical, partic-
ipatory listenership that facilitates further interaction and promotes community engagement. Lis-
tening itself should be regarded as a two-way process that enables translation, meaning-making,
and communication. Active listeners play a wide range of roles: “speaker, addressee, auditor, over-
hearer, eavesdropper, promoter and interpreter (Cotter 421).” In fact, community media always
encourages “prosumerism”; it enables its consumers to be producers and welcomes participatory
10
involvement from the audience. As Cotter points out, “not only do community members influence
what goes on the air, they can go on the air themselves (429).” Different types of radio programs
would facilitate interactions and exchanges of different sorts. In “listener’s mail” programs, audi-
ence can directly dial in or email their comments to the hosts. Most of the story programs and talk
show programs accept contributions from listeners. The diasporic communal interactions through
audio storytelling could be informed by Wenger’s community of practice theory. It emphasizes
the significance of everyday interactions and practices to the community building and proposes
three modes of community belongings (engagement, imagination, and alignment) through which
members strengthen their collective identity. I will elaborate on the application of this model in a
case study of Chinese Radio Seattle later in chapter two.
1.4 Imaginedhomeland,imaginedidentity
In her treatise on American radio history, Susan Douglas states that radio listening cultivates our
imagination, which is mainly expressed as imagining the presence of like-minded others. “The
deeply personal nature of radio communication—the way its sole reliance on sound produces in-
dividualized images and reactions; its extension of a precommercial, oral tradition; its cultivation
of the imagination— all work in stark contrast to the needs of its managers, who seek homoge-
nized responses, and need a like-minded audience instead of idiosyncratic individuals (17).” Put
the seemingly wishful thinking aside, radio does work more powerfully in constructing an image
of imagined communities to which people may or may not belong than other mediums (5). While
she maintains that radio reinforces one’s social solidarity with others, she also takes account of
the ethnic, geographic, and gendered divisions that radio could “hardly smooth over (7)”. The na-
tionhood that public broadcasting aims to build among listeners is challenged by different modes
of aural consumption. On the one hand, most modes of listening generate a sense of belonging
functioning as a domestic ambience. The radio, on the other hand, allows listeners to hear the
11
difference, the uneven, the odds – that help them recalibrate their places in the world, hence refor-
mulate the identities, be it national, regional, or local. More specifically, radio cultivates different
modes of listening that allow listeners to switch between their fragmented selves (11). Douglas
concludes the legacy of audio research to be “encouraging us to think we are unified individuals
with clear, stable identities and preferences while at the same time recognizing and pointing out
that our experiences in the flow of broadcasting socialize us into being just the opposite (160).”
When it comes to diasporic radio, the imaginative power of radio listening dissolves the tempo-
ral, geographic, nation-state boundaries that often trouble diasporic communities, creating a space
that goes beyond acoustic. The radio sounds transmit through different ends, “collapsed space
to an ideal of instantaneous transmission and reception (Kahn 21).” Listeners may not be able
to directly reach fellows who are listening together; the emotional linkage is already established
from the collective listening. “...sound and listening are highly adept as carriers of compassion and
the forcefulness of one’s singularity - the intensification of affective sharing (LaBalle 7).” Radio
broadcasting develops aural intimacy across indeterminately distanced subjects in a short amount
of time that allows little cognitive reflection. The intimacy that audio format affords is not sub-
ject to the time-space limit, nor is it premised on the immediate responsiveness (Lacey 167). The
resonance lies in the synchronous listening experience that accommodates dissonances. To revisit
Anthony Cohen’s idea, “communities are expressions of commonality as well as difference (50).”
While it’s tempting to assume a social solidarity among diasporic listeners, we need to be aware of
the fact that each holds a personal, mental, even phantom image of their homelands that is hardly
communicable through auditory exchanges.
Anguiano’s work on Spanish-language radio introduces the concept of “sonic citizenship”, re-
ferring to “the use of sonic elements such as the voice, music, and sound technology in conjunction
with other forms of performative aesthetics to assert and reframe citizenship on their own terms
(140).” I argue that the Chinese radio provides the diasporic communities sonic materials they
12
could utilize to imagine, affirm, and negotiate their identifications with either homeland or re-
siding country on their own terms. Within this sonic enclave, Chinese immigrants not only feel
represented and comfortable, but empowered to assert their (transnational) citizenship.
1.5 Methodology
Traveling between voices, narratives, and places to which voices are directed, I collect the “experi-
ential data (Corbin and Strauss 6)” from a habitual listening to Chinese radio stations, participation
in sonic events, and in-depth interviews with 6 major producers, who worked or are still working
at the radio station. The research is qualitative and narrative by nature since oral interviews/radio
stories are the main corpus of my subjects of analysis. A basic underpinning of narrative research
is that human beings organize their experiences into narratives that reflect personal histories, val-
ues, and their meaning-making process (Moen 60). Following this line, the truthfulness of one’s
narrative is conditioned on their subjective positions. A told story is always a chiaroscuro of the
experienced life that is, too, different from what is rendered in text. As much as I want to untangle
the web of social relationships in which narratives are embedded, I can only complete part of the
jigsaw that sheds light on issues regarding the main focus of my research.
One key feature of narrative research is the collaborative, dialogic relationship between the
researcher and research subjects. In this approach, the latter are less thought of as informants
guided by researchers’ agenda but collaborators that contribute to the research dialogue. Bakhtin
maintains that all human relations are inherent dialogic (32). When people are in conversations,
they are engaged in manifolded dialogues that happen between surroundings, consciousness, and
words, which are constantly destabilizing and re-shaping the sense-making process. Dialogue
propels researchers to move beyond isolated individuals and delve into the plurality of voices, as
recognized by Nick Couldry. In this project, oral interviews and shared listening establish the af-
fective bonding between the researcher and collaborators. The interviews cited in the following
13
pages were conducted over phone calls, which replicates the material quality of radio communica-
tion. Lack of face-to-face interaction restores the imaginative understanding of their narratives and
highlights the affective quality of listening. My ethnographic accounts have documented the lived
experiences that are sonically truthful.
