What is the soundtrack to your living room? From our favorites on the radio to the conversations woven over them, our living rooms ring with the sounds and stories of our families.
Photo by Cindy Trinh
About this event
Bringing together music and oral history, Rochelle Hoi-Yiu Kwan (aka YiuYiu 瑶瑶) will gather us for an intimate living room listening through the Chinatown Records 華埠錄音 archive at the Clemente Center. Pulling from over 20 record collections inherited from her family and neighbors, we'll listen together to songs that have long filled Chinatown living rooms – and the histories and memories that come with them. Rooted in the belief that we can all be DJs and oral historians, Rochelle invites OHMA students to bring a favorite song of their own to share and soundtrack our living room with us.
We invite you to step into these musical portals with us, back to a time – whether 50 years ago while dancing in our youth or to our childhood singing along at family karaoke parties – that etched every word and beat into our memory.
Rochelle Hoi-Yiu Kwan (aka YiuYiu 瑶瑶) is a cultural organizer, oral history educator, and DJ based on Lenape land in NYC's Manhattan Chinatown. She takes on her childhood name YiuYiu 瑶瑶 as an artist and DJ for Chinatown Records 華埠錄音, a homegrown community effort to celebrate the richness of music and history that comes with inherited family record collections. From Chinatown block parties to sonic family histories to endless listening and research, Chinatown Records is an ever-growing record of the people we love who bring all this music back to life with us.
As an oral history educator, Rochelle builds her practice around the belief that we are all storytellers. As the Community Producer at Self Evident, she leads their growing oral history training and archiving program. She is the Storytelling Team Lead and resident DJ at Think!Chinatown, an intergenerational non-profit based in New York City’s Manhattan Chinatown, working at the intersection of storytelling, arts, and neighborhood engagement. She has also worked with partners such as the Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, Hunter College Asian American Studies Program, StoryCorps, Red Canary Song, Bulosan Center for Filipino Studies, as well as her own family and neighbors.