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Shuffled! is a weekly column appearing every Thursday (sometimes later in the day) here on BPRLive. Each week, we welcome a person from the APA community to share some thoughts about the music they listen to. Check out the Shuffled! archive for past articles.

Today’s Shuffler: Grace Talusan

Grace Talusan was born in the Philippines and immigrated to the US at age 3. She grew up in the suburbs of Boston. A a child, Grace played the flute and piano. She was a member of the math team in high school, and was pre-med in college. Despite these auspicious beginnings, with the encouragement of teachers, she became a writer.

After graduating from Tufts University with a degree in English, she earned an MFA in fiction from the University of California-Irvine and then began teaching in the creative writing program at the University of Oregon.

Grace was awarded an Artist Grant in Fiction Writing from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a residency at Hedgebrook, and other fellowships and awards. She was a finalist in Creative Nonfiction’s Silence Kills Essay Contest in 2007 and won the Ivy Teresaka Short Fiction Award in 2006. Grace’s publications include work in the Brevity, the Del Sol Review, Creative Nonfiction, Parents and Kids, and The Boston Globe. She wrote the children’s book, Joey’s Special Eye, which was published by the EyeCare Foundation and distributed worldwide free to families dealing with retinoblastoma (Rb) - a rare pediatric eye cancer.

Currently, Grace teaches writing at Tufts University and Grub Street.

For more, visit her website at http://gracetalusan.com and her blog at http://gracetalusan.blogspot.com.

Let’s see her shuffle…

My process: I combed through my music library and created a playlist with songs with any association in my mind with Asian Americans. Then I shuffled the songs a few times until I found an order I liked.

Just a Girl
No Doubt

My first job out of college was in publishing. I expected my life in publishing would be glamorous and intellectually stimulating, but my greatest challenge was keeping awake. During my lunch hour, I’d nap in the parking garage, reclined in the front seat of my car.

This was before the Internet. Can you imagine killing eight hours of your workday without blogs, online shopping, and Facebook? If people didn’t have respectable office jobs, when would they find the time to read articles like this one?

By Mondays, I would already make plans for Fridays. One weekend, my little brother, in junior high, asked if I would bring him to concert in Providence. I’d never heard of this band, 311, and even though I felt very old and uncool, I agreed. My parents, immigrants from the Philippines, were worried that my little brother was hanging out with the wrong crowd and asked me to intervene. Here was my chance.

As soon as we walked into the concert, my brother ran to join a crowd of jumping kids greeting the opening band, No Doubt. The music was loud and aggressive; I was surprised to see a young woman fronting the band, singing, “I’m just a girl.” Her platinum ponytail was impossibly long. I was far away, but I noticed that the bassist was a person of color. I learned later that the bassist was Tony Kanal. I wondered about the stereotype of Asian Americans and musical genius. If so many of us learned to play the piano and violin, why were we so absent from the music scene? Why was the only Asian American musical hero available to me Yo-Yo Ma?

I scanned the crowd for my brother. It wasn’t hard to find him amidst all the white kids.

Unaccompanied Cello Suites No. 1 in G Major
Yo-Yo Ma

When I was in junior high, I had a crush on a blue-eyed cellist named Michael. His thick blonde bangs flopped over one side of his face. My older sister, also a cellist, sat behind him in youth orchestra. He thought I was cute; my sister introduced us. Michael and I would make shy, awkward conversation after concerts. Michael admired Yo-Yo Ma. Although we never had anything to say to each other, I’d put on Yo-Yo Ma’s Bach Suites and imagine Michael listening to the same music. Despite our inability to connect face to face, in the somber notes drawn out of the string and wood, I heard Michael speak.

Lost in Love
Air Supply

When I was growing up our only relatives in the United States lived in New York and every month we’d drive from a suburb of Boston in the green family wagon to visit them. The experience was always stressful.

We knew we were almost to their apartment when men with spray bottles would approach our windows as we stopped at lights or in traffic. “Lock your doors,” my father would say. He waved his hands so the men would go away. I was afraid. The men with blank, defeated faces reminded me of zombies. The kind that ate your brain.