14
Chapter2
AcasestudyofChineseRadioSeattle: aradiothatlistenstoyou
Liang’s research indicates that, in United States, most of the radio and television stations started
to broadcast Chinese programs in the 70s. From his survey, he concluded that one of the first, or
probably the first, Chinese language radio stations in the States is Chung Wah Commercial Broad-
cast Company, which was founded by a Chinese American Robert Y . Lee in New York in 1968
(27). One year after, KWHY-TV began broadcasting Chinese programs in Los Angeles. However,
most of the radio stations and televisions around the time provided bilingual broadcasting services
and devoted less than half of their airing time to Chinese programs. The past few decades have
witnessed an emergence of ethnic radio stations and televisions, which are mostly located in gate-
way cities such as New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and established in the Chinatowns
of metropolitan regions. According to Zhou and Cai, the regional concentration pattern continues
to hold, “As of 1990, close to 90 percent of the ethnic population was either foreign born (the first
generation) or of foreign-born parentage (the second generation), more than 80 percent reported
speaking Chinese at home, and about 60 percent admitted to not speaking English ‘very well.’ As
they strive to get settled, many post-1965 immigrants, including the upwardly mobile, find them-
selves in paradoxical situations—they have voluntarily left their old homeland but remained emo-
tionally attached to it; they aspire to become a part of their new homeland but are often blocked by
language and cultural barriers. They need institutional support to help ease adjustment difficulties.
(422–423)” Print and broadcasting media in ethnic languages are very educational and informative
15
for fresh immigrants who are struggling with English. Today, there are over 25 Chinese language
(include mandarin, cantonese, and hokkien) radio stations in United States and Canada.
Since its founding in May 2012, Chinese Radio Seattle has been serving Chinese communities
in the greater Seattle area. It is the first Chinese radio station in Washington State. The station
has more than 20 radio programs, covering topics of local life, health, travel, education, movie,
relationship, family, arts and culture, etc. Chinese Radio Seattle is supported by Seattle Chinese
Broadcasting Association, a non-profit Chinese organization, whose major advisors include Chi-
nese entrepreneurs, Asian journalists, and local reputable educators. Their radio programs are
distributed through 10 channels including Qingting FM (a network audio application), Himalaya
FM (a content platform features live-streaming broadcast, audio books and podcasts), official web-
site, YouTube, Facebook, and so forth. Chinese Radio Seattle has more than 400,000 views per
month on the abovementioned platforms, according to its director. Apart from the radio, the as-
sociation also operates Chinese social media accounts (WeChat and Weibo), a weekly newsletter,
and a Facebook group, where members can trade and share information regarding local life. This
chapter aims to flesh out the nuances of diasporic identities by a close listening to three types of
programming at the radio station: story program, music program, and news program. Each of them
reflects different aspects of the immigrants’ self-representation and communicates different kind
of belonging both to their homeland and the local Chinese community.
Much like the county radios in mainland China, Chinese Radio Seattle has named its radio
programs in four-character words and structured them in a traditional editorial style. Unlike many
of today’s podcasters who always make an effort to provide listeners with a relaxed atmosphere,
the radio hosts often start their episode with a literati verse and read it out loud affectionately.
The unique hosting style might be afforded by this specific media form on the one hand. It is
also influenced by demographic features of their target audience on the other. Lin’s research on
Chinese ethnic media outlines the profile of ethnic radio listeners in North America. She concludes
that elder, first-generation residents tended to listen to Chinese-language radio stations more than
second generation and younger people (101). Corroborating her findings, most of the producers of
16
Chinese Radio Seattle are middle-aged or elder first-generation immigrants, who grew up listening
to the county radio broadcasting.
The founder and director of Chinese Radio Seattle, Xiaoyuan, came to the United States 20
years ago for graduate study. After finishing his PhD degree, he moved to Seattle for work. Speak-
ing of why he started it initially, he recalled:
I walked to the office every day when I was working at an IT company in Seattle.
Commute is boring, so I often carried a MP3 to listen to radio. But there weren’t
any Chinese radio stations then, only English ones. I thus thought about starting a
Chinese radio station, which was also my MBA capstone project. After doing some
market research, I felt there is a potential market for it. I posted a brief proposal on a
Facebook group and an online overseas Chinese forum. My proposal gathered a group
of people who were interested, around ten I think? Some of them were broadcasters
themselves, some of them love literature. There were some programmers, too. We had
our first meeting in a McDonald, and decided we were to make it happen. (Xiaoyuan)
Xiaoyuan used his saving to cover the cost of the first and the second year. Some of partners left
during the time, some new and younger members joined in. Only the second year, the radio station
already started making a profit by broadcasting commercials. Xiaoyuan then quit his job and has
worked full-time at the radio station till today. He manages radio station’s social media accounts,
hotline, and email. “We once received an email from an elder listener, who told us he had been
listening to our radio at hospital. He said our radio accompanied him through the sleepless nights
and gave him reason to hope (Xiaoyuan).” Realizing that this radio station means more than an
information center to some listeners (especially the elder ones who are less familiar with mobile
technologies), Xiaoyuan feels a sense of responsibility to keep providing for the local Chinese
community and beyond, even in difficult times when some editorial differences caused managerial
crisis within the radio station and staffs left. Community radios are often volunteer driven and
characterized by participatory practices. By intentionally engaging the listeners/consumers in the
17
process of production, community media demystify the traditional media production and extend
the editorial decision to active community members.
Throughout the years, Xiaoyuan remains the only full-time staff at the radio station. One
producer commented: “it’s not only about the money. If they were to hire a crew of full-time staffs,
then around four or five people would be enough given the number and scale of our programs.
The director will need to disband the current producer group – now we have over ten people, the
number ensures the diversity of programs. There could be one or two working full-time in charge
of administrative affairs. But when it comes to production, having diverse voices and different
perspectives is very essential.” According to Bosch, participatory practices from audience bring in
representations and discourses that differ radically from those of mainstream media, “this might
involve providing local interpretations of national or global news events, broadcasting in local or
minority languages, and addressing audience members as citizens versus consumers (432).” I will
further elaborate on construction of citizenship through sonic engagement in the later section on
the news programming.
Compared with other community/alternative media, radio is more often regarded as a tool
for social change and community building given the relatively low cost of production and wider
accessibility. Radio features orality instead of literacy thus could reach illiterate populations. The
use of minority language groups together communities of a shared language across geographic
areas. Many examples show that local communities use radio as a means of informal education
on a wide range of topics including health, human rights, and legal system (Bosch 430). Utilizing
the linguistic and broadcasting resources, Chinese Radio Seattle has been offering broadcasting
class annually to teen students in Seattle area. The broadcasting bootcamp provides journalism,
broadcasting, and language trainings for the students, who are primarily the second-generation
young Chinese immigrants. They also have the chance to work in the radio station hosting shows
after finishing the bootcamp.
