Claiming Diaspora: Music, Transnationalism, and Cultural Politics in Asian/Chinese America adds a most welcome dimension to study of, in the author's words, the “Asian/Chinese” experience in America—that of music, which, the author points out, has been strangely ignored until now despite the significance of its role in the formation of the Asian/Chinese American cultural identity. The book fills in this gap with an excellent historical overview of almost 150 years of music making and consumption among the Chinese in America, or rather, more specifically, in New York City, followed by an exhaustive accounting of individuals and groups active on New York's Chinese American music scene in 1992-1993. It also makes note of the impact of new technologies and globalization on the modes of music making, propagation, and consumption.

Why does an author who proposes to speak to cultural debates current in twenty-first-century America focus on 1992–1993 in a book published in 2010? Was it a year of special significance? Not so. It was when the author engaged in doctoral research, and the material presented here bears strong overtones of a dissertation in style and format. It is framed as an interdisciplinary challenge to established discourse(s) in several fields (ethnomusicology, anthropology, cultural studies, ethnic studies, minority studies, Asian American studies, studies of the diaspora, identity and migration studies, American multicultural studies). But, by invoking current jargon and select authorities from each to act as traffic signals directing its anticipated informed readers, it comes across more as a nod of recognition to theorizing done elsewhere than an original syncretic interpretation. This despite troves of original research and interesting information, which is a pity.

Had the author—herself a practitioner of the Chinese musical idiom—framed her book as a personal account (how she arrived from mainland China to pursue a higher degree in ethnomusicology and found herself at odds with the way Chinese music was treated in her academic discipline in the early 1990s, how she struggled to identify with the earlier Chinese immigrant experience and had trouble with being defined as an Asian American, and how she concluded that the experience of her co-ethnic immigrant peers engaged in music making can best be described as “claiming diaspora”) this could have been an excellent book, because we would trust her authority. The most interesting conclusions in the book are the ones she draws directly from the responses of her “informants” to the question of what music making in America means to them. She is a skillful and compassionate interviewer, and the musicians she speaks to convey that they see the weekend music groups they belong to as an extended family when feeling lonely, an emotional shelter when feeling nostalgic, an institution eligible to sponsor new immigrants for green cards, or a local center for information and support about living in America. Honest and powerful stuff. But how does this fit into the book's avowed ambition to help Americans understand what constitutes their (multi)cultural identity?

The problem may lie in the term “diaspora,” already ambiguous and contested, which the author defines too loosely as “a descriptive term illustrating Chinese Americans' past and present social and cultural experiences” intended “to invoke a sense of contemporariness that represents Chinese Americans' current cultural struggles” (p. 11). Yet, with the notable exception of the second-generation Asian American jazz musician Fred Ho, the “contemporariness” is only represented by the most recent immigrants who have more cultural ties to their home country than to America. What of all the descendents of earlier immigrants? What are their aspirations in music making and habits in music consumption? How do they fit in the multicultural America? Who are the Chinese American kids running around with guitars and struggling to express themselves through rock, R&B, hip-hop, techno, rap, and “non-category” music?

Because the book's scope is limited to the immigrant Chinese communities in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, and frozen in time, there is no mention of numerous Chinese Americans playing with and conducting major American orchestras (some indeed in New York), nor a discussion of their struggles. There is no mention of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project and its pilot program in New York City's public schools. There is, curiously, no mention of numerous prodigies and hopefuls making their way through Julliard, some of whom are indeed defining transnationalism in contemporary America. What of Tom Chiu and Felix Fan, founders of the New York-based Flux quartet, called by the critics “one of the most fearless and important new-music ensembles around?” Where is Huang Ruo, whose “multidimensional” transnational music has been included in the American Classics series issued by Naxos? The omissions, whether self-imposed or arbitrary, are too many to list and, in a book purporting to be dealing with contemporary American and/or Asian/Chinese American cultural trends, simply unacceptable.

Claiming Diaspora should have been subtitled, “Music making and consumption of the musics [author's term] of China among the most recent Chinese immigrants in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens ca. 1992-1993, with an interdisciplinary theoretical framework and a historical overview,” to truly reflect its content. It would then offer a thorough though challenging reading to those interested in the subject.