Somewhere in the darkness, I found heaven. In the middle of a dark club, surrounded by people, I closed my eyes and held a private communion. Everything else fell away. Just the booming sound system and me. An acapella of Taeyang’s “Wedding Dress” floated above an instrumental loop of 4 Strings’ “Take Me Away (Into The Night)” and washed over me like holy water. My first experience of euphoria. A baptism. A moment eternal.
I experienced this euphoria when I discovered the Asian diasporic art collective Eternal Dragonz in April 2017. Through The Fader’s regular mix series, I found Eternal Dragonz’s contribution: a mix traversing club, RnB, and Kpop edits lovingly put together by Tzekin (formerly known as V Kim). What was most exciting to me was his blending of early 2000s Kpop vocals with old school trance anthems. Tzekin looped iconic trance synth lines, setting the stage for the Kpop acapellas to shine beautifully, like emotional karaoke performances held in dark rooms bathed in colored lights. These endless loops of trance kept building, rising towards a drop that would never come. The promise of euphoria, again and again. The anticipation ever expanding. With nowhere to go, it filled me until I was bursting at the seams. I hoped it would never end.
Eternal Dragonz is a cyber collective of visual artists, musicians, DJ’s, writers, and designers based throughout the Asian diaspora. Founded in 2015 by Jason Wong, Jenny Yoo, Justin Tam (Tzekin), and joined soon after by Eric Hu and Lucy Chinen, the collective initially came together in a Facebook group through bonding over shared memories of the late 1990s, early 2000s AZN Pride internet movement. They recalled the freedom found in building websites during the early days of the internet, reminiscing over curating and populating their pages with animated gifs, sparkly Maplestory-like sprites, an obsession with car culture, hip hop, visions of Dance Dance Revolution, Asian RnB, trance music, and rave culture.
But while the collective’s origins lie in a shared nostalgia for Asian self-love, the question became how to encapsulate past moments of Asian joy with a vision for the future. To create new formations of Asian diasporic identity. AZN Pride was by no means perfect. There was rampant use of the N-word and questions of cultural appropriation. But it was still a pivotal moment when Asians throughout the diaspora found connection, creating a safe space to celebrate their identity rather than distance themselves from it. For young Asians living in the West, treated as perpetual outsiders and often succumbing to assimilation to white culture, to embrace their Asian identity in a way that felt honest to their particular experience was a radical act of self-love.
In an interview with Dazed Magazine in 2016, Eric Hu reflects, “We’re not recreating AZN Pride, but we’re putting up a flag, and if this speaks to you in any way, this flag is asking you to come closer and engage with us.” This flag spoke to me, not because I had a personal nostalgia for AZN Pride, but because it felt like the first time I had seen the kind of experimental art and music I loved through the lens of celebrating Asian culture and identity. As an Asian American born in the latter half of the ‘90s and an only child with no older siblings to introduce me to pop culture, I missed out on AZN Pride. Witnessing the aesthetics and the sounds of that era remixed and placed within the modern context of club culture was revelatory. I heard vintage Kpop blended with nostalgic trance tracks and it was not only beautiful, it was beautiful because it felt so distinctly Asian.
In a lot of ways, Eternal Dragonz and the people that make up the collective feel like the older siblings I wished I had. The big brother that introduced me to BIGBANG and Initial D. The older sister that animatedly told me about the warehouse rave where she and her Asian friends danced to trance music until the sun’s morning rays peaked through broken windows. The older siblings that laughed hysterically, falling to the floor, as we attempted to practice dance choreography in our pajamas along to Kpop music videos played on grainy bootlegged VHS tapes in our living room. Siblings to play Dance Dance Revolution with at the arcade and get milk tea and popcorn chicken afterwards as a late-night treat.
Music has often acted as a form of time travel for me, a way to revisit different times and different memories. Sometimes, if I listen closely and I am lucky, I have found music that transports me to memories and times that do not belong to me. Discovering Eternal Dragonz and listening to mixes lovingly assembled by Asian diasporic DJ’s felt like I was given a key, one that unlocked cherished memories that were not my own but perhaps I could inherit just the same.
Nothing encapsulates this feeling more than x/o’s mix for Eternal Dragonz’s Radar Radio show in May 2017. In just an hour, x/o navigates deftly through multiple moments of Asian cultural discovery in their life. It is a sprawling mix, traversing the late ‘90s Azn Pride era, early 2000s Jpop and Kpop, video game and anime soundtracks, Asian karaoke covers of American pop music, experimental Asian diasporic club, Asian cinema, and big trance rave energy. The beginning of the mix is an Easter egg hunt of Asian aesthetics, like flipping quickly through channels on the television but every program is celebrating Asian culture. A glimpse of Jay Chou, then BoA, then the classic “Hadouken!” from Street Fighter. Flashes of Final Fantasy X and Parappa The Rapper and Dance Dance Revolution. Underneath it all, x/o weaves in an ominous experimental drone track by Geng, a current Asian American electronic artist, creating a new language in this merging of past and present.
I have been thinking about these two mixes—Tzekin’s mix for The Fader and x/o’s mix for Radar Radio—for a while now. And yet, when I try to unpack my feelings on Asian American identity, try to say something that feels significant, I find myself stuck. Another Asian Pacific American Heritage Month came and went in May and Asia America’s obsession with representation continues to dominate our conversations on identity. I recognize my natural inclination towards it. We all need our roles models, the people that show us what is possible and give us the courage to dream for ourselves. In recent years, our visibility has grown, from Crazy Rich Asians to Bling Empire. And while I know these narratives may resonate for some, I hesitate to rejoice fully because it feels like they leave little room for other stories to be told.
In her essay, “The Turn to Diaspora,” cultural critic Lily Cho remarks, “To turn to diaspora is to turn to restless specters of sorrow bound by that which is lost and to obscure miracles of connection marked by that which is found.” Despite growing up in California surrounded by Asian Americans, it took a turn towards diaspora—towards Eternal Dragonz—for me to find the deeper connections I craved. To turn to diaspora was to find a space that felt less confining. To escape the boundaries of Asian American discourse, whose focal point has shifted in recent years away from its origins of organizing within a larger movement for Third World Liberation and instead towards the near-impossible task of defining who we are. Within a framework of Asian diaspora, there is no false hope of defining one unifying identity because it is simply impossible to synthesize such a wide range of experiences. To turn to diaspora, then, is to celebrate both points of shared experience and points of difference.
Eternal Dragonz put up a flag and those that saw it in the distance recognized something that called out their name. Something that signaled that they might find their people. Though there was no physical space to come together, this didn’t stop us from connecting. The internet became the space that allowed us to find each other across borders, across time zones, mostly on Instagram or WhatsApp in the late hours of the night or at the first signs of dawn. We spoke intimately and honestly, sharing music, film, and art recommendations, learning about each other’s family histories, and reminiscing over memories of Asian identity. Despite the physical distance, I felt a closeness that had eluded me for so long. An obscure miracle of connection, a surprise bond found in some special corner of the internet. A home not tied to a single place but one that expanded across space and time. A love eternal.
For more information on Eternal Dragonz, you can check out their Bandcamp (which has links to all their socials as well) below.
Active Listening 