In the following section, I will analyze several episodes of two major story programs at Chinese
Radio Seattle featuring the self-narratives of immigrants. I will pay attention to the narrative style,
18
their locution, as well as lilts and tones, to further unpack self-imagination and self-imaging of this
immigrant community.
2.1 Self-narrativesinstoryprograms
Telling stories of oneself maintains a narrative consistency of life. The story could be as short as a
sentence, or as long as a book. Dialogue is the humblest unit of a narrative. In a dialogic exchange,
people are granted glances at the mental landscapes of each other that inform the goal, wish,
desire, and struggles in the story. Radio talk promotes a storytelling form via dialogues. Every
time a story is told, it is told both internally and to others; every time a story is told, it revises
the knowledge of self and modifies the narrative of life. The modification could be constructing,
reinforcing, challenging, or reversing a casual relation, which seems to be a major mode of sense
making of life (even if it is not necessarily the best one). Sometimes, a modification reconstructs
a mental timeline of life events. By recollecting one’s story, the narrator demonstrates how the
past corresponds to the present and anticipates the future. It is important to take note of both
the temporality of narrative identity, and that the process of identity construction is always fluid,
becoming.
Ricoeur thinks “narrative identity constructs a sense of self-sameness, continuity and charac-
ter in the plot of the story a person tells about him- or herself. The story becomes that person’s
actual history (Ezzy 12).” In self-narration, people gain an objective perspective of their life expe-
riences. “...with the provision of a verbal account of the experience, the Experiencing I becomes
the Objective Me. (Koh and Wang 10)” The verbal account also cements a temporal reflection or
understanding of one’s identity. A dialogue mirrors the self-perceived identity meanwhile opens
the narrative to the others.
A recent episode of “American Stories” invited Xiaoli Wu, who runs a famous noodle place
in Seattle, to share her experience as a self-made restaurateur. The interview follows a common
narrative pattern that starts with recent events, recaptures past, and ends in hopes for the future.
19
The host started off by asking how pandemic has affected her business, then proceeded to introduce
how she opened the first store. “When I came to United States, I had nothing. I was born in a rural
area in China, my parents couldn’t help much, either. I was penniless when I arrived in New York.
I did everything I could to make a living there: I have worked at nail salons, assembled lamps at
a factory, and cleaned rooms in hotels. I lived in a basement, the rent is 300 dollars per month. I
lived like that for five years. It really hit me hard – I finished my college in China, but what I did
for a living in the States is to wash people’s feet.” The host asked, “what’s the turning point?” The
guest mentioned that she got an opportunity working at a law firm reception when she consulted a
lawyer for legal issues. When giving out the traffic tickets in New York, she found many visitors
are from Seattle. She became interested in this city and moved to Seattle since. “Moving to Seattle
is the turning point of my life. In New York, I worked for people but still could not afford the living
cost. When I moved to Seattle, I changed my mind. I wanted to start a business of my own.” She
received the seed money from a Chinese couple who sent their kid to University of Washington.
“They are really kind people. They gave me thirty thousand dollars and said I don’t have to pay
it back. I only knew them for a week. It’s like a story that only exists in movies. They are this
kind. I couldn’t achieve what I have now without their help. ” The voice of the guest softened a bit
when she talked about the kind Chinese couple. She continued to say, “but I paid back their money
within six months. I was really happy. I felt I was finally lucky enough to achieve my American
dream. This first store has achieved my American dream in two years. Hard work pays off. My
life isn’t nothing. I succeeded. I bought a new house for my parents in the city. They are really
proud of me.”
This episode showcases three essential narrative elements of “American Stories”: suffering,
turning point, and success. A phrase frequently mentioned in story programs is “American Dream”.
The narrators often say their goal is to “achieve American dream”, to put it another way, they be-
lieve that if they work hard enough, one day, they will succeed in this land of freedom. “American
Stories” are the stories of Chinese immigrants who have achieved their American dream through
20
years of hard work. By featuring these success stories, this radio show crafts a replicable narra-
tive of success (suffering-hardworking-succeed) and encourages the listeners to follow the path
and pursue their own American dream. When guests are telling their stories on air, they often
portray themselves as self-made, hardworking immigrants who make their Chinese parents proud,
which fits into a general stereotype of Chinese immigrants in eighties and nineties. Kung’s book
divided the history of Chinese immigration into four important periods: 1) free immigration pe-
riod (1820–1882) 2) discriminatory restriction period (1882–1904) 3) absolute exclusion period
(1904-1943) 4) gradual liberalization period (1943–1983). Since Kung’s book was published in
80s, his periodization needs to be updated from today’s perspective. Nonetheless, his attention to
the generational feature of immigrants is provoking and deserves further contemplation. I argue
that each period holds a generational image of Chinese immigrants, and the ethnic media estab-
lished in different periods respond to different waves of immigration and tell stories of immigrant
generations under the changing contexts (both local and international). However, central issues
like exclusion and assimilation remain the major topics of ethnic media content. In the last decade,
it is noticeable that Chinese-language media in the United States has attended to the sensibility
and concerns of new, well-educated immigrants and migrant workers in science, technology, and
finance industry given the new wave of immigration. “The 1990 Census showed that 42% of the
foreign-born Chinese at productive ages (25 to 64) have attained four or more years of college ed-
ucation (Zhou and Cai 422).” Their stories share some commonalities with the guest story above,
such as promoting the hardworking model of pursuing American dream. But since many of new
immigrants received (at least part of) their higher education in the United States, they have acquired
and showed a higher level of cultural flexibility in terms of mindset and lifestyle. Many episodes of
story programs have featured engineers, scientists, programmers, and financial analysts working in
Seattle, who are relatively new to United States. Less bounded by the existing Chinese American
image and a fixed hometown imagination, they constantly recalibrate their position and multi-local
sense of belonging as immigrants in the global flows of social and cultural capital. Compared to
21
older immigrants, they came to America in an age of higher mobility and are in pursuit of more
than financial stability, for instance, a different cultural or political climate.
