Each time Blind Faith's ' Sea of Joy' came on, he and my mother would reminisce about a former coworker named Lenox.īy the late 1980s, he had moved on to rock ballads - Guns N' Roses, Cheap Trick and Foreigner joined the fray. The Animals' ' House of the Rising Sun' always terrified me. Bob Dylan, a voice he first heard through the walls of his apartment, thanks to a neighbor who played his stereo sociopathically loud. He'd tape rock tunes from his early years in the United States. One of his favorite pastimes was making mixtapes for long trips in the car.

I imagined that his expanding record collection and the chance to be first in line for new gadgets - a Discman, a Laserdisc player, second-wave Beta decks - were part of the reason he had come to America. Listening to music was one of the few joys that had survived from his childhood in Taiwan to his life in America, boxes of LPs and the bulky turntable he soldered together himself surviving stints in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, Texas and then California. For my father, music wasn't a social thing. It's not that my parents measured their worth in relation to their possessions. All I wanted for my life was to make as much money as my parents so I could amass my own collection of stereo components and records. I effortlessly acquired the pop know-how that is the teenager's surest commodity. At some point in middle school I realized that my dad's habit had prepared me for the social hierarchies of recess. I grew comfortable in the margins and awaited the conversations I felt comfortable joining. The Record Tell Us What Your American Dream Sounds Likeīut being aware of the limits of assimilation early on was weirdly liberating. I knew people would always assume I was from somewhere else.

I never thought I could become President (of the United States or of our third-grade class). He would buy Rolling Stone and Spin and carefully transcribe their lists of the year's, decade's or era's best albums, and then he would return to Tower Records and buy the ones he thought he would like.įor a while, this represented the apex of American possibility - the idea that there would be a new innovation the following year that there would always be some newer and better model. He was the one who always wanted to go to Tower Records and browse the aisles, picking up old favorites in whatever new format was available. He was the one recording hours of MTV on one VCR and whittling his findings down to a greatest hits tape on another VCR. As a child, this only had the effect of making music seem terribly uncool.

For as long as I can remember, my father has maintained a large collection of records.

Floating Chinaman by Hua Hsu