It seems that feeling like an alien is a common experience among Asian Americans,
who are frequent victims of nativist racial attacks (‘Go back to your home country!’).
As a ‘real’ alien who has a distant Asian homeland to fall back on, I do certainly feel the
sting of such attacks. Yet I can only guess how American natives of Asian descent
would feel.
On the other hand, being a student from an Asian country in America gave me a
chance to develop a unique perspective on the phenomenon of growing Asian presence
in American independent(in short, ‘indie’) rock scene. Growing up in South Korea,
Anglo-American pop music has been a part of my cultural identity since teenage years
just like many other kids in my generation and beyond. Some of us have been digging
into more obscure, underground music from the US and the UK. Global economy and
information technology made it much easier for us ‘music nerds’(or maenia in Korean
pop culture lingo – somewhat close to the Japanese term otaku). Accordingly, audiences
of American indie rock grew in size and depth over the years.
Since my arrival in the U.S., I have had an opportunity to witness a fledgling ethnic
connection between Asian American musicians who have few or no direct ties with their
ancestral ‘homelands’ and an Asian fanbase of American indie music. Is it a
2
Convention