Ya Qiu has been hosting another story program called “Love and Feelings” since 2013. She
said her show does not promote success immigrant stories – it tells the stories of ordinary people:
There is no specific topics in my show. I always ask my guests to share whatever they
are happy to share in their lives, or something they want people to know about. You
don’t have to be successful to be on my show. You don’t even have to be in the United
States. It’s a weekly show, so no matter wherever I am in the world, I have to find a
guest to do the show with me. We don’t limit our guests to Chinese immigrants (most
of them are). It is the life experience that matters. I don’t sell inspirational success
stories. I really want to hear their inner voice – something they don’t have the chance
to say out loud but always want to say. Sometimes, saying out their inner thoughts
would move them to tears, sometimes it’s the host (myself) that can’t help crying. I
don’t know how to put it, (every time when I talk with the guests), I feel our souls are
somehow connected.
In one episode, she invited a mother and a daughter on the show. The mother moved to Seattle
to live with her daughter recently after seven years apart. Compared to “American Stories”, the
whole show is very loosely structured in terms of storytelling. There is no specific agenda or story
arc of their conversations. The questions are more spontaneous and phatic. For example, the host
asked questions like “what do you talk about when you are at home together?”, “I see you are
nodding, what’s on your mind?” rather than “can you share your secret of success?” The topics
they discussed on the show are all over, from yoga to work, travel to food. Another thing that stands
out in the dialogue, is that the host asks more questions about feelings than facts. Questions like
“how do you feel about it?” appear a couple of times during the show. As the host said in research
interview, she wants to tap into the deeper parts of heart in people. The tone of guests also gives
out the real-time emotional reaction. When asked about how does it feel to live with her daughter
again, the mother’s voice was thick with emotions: “I was very impressed when I visited her last
22
year, it was her seventh year in the States. I found she suddenly grew up to a mature person. She
bought me lunch and took me to visit many places instead of I doing everything for her. When she
was at work, she called me to see if I was doing well, sometimes she fears I would get lost. She took
good care of me (voice got wobbly). It’s like we switch the roles now. It’s really nice to see that.”
The host also responds in an affectionate way, “I would also be very moved, proud, and happy if
I were you. I am a mother, too.” The transmission of affect from the radio stories resembles the
doppler effect of sound waves that radiates from the emotion center and expand outwardly. Hearing
the emotional responses of guests and hosts on radio, listeners temporarily enter a state where
empathy overwhelms the examination of story gist. Radio functions as a “boundary object (Star
and Griesemer 5)”, moving between specific identities and communities and translating diverse
practices of communities and connect them. The emotional contagion channeled through the radio
conversation carries different lines of affinity and shared experiences (Cory and Boothby 128).
In both programs, the guests share their life experiences with an intention to encourage, in-
spire, or support fellow Chinese immigrants who are part of the imagined community. A synchro-
nized listenership to story programs draws together fragmented Chinese communities that disperse
globally. The diasporic experiences from individuals shared through airwaves crystallize the com-
munity imagination and flesh out the imagined existence of compatriots with narrative details and
emotional energy. The featured radio stories have enriched the self-imagination of Chinese immi-
grant communities. In the case of “American Stories”, the image could be described as diligent,
persevering, opportunistic, and success-driven. However, there is no all-encompassing narrative
that defines the identity of individuals or a group, even if we divide the group by generations.
There are more nuances in the crafting of their identifications as immigrants. Any story told is
only temporal; countless temporal reflections ultimately build up to a grander narrative that em-
braces plurality and fluidity of the identities.
23
2.2 Nostalgia,auditoryvoyeurism,andnight-timemusicprograms
Music builds our earliest social memories: lullaby, mother’s voice, and a mixing of high-low
pitches from a world that is yet to familiarize with. Functioning both as communicative and cultural
memory (Assman 126), music enables people to articulate and develop a sense of self. Music
speaks to people, as if the singer attunes to the listener solely. It is our subjective projections that
make the magic of music. Listening alone, singing along, or dancing to, we articulate our personal
and collective identities through different ways of engaging with music.
In neurophysiology, hearing music brings “temporal pattern[s] of changes in density of neural
firing (Stern 84).” Similar patterns appear when people are having an emotion. The musical
network overlaps with emotional circuits in our brain. This could help explain the attunement –
we effectively associate the music with our memories: when and where we firstly heard a song,
how we felt about it, with whom we heard this song again; music accentuates the feelings. As an
“affective mediator” (V olgsten and Pripp 160), music mediates between musicians and listeners,
the past and present, the virtual and real.
Radio mainly fosters two modes of listening: linguistic and musical. Compared with the for-
mer, musical listening is less attention-demanding and easily adapted as emotion stimulus. There
is something special about night-time music radio, as Douglas affectionately puts, “maybe it was
the darkness, the solitude, or being in bed, but the intimacy of this experience remains vivid; lis-
teners had a deeply private, personal bond with radio... (with eyes closed) their fantasies are free
(5).” She emphasizes that nostalgia is intrinsically connected to the act of listening (7). I argue that
the openness of listening enables people to link with distant past and places. Radio listening, as a
nostalgic practice, could be viewed as an aural resistance to conditions of modernity that privilege
visual, linear order and fragment such linkages, which are often experienced in solitude.
As an interviewee recalls, the late-night music programs of Chinese Radio Seattle used to be
an air room for collective nostalgia:
24
A lot of our listeners missed the days in China very much. I guess this has something
to do with the broadcast time. Our show often started at 10 pm. People are more
sentimental during the night. Music has the contagious power, too. I remember that
I played a list of old timey music one night – do you know the ‘four heavenly kings
(four Hong Kong singers)’? they are the idol of our times. That night, lots of people
dialed in, starting to recall their youth – their first love, graduation season, and all that.
Many immigrants finished their undergrad in mainland China. They talked about how
the songs reminded them of their college years (Dandan).
The music may relate to the listeners in different ways, but the sentiments shared some simi-
larities. Musical consolation exhibits a strong sense of temporality. It is not only that they listened
to a group of popular singers from a time when they left their homeland. In a collective, group
listening, they were temporally detached from the environment (as well as the life in the United
States) and connected to distant memories that wouldn’t be easily evoked otherwise. The temporal
disengagement creates an interspace that allows them to reflect on copresence of dual identities or
citizenship and establish a coherence between their lives in China and Seattle.
