![]() ![]() While Rodrigo had already proved herself as the lead in a Disney+ musical TV series, her fellow Filipino American Bella Poarch wasn’t known as a singer. By summer, shortly after the release of her first album, she’d surpassed Ariana Grande in a feat of ubiquity, landing the most songs (four) on the Billboard Global 200 at once, and she’d been recruited by the White House to urge young people to get vaccinated against Covid-19. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart and clung there for eight weeks while racking up No. Her first single, the fragile yet anthemic ballad “Driver’s License,” debuted at No. ![]() IN THE WINTER of 2021 - a year into a pandemic whose origins in China spurred verbal and then physical attacks against people of Asian descent in the United States, and a few months before six ethnically Korean and Chinese women spa workers in Georgia would be shot by a white evangelical man who allegedly told the police that he wanted to eliminate sources of sexual temptation - everyone, or at least much of the measurable globe, was listening to the Filipino American singer Olivia Rodrigo, who turned 18 in February. For years I have combed American history for Asian women ascendant, maybe out of desire for an ancestor, however distant, or to discover if such public recognition were possible, or to take comfort that in my muddled, uncertain ambitions I was not alone. My mother is from the Philippines I was born in Los Angeles. Then their style of music fell out of favor, and they disappeared from sight. They became American citizens in 1968, when more than half a million American troops were deployed in Vietnam. They went on to perform for Sullivan 22 times, received spreads in Newsweek and Life and released an English-language album through Monument Records. That fall, when they greeted America on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” they might have been the first Koreans - the first Asians - whom Americans could accept as pop stars, and even want to claim as their own. Was it because they fit what would become the paradigm of the Asian in America, displaying a model minority’s work ethic by mastering more than a dozen instruments, including the saxophone, bagpipes and upright bass, along with tortuous choreography in high heels or because they both exploited and resisted the hypersexualization of Asian women, opening sets wearing traditional Korean hanbok and then shucking them off to reveal floofy little polka-dot dresses, all the while assuring interviewers that they didn’t drink or date, making themselves unthreatening to their white female rivals or because their isolation and seeming innocence suggested helplessness, inspiring the same protective impulse that led white Americans to adopt thousands of Korean children over the next decade or because they had the savvy to cover contemporary hits like Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock” (first recorded in 1957) and borrow the bobby socks and perkiness of ponytailed American teens, displaying both a willingness to assimilate and a tacit acknowledgment of the imagined superior appeal of Western culture or because, as one critic wrote approvingly, they proved that, surprise, surprise, Asians could “have swing”? They learned to tap dance they stopped going hungry.īut the Kim Sisters, although relegated to the same costumes and accessories, somehow stood apart. Soon, Sue joined forces with her younger sister and cousin and pragmatically began wearing form-fitting dresses slit to midthigh. Only 14 at the time, she was too young to be allowed in venues with beer bottles toppling off tables, but the bookers turned a blind eye. She sang “Candy and Cake” - in English, a language she didn’t speak - for G.I.s in tents thick with the black smoke of oil stoves, earning her first chocolate bars and Coca-Colas, along with whiskey that her mother traded for essentials on the black market. Sue, coached by her mother, started out performing on American military bases during the war. The women called themselves the Kim Sisters - evoking the beloved Andrews Sisters from Minnesota, who sold 50 million records in the 1930s and ’40s - but were in fact a cousin, Min Ja (Anglicized as Mia), 17, and two sisters, Sook Ja (later Sue), 21, and Ai-Ja, 18. The show was an institution, a live cabaret every Sunday night that reached more than a quarter of all American households with a TV set. casualties in Vietnam - three young women from Seoul appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on CBS. IN THE FALL of 1959 - 14 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and released Japanese Americans from its domestic internment camps 13 years after the American territory of the Philippines gained independence six years after the end of the Korean War and two months after American soldiers were killed by the Viet Cong just north of Saigon, among the first U.S. ![]()
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