Lingyan Liu (History) is a 2022–2023 HRI Campus Graduate Student Fellow. Liu’s research project, “That Hideous Sound: The Speaking, Singing, and Shouting of Chinese and Chinese Americans in Race Making, 1850s-1930s,” explores how the sounds of Chinese opera, street hawkers, labors, festival firecrackers were historically constructed as unnatural and noisy, leading to the sonic configuration of the “yellow” race both in China and in the U.S.
Learn more about HRI’s Campus Fellowship Program, which supports a cohort of faculty and graduate students through a year of dedicated research and writing in a collaborative, interdisciplinary environment.
What is unique about your research on this topic?
The sonic and sensory encounter between the East and the West has mostly been approached from a Western lens. By juxtaposing the diverse interpretations of the same soundscapes among Anglophone listeners, Chinese intellectuals, and Chinese sound makers (such as laborers, hawkers, and opera performers), my research exposes the politics of listening, dismantles the artificial nature of sonic hierarchies, and provides an alternative ontology of sound.
What drives your interest in this research?
Revealing the personal journey behind my research has always been daunting for me. My mom always says, “Don’t look back: flee for your life.” She knows that in China’s context, poor people are not entitled to indulge in the past: the past is something to hide. As the daughter of a farmer, hawker, and construction worker—my father’s work changed seasonally—I have constantly struggled with the shame and humiliation encoded in my lower-class countryside background. I wobbled to the United States for my PhD training, drawn by the rosy picture of the “Shining City on a Hill.”
Then the pandemic came, then the murder of George Floyd, and then an 89-year-old Chinese woman was set on fire in Brooklyn. While most of the time I had the privilege of burying myself in piles of history books and archival documents, during many sleepless nights, I listened to my Chinese American friends’ fear of being physically attacked if they walk alone on the street even during the day, their struggles of being seen as forever outsiders, and their toxic working environments in which people truly believe that COVID-19 is a Chinese virus. I shared their fears, shames, struggles, and pains.
I was haunted by the question of why “we” are encouraged to hate people different from “us,” and in what ways “we” are taught to justify our hatreds and tendencies toward discrimination. With rigorous training in the critical studies of race and gender, as well as in performance studies and sensory studies, I realized that those shames and stigmas imposed upon, and internalized by, my mom, my friends, and myself were all social constructs. My faculty mentors helped me to confront those discriminations with their knowledge, empathy, and historians’ skills. They helped to light the fire in my heart. In response, my project evolved to investigate the sonic discriminations that were shared by both the Chinese and by Chinese Americans during the generations that span a crucial era of historical changes, in China and around the globe, between the 1850s and the 1930s.