Radio music cultivates a taste community. In this scenario, the listeners shared musical knowl-
edge and preferences, which could also be fostered by the radio and television shows they had
consumed. The sociality of music listening reinforces the affect and elucidates the role of music in
the collective memory sense. They relive the collective musical memories through an aural ritual
regardless of spatial constraints. Perhaps musical memories are not spatial at all from the begin-
ning; they are stored in a mental place and shared through collective expression of sentiment, as
the case above suggests.
Douglas writes about “auditory voyeurism” in her book, referring to white listeners hearing
black music on radio. She thinks that radio has reinforced and perpetuated the racial stereotypes
while making the black music popular. She goes further to explain “the pleasure of eavesdrop-
ping”, you can listen in on others in a safe anonymity and enjoy the sense of freedom and su-
periority. “Like voyeurism, eavesdropping brought a sense of control over others, the power to
25
judge them without them being able to judge you. In a culture as persistently judgmental as Amer-
ica, this was no small pleasure, and no small relief (75).” In comparison with news programs or
story programs, music channels can accommodate hence reach a larger listener group who don’t
understand Chinese. The “auditory voyeurism” could happen anytime when the listeners switch
channels. Douglas describes the auditory voyeurism based on a racial framework and highlights
what Jennifer Lynn called “sonic color line” in everyday aural experience. The below example
told by an interviewee illustrates how the eavesdropping sparks curiosity of the English-speaking
listeners and introduces the Chinese music to an English-dominant soundscape.
For those listeners who don’t understand Chinese – yes, we have many American
listeners – they ask for playlists of the music programs via email. Last month, we
received an email from an American requesting a list of Chinese songs for his friend.
(Xiaoyuan)
It is hard to speculate the occasions under which English-speaking listeners overheard the Chi-
nese songs, but the music has definitely caught their aural attention and intrigued them to know
more. The sounds of Chinese are not automatically filtered out as “noises”, for the first time. Few
seconds into the song, they could already appreciate the language without the need to understand
it. Another thing in this example I want to further address, is the song request. Song requesting
has been a regular part of repertoire in music programs. Especially when the song is requested
for a specific person, the act of requesting appropriates the publicness of radio communication to
express personal affection. The connecting power of radio/music doesn’t exist in a flimsy promise
any longer; it bridges actual people.
2.3 Civiceducationinnewstalkprograms
From the beginning, radio has been a medium for civic empowerment, public service, and freedom
of expression. It provides a platform for information distribution and participatory communication,
26
which could drive important social developments by and large. Scholars have conceived commu-
nity radio as a development tool for local community in that it offers accessible civic education for
its community members. Radio programs strengthen the citizenship of community members by
explaining the know-how of civic rights and urging them to fulfill the civic duties. Unlike main-
stream media primarily serves the majority, community media highlights the issues neglected or
concealed on public media and translates public opinion to local community members in a way
that they can relate to the issues.
Chinese Radio Seattle runs a daily news program and several political talk programs. The top-
ics of news program are mainly public health, national policy, finance, local events, etc. Political
talk programs have invited scholars and experts in Seattle area to share local interpretations of na-
tional policies, which helps immigrant community make informed decisions and mobilizes them to
participate in politics. US-China relation is another major topic in talk programs. The broadcasters
would also select important news events happening in mainland China.
According to a host, she has witnessed a recent transition of content strategy in favor of political
engagement:
...when I was working at the Chinese Radio Seattle, there were only a few programs. I
thought our main goal back then was to promote Chinese culture or... multiculturalism
for local Chinese community. Now I have noticed more and more politician interviews
in the news programs. Or voter’s guidelines, things like that. I feel the director is
strategically re-orienting the radio station, putting more focus on the civic engagement.
(Dan Dan)
An episode in early July invites Michael Fong, deputy mayor of Seattle, to talk about the re-
opening of Seattle and government performance during the pandemic. The interview is conducted
bilingually with a translator facilitating the conversation. During the show, mayor Michael Fong
was asked to introduce some of reopening measures and the vaccination plans. Towards the end of
the show, the host asked him if he had anything to say to listeners. In his ending speech, he raised
up the spirits of Chinese community and assured them that the government of Seattle will support
27
and stand with them. “This has been a such a challenging and difficult 16 months for everyone in
our community. Our Chinese community in particular has really endured some pretty significant
challenges. From the outset of the pandemic, we had to contend with issues of stigmatization about
covid and the Chinese and Asian community. In recent months, AAPI campaign brings into the
forefront hate crimes against Asian Americans that had been hovering in the background but has
always existed as a challenge for our community, and then overlaying all of that is trying to come
out of the pandemic and reopen and recover. I am very proud of the community and its strength in
holding together as a community. Because of that strength, we will come out of this stronger than
before. With all listeners out there, I know people are relieved and excited as I am for us to start
the process of a full recovery.”
Having politicians on the radio programs familiarizes the community members with their policy
and governance styles. V oters could therefore better gauge which candidate can best represent their
interests. On the other hand, the officials are given a chance to connect with the local community
through airwaves and gain support of community members. During the research interview, the host
has indicated that their shows have influenced the past election results:
When the election season approaches every year, we will contact the candidates. Some
candidates asked if they could be on our news programs or talk show, then we will tell
them that’s paid interview. They would often say yes, because the politicians who have
been on our show think the whole experience was great and it’s very effective in terms
of getting the votes. We reported many political affairs in Seattle and Washington
state. Some election results wouldn’t be the same if not us. For example, when the
current mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, was running for election, we covered major
policy of her and her competitors. Imagine all Chinese people in Seattle vote for one
candidate, it can make considerable impact on the election result. (Xiaoyuan)
When asked about the political stance of the radio station, the hosts have emphasized repeatedly
that Chinese Radio Seattle is an “American” radio:
28
The radio has no political affiliations. we are an American radio, we abide by the laws
in the United States, that means we have the freedom of speech and freedom of the
press.
We have one unspoken rule for selecting news sources: we don’t use or translate news
from mainland China state-media since day one. The reason is pretty clear: China
doesn’t have the same level of news freedom as some western countries.
(Researcher: does that mean you don’t think mainland Chinese news media are reli-
able?)
