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8. How does being POC, or immigration, or dias- pora, affect who you are as people today?
KC: i’m fourth generation. i speak more spanish than chinese. i was raised on 90s american television, which, if you hadn’t noticed before, is absolutely ob- sessed with shaming, castrating and foreignizing asian americans for cheap comic relief (and is not too dra- matically different from tv today). as a result, i spent a lot of my early life feeling invisible, despising myself, pining after white cock and desperately trying to un- become who i was/am.
diving into ethnic studies and punk, and bridging them through SISSYFIT, has been such a healing mecha- nism. i remember first picking up audre lorde/fred ho, and realizing that i was actually ENTITLED to my an- ger. it was such an overwhelming and emotional expe- rience to understand that i could let that rage breathe, instead of stifling it for the sake of preserving my white liberal friends’ sense of comfort. cultivating an attach
ment and entitlement to that anger has been a trans- formative thing for me. i think, transitioning from an awkward, soft-spoken in-the-background saxophonist in a white hardcore band as a teenager, to an outspo- ken voxist of a “political” QPOC band, are just the cliffs notes for a life-long journey and fight for visibility and space. i really hope other qpoc weirdos out there know they’re not alone, and that they fucking matter. developing a chosen fam of chill bi/tri-cultural brown folks has also been fun-da-men-tal. So much so it almost goes without saying. i dont know where the F i’d be without my cute bay homies!
9. Can music change the world, y’all?
KC: dude fuck yeah! when the macarena came out in elementary school, my world flipped!
sissyfitmusic.bandcamp.com facebook.com/sissyfitmusic
READING AND LISTENING LIST from Kyle Casey Chu:
the new jim crow by michelle alexander is such a powerful resource. queer and trans artists of color by nia king
- yay to texts that celebrate and attest to our existence!- gold by the inch by lawrence chua, and “another round” podcast with heben and tracy (not to be confused with the podcast about beer).
Back Cover:
“the intersections of life death and forever”
photo by Adrian Acencion http://www.adrianacencion.com