Musical Autobiography

As you all have probably figured, I am not originally from here. I was born and raised in Viet Nam, so I developed a very non-Western taste in music as a child. I used to sing karaoke with my family all the time when I was 2 even though I had trouble with enunciation. One of the children songs I can still remember is "Bat Kim Thang". All the years I had spent singing it in class, for a performance, and with family and friends left the lyrics and melody engraved in my brain. To my surprise, they had this song in the children book of my choir in my middle school, which was in America. Of course, the teacher had me sing it in front of the class, though I didn't mind!

Besides the karaoke machine, my family owned an instrument called dan tranh or sixteen-stringed zither. If my memory serves me right, it belonged to my grandma, but I had never seen her play it. Sadly, the closest physical contact I had with it was poking it. A lot of Vietnamese folk music use this and the monochord including the lullabies that my mom sang to me as a kid. It was a mistake to not bring dan tranh with me, but my petty music appreciation then prevented me from considering it as anything other than a boring sound maker.

After I entered elementary school, I performed tons of Vietnamese pop songs for school and competitions within my neighborhood with at least one other person. I also had to dance, which I was and still am not good at. As a matter of fact, for my competitions, participants were required to choreograph their own songs. I am ashamed to say my group had never won first place (though we were close once...); nonetheless, we did have fun! Other than performing, I had to take a music class as well since it was mandatory. I can only vaguely recall this, but what we mainly did in there were learning songs and some music theory like scales. I actually learned the basic contour of a major scale in Viet Nam. We use solfege like here as well.

Other than Vietnamese pop and blues, I also had a love for Japanese, Korean, and Chinese pop. I later started listening to Japanese rock as well. Ironically, my love for Japanese pop grew even stronger after I came to America. When I was 13 or 14, I formed a singing group with my friends from other states on YouTube. We would cover pop songs of famous girl groups from Japan like Cute, Minimoni, and Viyuden. We were all either half or full-blooded Asian, but only a few of us were actually Japanese, so pronunciation was probably not perfect. On the bright side, we all seemed to have the same accent when part of the lyrics was English. We lasted for about a year before we disbanded.