Chapter 7 follows a young adult college student who speaks Chinese as a heritage language and his girlfriend as they explore language, life, and race relations during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to use the Chinese language to transform the very Chinese-American communities they grew up in and transcend the cultural identity that is assigned to them by society. It explores societal language ideologies regarding Americans of Chinese origin, cultural legitimacy and authenticity for second-generation Chinese immigrants both in the U.S. and in China, the relation between diaspora and domesticity, and the transformative role of Chinese as a heritage language in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. It highlights the nonlinear nature of language shift.

This chapter addresses Sterling A. Brown’s essays and blues-based poems, particularly those appearing in his 1932 collection Southern Road, to raise questions of commodification in the context of the technologized recording and dissemination of African American musical forms, especially the blues. The chapter claims that in Brown’s work (and that of other commentators), the folksong collector emerges as a figure antithetical to the commodification of folk forms suggested by the phonograph. Brown’s attitude toward the phonograph was ambivalent: He embraced it at times, and at others dismissed it as an emblem of commodification and cultural appropriation. The phonograph, however, emerged within a shifting set of cultural practices in which the boundaries between live performance and recorded sound, as well as bodies and recording apparatuses, became permeable and negotiable. Thus, even when Brown’s poems celebrate the blues as an uncommodified oral cultural form indissociable from its social and material milieu in the folk community, as in his iconic poem “Ma Rainey,” the phonograph becomes a kind of vanishing mediator between the poem and its vernacular sources, as Brown’s poems’ constructions of orality are underwritten by its inescapable technologized presence.