On the drive, we’d listen to my father’s mix tapes, cassettes dubbed from 8-tracks, record albums, and friend’s music collections. These were the early days of illegal music sharing. During one of our trips to New York, the leather box of cassettes was stolen from the station wagon. After that, my father insisted someone sit in the car while the rest of the family went up to my uncle’s apartment.

Once, my seven-year old cousin pulled me to the window on the 19th floor and pointed to a dark stain on the concrete between his high rise and the next. On a hot night, one of his playmates had fallen. “He’s dead,” my cousin said. “Splat.”

Despite the fear and stress of being in the city, I loved hanging out with my older cousin. Geena was in high school and would play songs on her guitar for me. I always asked her to sing Air Supply’s “Lost in Love.”

In Geena’s apartment, a vat of wonton soup was always bubbling on the stove and the magic brick of yellow government cheese in the refrigerator never got smaller no matter how much we ate off it. Geena had a stack of magazines, Teen and Seventeen, that I studied religiously so I could learn how to apply makeup, talk to boys, and cuff my pants. I never saw any models who looked like me in those magazines, but that never stopped me from teasing my hair or painting my eyes and cheeks with the blues and pinks the white models wore. Until I looked in the mirror and was reminded of my black hair and brown skin, I could pretend that I was just like them.

Today
Smashing Pumpkins

When I first heard this song, I was idling my red Jetta in line at a Taco Bell drive-thru in Portland, Oregon. My friend from graduate school turned up the volume. He was visiting from Los Angeles, on book tour for his first novel. A film actor was interested in making a movie of his book. “This is the song I want to play at the end of the movie,” he said.

As triangles of taco crust fell on our laps, he explained how the music would fit with the final scene. I liked the exuberance of the song. “Today is the greatest/Day I’ve ever known/Can’t live for tomorrow/Tomorrow’s much too long.”

I learned later that “Today” was the first song Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan wrote for Siamese Dream after a breakdown. Corgan battled suicidal depression and writer’s block. James Iha, a second generation Japanese American, was the guitarist for Smashing Pumpkins. In 1996, while on tour, Smashing Pumpkins keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin died from a heroin overdose. Iha left the band in 2000 and did not participate in the band’s reunion in 2006.

The song reminded me of my brother. It was after midnight and I wondered what he was doing. After his first year of college, my brother was not invited back for his sophomore year. He had called me in June, all the life gone from his voice and mumbled, “Mom thinks I’m going to be dead by the time I’m twenty.”

“You’re coming to live with me,” I said. That fall, my brother moved in. Except for when he was in class, at the same university where I was a professor, in those first few months, my brother slept all day, only emerging at night. When my friend came to visit, I left my brother alone for the weekend at our apartment.

My brother needed help, more help than I could give him alone. Over that year, he started to come back to us. By the time he turned twenty in June, he was not only still alive, he was starting to smile again and make friends. He talked about wanting to be a writer and teacher, like me. He decided to stay and graduate from the university although I was moving back to California. When we moved out of our apartment ,I hugged my brother goodbye. He just might have a chance.

But I didn’t know the future. Who does?

Somewhere Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World
Israel “Iz” Kamakawiwoʻole

This is what happened after I left Oregon: My brother started going to school full-time. My former colleagues in the creative writing department were his teachers. He made Dean’s List and graduated with a degree in English. He met a girl with blond hair. Their daughter was born healthy and screaming in a birthing center a few blocks from where we once shared an apartment.

During his wedding, among hills of wine grapes, he danced with his wife to the Brother Iz version of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” Their three year old daughter, wearing fairy wings, danced with them.

Last 5 posts by shuffled

• Shuffled! Wendy Hsu - January 1st, 2009
• Shuffled! Kelly Zen-Yie Tsai - December 18th, 2008
• Shuffled! Theo Gonzalves - December 11th, 2008
• Shuffled! Scott Kurashige - December 4th, 2008
• Shuffled! EyeASage - November 27th, 2008

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