By Mike Rougeau
Melissa Li said she came dangerously close to being made into a stereotype.
“When I was 5 [years old], like all Asian children, I was forced to play the piano and the violin,” she said. “But at some point I was like, I’m just not going to play what they want me to play.”
Li said she came out to her mother at the age of 11. Two years later, she began writing her own music. The singer-songwriter describes her songs during that period as “cheesy piano ballads, like really awful.”
She said a thoughtful benefactor changed her life forever.
“When I was around 14 or 15, somebody gave me, and this sounds really cliche … somebody gave me an Ani DiFranco album and a guitar,” Li said. “It absolutely 100 percent changed my life.”
Li, along with Hawaii-born transgender slam poet Kit Yan, who together are known as Good Asian Drivers, performed Tuesday night at afterHOURS as part of NU Pride Week.
Em Dunham, co-chair of NUBiLaGA, Northeastern’s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning and straight alliance, said the main goal of Pride Week is to raise awareness about diversity and try to achieve things like gender neutral housing, gender neutral bathrooms and access to appropriate healthcare from the health center at Northeastern.
She said they want to create a more inclusive campus for sutdents of varying sexual orientations and make sure they have a safe space at Northeastern.
Dunham said NUBiLaGA is working toward this goal by hosting entertaining and educational events all around campus this week. Organizations including Sigma Sigma Sigma, the African American Institute, the Asian American Center, the Asian Student Union, the Progressive Student Alliance and Students for Choice collaborated with NUBiLaGA to plan the week’s events.
Delia Cheung Hom, director of the Asian American Center, said she was happy to see a diverse group of students coming together for the Good Asian Drivers concert.
“People were really responding to the different things that Kit and Melissa were saying,” Hom said. “We’re really happy with the turnout.”
The Center co-sponsored the event with afterHOURS and the Office of Student Life.
Yan said Good Asian Drivers sometimes gets questioned about where its name originates.
“[We] came up with the name Good Asian Drivers because we were doing a driving tour, but also to challenge and confront stereotypes in a really positive way,” he said.
The songs Li performed Tuesday ranged from rock anthems featuring Weezer-like guitar riffs to love ballads. The range of her vocals was matched by her acoustic guitar.
Li said in an interview with The News that her songs come from the heart.
“A lot of it is very personal,” she said. “I write a lot about love, and I write a lot about Asian-American issues. My upbringing was here in the states where we feel very much a minority.”
Li said Yan’s approach to poetry is different.
“Kit’s pieces are very much about education,” Li said. “A lot of times I feel like his work is really about showing people different aspects of the queer community and different issues.”
Both artists said their lyrics exemplify their pride about who they are. Li said she has no qualms about writing love songs to women and that Yan’s poems about gender identification are powerfully raw.
They opened the set with a duet about their experiences together so far.
“We can’t be artists and we can’t keep creating unless we have the support of the different communities that we operate in,” Yan said. “So it’s kind of a thank you piece and a reflection piece of being on the road and all the people that we met throughout that.”
The two met as teenagers when they were both participants in “the queer Asian performing arts scene in Boston,” said Yan, who added that they saw each other numerous times at the same venues and clubs.
Yan said the idea to go on tour came to him one day when he saw Li in the back of a drag bar.
“I said to her, ‘Hey, you want to quit your job, go on tour across the country?’ and she was like, ‘Yeah!'” he said.
When met with prejudices, both band members said they prefer to reason with people.
“We run across a lot of stupid people that say lots of racist stuff to us, especially about our name,” Yan said. “Like, ‘Good Asian drivers? None of those exist.’