I wouldn’t say it’s unreliable, it’s just we don’t use their news sources. We only select
Chinese-related news from the news outlet outside mainland China, like VOA, BBC,
CNN, New York Times, and Ming Pao (a Hong Kong news media). The list used to
be longer, but we have cut some news media because of their pro-China stance.
(Researcher: so there still are reasons for not using their news, right?)
From my point of view, it follows the same logic of some Chinese people staying in
the United States. If we really trust the mainland Chinese media that much, why didn’t
we stay in the China? Now that we are in the United States, we abide by the laws here.
Even if Xiaoyuan claims the radio station is politically neutral, he makes it clear that mainland
Chinese news outlets are not “neutral” and editorially untrustworthy. In Sun and Sinclair’s work
on Chinese transnationalism, they commented on the de-centering China tendency of diasporic
Chinese media: “For decades, the global diasporic Chinese media network has been considered to
be a key site in the formation of a diasporic public sphere, which, though not rejecting all links to
China, nevertheless wanted to de-center China in an attempt to carve out an alternative space of
being Chinese (8).” Another host has reiterated that Chinese Radio Seattle is an “American radio”,
its main goal should be serving Chinese communities living in United States and civic education
is a major responsibility of the radio.
29
First, we have to be clear that Chinese Radio Seattle is an American radio, not a Chi-
nese radio. I’m with director in the positioning of our radio, it’s a radio for Chinese
in America. Some of them are American citizens, some are not. But for those who
are, they have the right to vote, they must know their rights. Most of them passed
the naturalization test, but they may just forget or didn’t pay attention to the details
at all. I do think civic education is very important for the wellbeing of Chinese com-
munity. Nowadays, a lot of people are advocating for Chinese immigrants’ political
participation. To participate in the politics, you have to know the nitty-gritty, the rules,
the system. From what I observed from the 2020 presidential election, many Chinese
immigrant were misled by unverified information. Our civic education has a long way
to go. (Ya Qiu)
The local Chinese community the hosts are trying to hold together through radio civic education
constitutes what Nancy Fraser called “subaltern counterpublics.” Fraser coined the term to demur
the “bourgeois masculinist” assumptions of the Habermasian public sphere. She claims that subal-
tern counterpublics function as “parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated social
groups invent and circulate counter discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate opposi-
tional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs (67).” Her idea advances the unitary
understanding of public sphere and promotes more plural, diversified, and competing publics to
co-practice participatory democracy.
2.4 Hearingfromthehosts: whyradio?
When I spoke to the hosts regarding their broadcasting experience, most of them said they were
born in the radio age:
I grew up listening to the radio. I waited by the radio to hear my favorite shows. It
was a radio drama; I loved how they acted with their voice. I also loved Beijing opera
radio show a lot. The sounds of radio accompanied my whole adolescence till I went
30
to college. Radio faded out in my college life since I was too busy with study and all
that. But after coming to the United States, I began to listen to radio again. I guess
television really isn’t my thing. I don’t know, I don’t loathe tv either. Radio is a more
convenient option for me. I can turn on the radio whenever, especially I exercise a lot,
and sometimes I drive, I want some sounds to fill the space. I don’t have to listen to
the radio attentively and the radio would not interrupt what I’m doing (Ya Qiu).
Referring to radio as a “convenient” medium that is not “interrupting”, the interview above explains
a common reason behind people’s preference for radio. Compared with television, sonic media
allows the freedom of multitasking, which is a key feature of fast-paced lifestyle nowadays. The
ambience from radio dispels loneliness but does not disrupt your attention allocation. It is a nice,
light addition to our sensory environment.
As a “blind” medium, radio builds one’s persona solely on voice. One host thinks the removal
of visual betters the delivery of information and quality of voice. Hearing the voice of herself
constantly reminds her to reflect and adjust her talking.
I worked as a TV host in China. Radio broadcasting has greatly reduced my on-camera
stress. I am much more relaxed wearing no makeup and a plain t shirt. Cutting the
visuals, the radio hosts could focus more on the voice and content quality. That’s a big
difference for me. I came to notice the timbre of my voice more, and I can constantly
adjust the way of talking when I’m hosting a show. Because I am hearing myself
clearly through the mic all the time. (Liu Gaoxia American Stories 0811).
Another host recalled that some listeners have recognized her by voice. “It’s interesting that
sometimes when I went out to eat or I was at some events, people recognized me (by my voice) and
walked to me saying, ‘hey, the guest you invited last week is cool.’ Or just giving me some general
feedbacks or comments. It’s really a small group of Chinese people here in Seattle.” The listeners
may not know her in person, but they know her voice well. Radio affords an aural intimacy that is
different from other types of interpersonal bond yet hard to erase.
31
In some interviews, the hosts said they feel a sense of achievement doing this job. Working at
the Chinese Radio Seattle strengthens their sense of belonging to the Chinese immigrant commu-
nity because of gaining more exposure to the insiders’ events and community activities. As a radio
host, they have the chance to connect with and speak to other overseas Chinese when doing their
shows. The airwave communication gives them a sense of solidarity; practically speaking, it also
expands their social circle. Hosting a show also provides them an arena to share what they like to
a group of people. There was a time when broadcasting was underpaid or unpaid, but they take
pride in this labor of love.
I joined Chinese Radio Seattle in 2015 when I studied at University of Washington.
My first radio show was a news show, after that, I did a lot of like cultural and arts
programming. I remember it clearly that we rehearsed a radio drama every Saturday
night. That was a great experience. I returned to China years ago and kept broadcasting
from China. I feel so proud to witness our radio station prosper and be a part of it...
working at Chinese Radio Seattle, makes me realize that, as an international media
practitioner, we need to fuse the voices from all over the world, providing an arena for
different voices worldwide (Simo American Stories 0811).
Besides broadcasting, Chinese Radio Seattle has organized many events on Halloween,
spring festival, anniversary, Christmas, memorial concert, etc...these events gather
overseas Chinese people together, fostering a sense of belonging in our community.
(Simo American Stories 0811)
If I were to leave Seattle someday and look back on my days in this city, the most
memorable thing for me is definitely the radio. Our director, my colleagues – a lot
of them were doing this part-time and volunteered for quite a few days. This is very
impressive. I am very moved. (Yi Lan American Stories 0811)
I like sharing music with my listeners. Chatting with strangers through airwaves made
me happy. I moved to United States with my husband for his job. Before that, I had no
32
experience of studying abroad or working abroad. You know what’s so fearful about
living in a foreign country? It’s the feeling of culturally isolated. I couldn’t fit in. I
couldn’t even feel the pleasure of reading tabloid gossip in the US. Therefore, when
I was given a channel to share what I like and share my culture, I said yes without
hesitation. Many hosts were doing the job without any payment during the first or
second year. But the passion supported us through the days. (Dan Dan)
The accounts above demonstrate the model of prosumerism (producer-consumer) in commu-
nity media. Georgiou argues that the advancement of tech literacy has “destabilized the conven-
tional three-step model of how media communication has hitherto been understood, that is, as
‘production-text-consumption’ (Sun and Sinclair 8).” The community media blurs the distinction
between producers and consumers and actively trains its community members to produce contents
of local concerns. Some of regular guests even start their own shows at the radio station.
A story episode aired last year invited several regular guests/hosts to reflect on the history of
Chinese Radio Seattle. The host introduced the first guest/host as follows: “Doctor Xiao has a lot
of connections in the government. He has introduced many politicians to our Chinese communities
in Seattle to make our voices heard. He also brings sub-communities together and communicates
their needs with governmental representatives. When it’s election time, he will introduce the policy
of different candidates and guide us through the voting procedures. He teaches us how to vote in
our best interests.”
Lawyer Cao is another regular on shows. He also hosts a program called “Lawyer Cao’s mail-
box.” He said, “I listened to Chinese Radio Seattle since day one. It’s been eight years now. Every
time I think of our first encounter, I feel so moved and excited. My show, ‘Lawyer Cao’s mailbox’,
has grown with the development of Chinese Radio Seattle. A lot of friends from other areas have
known our firm by listening to the radio. I also helped many Chinese here familiarize the migration
policy by answering questions on radio.”
Their statements inform the “three modes of belongings” framed by Wenger: engagement,
imagination, and alignment. First, Doctor Xiao’s continual endeavors have reinforced Chinese
33
communities’ engagement with local issues. Wenger defines engagement as “active involvement
in mutual processes of negotiation of meaning (17).” As a liaison between Seattle government and
Chinese community, Doctor Xiao has engaged more Chinese in voicing their concerns. The mode
of imagination is often practiced in the form of storytelling. The alignment mode of belonging
stresses the concerted efforts of community members. Building on imagination and engagement,
alignment motivates them to work towards a common goal. The shared goal of promoting good for
Chinese communities unites the hosts, the guests, and listeners to build the radio station together.
34
Chapter3
Discussion: listeninginanewether
The founder and director of Chinese Radio Seattle, Xiaoyuan has considered taking down the AM
and FM channel during the pandemic year, since “the equipment is pricey, and everything goes
online nowadays (Xiaoyuan).” He finally decided to keep it for a sense of ritual, “we are, after all,
a radio station. I feel that we have to keep the radio thing.” While Bosch maintained that radio
has its significance in disseminating information in less developed areas not or poorly served by
modern cabled ICT infrastructure (Bosch 431), it is difficult to evaluate the practical ramifications
of removing the FM/AM stations in above quote. How many people are listening in through the
AM/FM channel solely? The exact number is unknown, but predictably low. Truth is that people
are pivoting toward digital technologies. Why bother tuning in on radio when the podcast is only
a finger click away?
The rise of computational media jeopardizes more traditional media like newspaper and ra-
dio. In the meantime, the Internet also makes radio more available for listeners regardless of
time-space limits. Recordings of radio shows are archived and showcased online in the form of
podcast episodes that you can access anytime. The convergence of medium formats introduces
the on-demand listening model that cancels synchronicity of traditional radio listening. Diverse
media consumption divides the imagined community further into sub-communities or sub-publics
and fosters a more layered sense of belonging. In this new media diasporic culture, diasporic in-
dividuals are equipped with more tools and communication means to explore and negotiate their
identities. As Sun and Sinclair concludes, “The affordances of the Internet, whether as one-to-one
35
or one-to-many communication, and its inherently interactive character, provide the members of a
diaspora with a degree of agency never before known in the ‘old’ media era. Global interconnec-
tivity enables diasporic individuals to actively seek out media experiences for themselves and to
share and critically discuss them with each other over social media platforms (7).”
Alonso and Oiarzabal have conceived of a “digital diaspora,” which allows immigrants “to
connect, maintain, create and re-create social ties and networks with both their homeland and their
co-dispersed communities ... to exchange instant factual information regardless of geographic dis-
tance and time zones ... [and] to sustain and re-create diasporas as globally imagined communities
(9).” The mushrooming online forums and social media groups for overseas Chinese communities
are perfect illustrations of digital diaspora, which Chinese Radio Seattle has been making good
use of since day one. This chapter is going to rethink radio in a new light vis-` a-vis the new media
diasporic culture and revisit the key research question of identity construction.
3.1 Fadingsoundsofradio
In Nielsen’s 2018 audience report, 92% of U.S. adults listen to radio each week, which is the
highest across platforms. The figure dropped to 83% in 2020. In the meantime, podcast and online
audio listenership has been growing. According to Pew Research Center, 41% of Americans ages
12 or older have listened to a podcast in the past month. The statistics may explain a slight drop in
Xiaoyuan’s confidence in radio, and that he is overall quite optimistic about the business of audio
product. He is developing podcast and other online audio services and envisioning the IPO of
Chinese Radio Seattle in the near future. He believes the radio, or podcast, will continue to connect
Chinese with their homeland as well as their fellow immigrants, among other things. V oices from
microphone, resemble an impalpable, silky touch that sooths the solitude and fosters a sense of
belonging for the imagined community.
The impact of digital practices in audio production has prompted us to rethink what makes
radio radio – is it defined by its mode of delivery? the institution? or the artefact itself? Some
36
scholars have come to an agreement on a broad radio-ness that remains in changing formats such
as online audio, internet radio, podcast, and so forth (Berry 8). Radio becomes a handy term and
a set of features and protocols for evaluating audio products. Contemporary radio is embedded in
an interactive, cross-media environment that offers more outlets of radio stations. Digital formats
of audio products remediate radio and extend the “radio experience” into wider scenarios.
The independent, de-institutionalized, home-grown, and amateur space that podcast production
creates welcomes more people to share their voices and empowers podcasters to target, cultivate,
and engage with their niche publics. Podcast also creates an acoustic space that frees producers
from the linear structure of broadcasting and enable them to craft innovative ways of storytelling.
As a cultural practice, podcasting grows a field where podcasters are less bound by institutional
control and managerial intervention. In the case of community podcasting, narrative streams in-
tersect and join to form a de-centered, web-like, storytelling community among immigrants. On
the other hand, the podcast takeover also indicates a transition into more personal, intimate, iso-
lated audio consumption, which calls the radio public into question. Berry argues that “it is this
serendipitous simplicity that has enabled radio to endure and thrive for almost a 100 years, it is a
low-demand medium (12).” In contrast, Podcast listening often requires full attention and higher
level of engagement in that consumers tend to self-curate the playing list and play podcasts at a
place and a time of their choice. Audience research shows that over half of podcast consumption is
via smartphone, and 90% of listeners listen alone (Berry 13). Helen Zaltzman indicates that she is
aware of this intimacy as a podcaster: “When people are wearing headphones, you’re sort of talk-
ing right into their skull. It’s not coming from a radio set on the far side of the room ... It’s a very
intimate relationship (Taylor 10).” Sometimes, the intimacy established between podcasters and
listeners evolves into trust and loyalty and the narrative styles become part of the audio branding.
Michael Bull’s work on the use of Walkman in urban space has demonstrated an emergent
auditory culture that privileges the management of space, time, and boundaries of self. In his
portrayal of lone listeners, they put headphones on to shield out the noises outside and remove
themselves from the environment. Walkman permits an individualized listening in public space and
37
reorganizes public and private realms of experiences (Bull 180). Podcast listening displays similar
set of features. The on-demand listening model delays formation of a synchronous community.
How should we re-imagine the “listening public” when the act of listening is further fragmented
and isolated? Following this line, aural boundary-making and boundary-blurring will enable a new
sonic imagination of community. The more individualized listening and freer choice of media
consumption also echo Sun’s statement in Chapter 1: “my dilemma is not whether I can continue
to be Chinese in another country, but how Chinese or what kind of Chinese I want to be.” I argue
that new diasporic media culture grants heterogenous expressions of diasporic subjectivities that
are not constrained by a monolithic homeland imagination or a dominant narrative of migration
experiences.
Sound studies tends to charge aurality and listening with phenomenological, sociocultural
meanings and political currency to foreground the sound, in a gesture to tilt the sensorium ra-
tio and balance the longstanding ocular-centrism. However, listening is never more than listening.
It is essentially a type of sensory engagement. People don’t often shut down other senses when
using one. Singling out one sense potentially disregards the sensory coordination that guides our
bodily engagement. We probably should not abstract sound from other senses, even when we at-
tempt to establish the importance of it. The analysis of listening, voice, and sound may be better
orchestrated in, but doesn’t belong to sonic media studies alone. Sonic diaspora is manifested in
different kinds of everyday diasporic media consumption.
3.2 Soundsofbelonging,orsoundsofbecoming
Sample listening of Chinese Radio Seattle reveals that most of the programs more center around the
diasporic communities’ settlement and adaptation than expressing longings for their homelands;
the latter gradually morphs into a content with current life. The production of radio shows, along
with other community building activities, demonstrates their attempts to carve out an alternative
space for local Chinese community. As they spend longer time in the host countries/areas, they
38
learn to adjust their diasporic identifications, which are manifested in story programs through the
crafting of self-narratives. The musical programs afford a temporal homecoming trip for listeners
by communicating a generational sentiment inscribed in the rhythms and lyrics. In addition, pro-
ducers of news programs intentionally exploit the radio communication for community building
and political mobilization. The above radio programming has outlined the plurality of the diasporic
identities through different ways of sonic engagements and community interactions.
Citing Chinese Radio Seattle as an example, I maintain that overseas Chinese radio stations
construct sites of identity negotiation and local community building. The sense of belonging of
these immigrants eventually bifurcates, one reminds them where they are from, the other keeps
them at where they are. Radio provides a sonic borderscape both of belonging and becoming,
where they exchange their diasporic experiences and construct the diasporic identities (Brambilla
24).
In Ong and Nonini’s work on the cultural politics of modern Chinese transnationalism, they
point to an “intersection and mixing of different flows of information, images, ideas, and peoples”
in which “transnational publics provide alternatives to state ideologies for remaking identity,” and
are “forming Chinese subjectivities that are increasingly independent of race, self-consciously
postmodern, and subversive of national regimes of truth (25–6).” It would be reductive to conclude
a transnational imagination of China, or greater China area, from the accounts of radio hosts and
listeners I have interviewed in this research. However, it is important to note that, in the back
and forth of listening and speaking over airwaves, they travel between the grander narrative and
personal accounts, hearing each other out and exchanging the belongingness uniquely shaped by
their trajectories. Their stories demonstrate that emotional attachment of places can be bi- or
multi-centered. To borrows Cheng’s words, “...the possibility of multiple homelands and multiple
attachments is particularly salient given that we now live in an age of paradox... Although dual
citizenship has become a natural part of life for many people, dual or even multiple loyalties is a
social fact that needs to be recognized and interrogated (156).” The case study of Chinese Radio
39
Seattle lays out affective, discursive, and material aspects of the forming of dual belongingness in
local immigrant communities.
40
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Asset Metadata

Creator Wang, Sui (author)

Core Title Sounds of belonging: sonic diaspora in overseas Chinese radio stations

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program East Asian Area Studies

Degree Conferral Date 2021-12

Publication Date 11/03/2021

Defense Date 11/03/2021

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag community media,diasporic media,immigration history,OAI-PMH Harvest,Radio,sound studies

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jenkins, Henry (committee chair), Yasar, Kerim (committee chair), Bernards, Brian (committee member)

Creator Email suiwang@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-oUC16661228

Unique identifier UC16661228

Legacy Identifier etd-WangSui-10203

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Wang, Sui

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the author, as the original true and official version of the work, but does not grant the reader permission to use the work if the desired use is covered by copyright. It is the author, as rights holder, who must provide use permission if such use is covered by copyright. The original signature page accompanying the original submission of the work to the USC Libraries is retained by the USC Libraries and a copy of it may be obtained by authorized requesters contacting the repository e-mail address given.

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu