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From Urban Area to Refugee Camp: How One Thing Leads to Another
Author(s): Adelaida Reyes

Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 43, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1999), pp. 201-220
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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VOL. 43, NO. 2 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY SPRING/SUMMER1999
From Urban Area to Refugee Camp:

How One Thing Leads to Another
ADELAIDAREYES / Jersey City State College
I would reject any claim that personal preference... does not play a key
role in science.... [O]ur ways of learning about the world are strongly in-
fluenced by the social preconceptions and biased modes of thinking that
each scientist must apply to any problem. The stereotype of a fully rational
and objective 'scientific method'..,. is self-serving mythology (Gould
1994:14).
By our pupils we'll be taught (from Rodgers and Hammerstein, The King
and I).
Once again it was my students who eased me into meeting yet anoth-
er challenge, this time the Seeger lecture. I saw them in my mind's
eye, fixing me with their collective gaze to inquire quite pointedly: will you
do as you bade us do? Will you reveal your biases and prejudices so that they
can be factored into whatever else you say? Theirs was the same message
as Stephen Jay Gould's: the personal indeed cannot be expunged from the
methodological. But the students' spirit is better captured in the few words
from Rodgers and Hammerstein, for the idealism, the demands, and the cu-
riosity of the young indeed make teachers and learners of their elders.
I could never hope to live up to the expectations of the students who
have richly instructed me over the years. But I would like to acknowledge,
and in a tiny measure repay, the great debt I owe them.
The Vantage Point: Biases and Labels

Demographers, whether they study large, general populations like
nations or small, specialized ones such as the academic community, cre-
ate labels with which to tag us. In the process, insidiously though not in-
tentionally, I would like to think, they persuade us to pin those labels onto
ourselves not because those labels fit perfectly but because they fit less
? 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
201
202 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1999
imperfectly. Thus, when I first came to the United States, the demograph-
ic category that I checked on all kinds of forms was "Asian."I did not know
exactly what being Asian meant-I had not used that label on myself till
then-but calling myself "Asian" seemed more plausible than labeling
myself "Caucasian"or what at that time was called "Black."Some years later,
a new category appeared. That's when I became a "PacificIslander."That
was also when I began giving serious thought to the transformativeeffects
of labels.
It is not just the fit between label and labeled that is at issue. When the
validation of existing labels or sheer statistical expediency predominates,
when facts and features are painfully shoe-homed into molds that no long-
er correspond to what they are meant to hold, the response of the labeled
can subvert the usefulness of the label. During the last census, a friend
wondered which box to check for his three-year-olddaughter. Her pheno-
typical features were those of her father whom most people would call
Asian or Pacific Islander, but her color was lighter than that of her Cauca-
sian mother. Confronted by the rigidity of the categories, he and his wife
checked "Pacific Islander"this time around. Next census, they will check
"Caucasian,"and after that, when their daughter will no longer be a minor,
she can figure out what label to use on herself. What this does to the qual-
ity of the census data and the conclusions drawn from it, one can only
imagine. But this anecdote echoes my students' reminder about the poten-
tial (mis)measure of those we study owing to our own and others'
(mis)measure of ourselves.
Because it avoids many of these kinds of problems, the category "Oth-
er" eventually became for me the least problematic. It even became a com-
fortable place to be. It became a vantage point, a bias, that colored my vi-
sion and shaped my horizons.
The lyrics of an old pre-WorldWarII popular song, "Foolsrush in where
wise men never go" (expanded from Alexander Pope's famous admonition,
"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread") accurately described the reac-
tion to my announcement that I intended to study ethnomusicology. It was
indeed the otherness, the marginality of fools, and the inexperience that
lies at the heart of un-wisdom which made me plunge into a field about
which I knew virtually nothing. It was luck that brought me to Willard
Rhodes at Columbia University. He did not seem to mind that I knew no
music other than that which came from the Western European art music
tradition. I did not realize how lucky I was that no pressure was ever put
on me to choose (as was customary until the 1960s) a folk or traditional
music or an art music of the non-Western world as an area of specializa-
tion. I did not know that ten years before I came into ethnomusicology,
Rhodes had deviated from the expectation that ethnomusicologists would
Reyes: From Urban Area to Refugee Camp 203
study only those kinds of music by proposing instead that "the total music
of man, without limitations of time or space" (1956:460) should be the
subject matter of ethnomusicology. I had come to ethnomusicology with
nothing more than the exhilaration of getting to know a music as it is
lived-an exhilaration that I had caught from the first group of people who
afforded me a glimpse of musical life in America.
That world had been opened for me by my first mentor, Peter Yates, a
music critic living in California. He too was an outsider, not so much be-
cause he was Canadian but because he had what were considered maver-
ick ideas, ideas about contemporary musicians and musical life that finally
gave birth to that Los Angeles institution, "Evenings on the Roof." It was
through him that I first met Charles Seeger in 1964 on what was for me a
memorable occasion in the UCLAMusic Library(he wanted to talk about
the I-Ching about which, unfortunately, I knew nothing). It was Peter Yates
who gave me the chance to observe representatives of the American avant-
garde of the time-John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, HarryPartch,
the ONCEcomposers of Ann Arbor, among others. They had an infectious
enthusiasm for experimenting with sounds, forms, languages, tunings, and
notations, and for pushing the envelope of what qualified as music. They
talked about music from elsewhere--India, Indonesia, Iran, and so on. But
their interest was not in adding discrete items to a personal catalog of
musics they controlled; what they seemed to be doing was learning from
those musics to broaden their own aesthetic horizons.
I was fascinated by the way those American musicians converted their
ideas into sound. They had their music co-created and performed by the
skilled and unskilled in places conventional and unconventional--on side-
walks, lobbies of public buildings, parks, at each others' homes, in concert
halls, in churches-on standardmusical instruments, on instrumentsof their
own creation, and on objects not usually recognized as musical instruments.
They were applauded, booed, honored, ridiculed, glorified, ignored by
people of their own time and place. For someone who had always studied,
taught, performed, written mostly about the music of people long dead
whose voices I could hear and love only through the thick filter of history
and interpretations several times removed from those of my generation, this
experience was a revelation. For someone who had thought of music only
as acoustic phenomenon, who had taken only brief obligatory glances at
the lives and times of their makers, the exposure to music as it was lived
was irresistible. I knew I could never do what those musicians were do-
ing, but perhaps I could study their lives, not in a biographical but in an
ethnomusicological sense, although I hardly knew the term at that time. It
was explicitly people that were to be my starting point, because it was they
who made music happen. They gave it form and meaning, and thus, to my
mind, they were both the subject to be understood as well as an impor-

tant key to understanding the music that was their creation. This bias re-
mains with me today.
But it was the serendipitous confluence of many things: of otherness;
of exposure to people each of whom was also, in an important sense, an
other in his or her own milieu; of somehow finding myself in New York
City, the quintessential urban locale; of encountering mentors who under-
stood boundaries (musical, locational or disciplinary) not just as closures
but as thresholds, that led me eventually via ethnomusicology to East Har-
lem, a place with ever-contested boundaries and a place that had no mu-
sic distinctively its own. To many of my colleagues, doing fieldwork there
was a joke. To a fool and an "other," it seemed normal.
Signposts: From Cities to Refugee Camps

From East Harlem, venturing into the rest of Manhattandoes not seem
like much of a stretch. What may seem like a stretch is to take East Har-
lem, Manhattan, and the metropolitan area where I had been doing most
of my work as roads leading to refugee camps and to refugee-resettlers as
makers of musical life. But it was those conceptual signposts first encoun-
tered in East Harlem that pointed the way, vaguely at first, and then with
increasing clarity.
Each of these signposts carried a core idea. The first was labeled
"boundaries";the second, "heterogeneity";and the third, "marginality."Of
these, the second (heterogeneity) was a non-concept in the ethnomusico-
logical methods of the time (up to the mid-1970s). The first (boundaries)
was assumed to be, for the most part, pre-defined, and the third (marginal-
ity) was relegated to questions of authenticity. But the city insisted upon,
and demonstrated, the wealth of insights that these signposts and core ideas
could reveal.
Boundaries
East Harlem was an excellent reminder that boundaries are construct-
ed for certain purposes. In this urban community as in others, they define
school districts, parishes, electoral or voting units, census tracts, neighbor-
hoods, gang territories, etc. These boundaries are as likely to conflict with
or nullify as they are to reinforce each other. Musical boundaries appear
arbitraryor evaporate altogether as the residents think of the music in their
community not as sui generis but as an extension of the music of the larg-
er community, which may be New York City, or Puerto Rico and the rest
of the Caribbean, or the United States, or the world of popular music. To
me, a neophyte ethnomusicologist, this situation represented liberation

from the tyranny or the confines of pre-set boundaries. But the freedom
exacts its price: the responsibility for locating, constructing, and justifying
the boundaries that one uses to define what one studies. I owe East Har-
lem the continually challenging realization(which I emphatically distinguish
from comprehension) of something that a whole line of thinkers had known
before: that indeed the subject of study is a construct, not a given. I am
still learning to live up to the difficult corollary that the construct rises or
falls on the methods one brings to bear upon it.
Heterogeneity
When ethnomusicology confined itself to so-called simple societies,
homogeneity was taken to be both norm and premise. It eventually became
an expectation, inevitably conditioning the outcome of analysis. What
seems today to be a commonsensical course of action-to look at what is
actually there, messy and chaotic though it might appear to be, and to figure
out how things function notwithstanding--was hard to see at the time. It
was a classic case of what Thomas Kuhn (1970) had called paradigm-in-
duced expectations. But the cocoon of homogeneity that at one stage was
the womb providing nourishment and warmth, became confining and even
suffocating at the next stage when the need to crawl was supplanted by
the need to fly. The urban area, laden with objects, acts, and items of in-
formation that could be neither ignored nor homogenized, and the persis-
tent lack of fit between assumed homogeneity and perceivable realityfinally
succeeded in challenging the autocracy of homogeneity, in establishing the
potential for systematicity and function in heterogeneity, and in enforcing
a negotiated relationship between homogeneity and heterogeneity.
Marginality
This concept is closely related to the nature of boundaries and to het-
erogeneity in modern social units. It is always reassuring to have a clear line
that separates self and other, insider and outsider, the center and the pe-
riphery, belonging and not belonging. The "exotic," the culturally and geo-
graphically distant, ethnomusicology's primary concern until late into the
1960s, gave us that reassurance. But the complexity of urban societies and
of relationships among and within them deny us this comfort by ambigu-
ating, violating, or obfuscating lines of separation. The finality that self-
contained, presumably unchanging units of study appeared to promise has
been replaced by the constant mutability of urban phenomena and the
different kinds of description and explanation that they demand. Research-
ers grapple with conflicting demands: they desensitize themselves to un-
wanted noises, smells, and sights to protect themselves from system over-
load while simultaneously trying to sensitize themselves to their surround-
ings so as not to impair their capacity for doing effective fieldwork. City
centers are simultaneously frontiers, and the researcher weaves his or her
way between insider- and outsider-hood, working through the ambiguities
and ambivalences that permeate urban life. Marginalityis not marginal to
the urban condition. Rather, it inhabits the core of that condition because
the center eludes location and definition.
These signposts may have been around since antiquity, but ethnomusi-
cologists first saw their significance in cities, and it is still in cities where
we most easily find their manifestations. Cultural boundaries do not stop
where politics and geography say they should. Heterogeneity is constantly
re-invigoratedby in-migration,and marginalityis endemic when boundaries
are so readily transgressed. But we also know now that these signposts and
the phenomena they refer to are no longer-if indeed they ever were-the
exclusive property of cities. What purpose then can the signposts further
serve? To what or where do they suggest we turn our attention?
Signposts: To Migrancy through the Vietnamese

Refugee Experience
Signposts often carry a number of directional arrows that point in dif-
ferent directions. But there is at least one concept underlying the signposts
under discussion that gives them a certain cohesiveness of function and an
applicability beyond the urban: migrancy.
I do not mean migration,which refers to the movement of people, their
goods and their ideas. Rather, I mean migrancy as a state that grows out of
and develops both as consequence of and as part of that movement. It
captures the social dynamics set off by moving from one place to another.
It provides a point of departure for exploring the notion that home-as
country or culture of origin, as a place in which one is native-is less a
tangible location than an idea, one that animates a whole way of life and
gives new meaning to the saying "you can't go home again." In these re-
spects migrancy directs the observer's attention not just to where migrants
have gone and where migrants have been but, perhaps more importantly,
to the emotional, psychological, and creative behaviors that are the prod-
ucts of those moves. If we believe in the importance of context and if we
believe in the contextuality of meaning, we cannot ignore the musical
implications of migrancy.
In recent decades, ethnomusicology has demonstrated its sensitivity to
migration. We encounter migrant musics basking in the light of such con-
cepts and theories as diffusion, acculturation, culture contact, ethnicity, and
globalization. But with painfully rare exceptions, the unmarked premise
upon which these studies rest is voluntary migration. And the models con-
structed upon that premise are based on the experience of voluntary mi-
grants. We are now confronted with a world awash in non-voluntary mi-
grants: people such as Edward Said, the critic George Steiner, and the
philosopher Leszek Kolakowski have been moved to call our age the age
of refugees.' And even were we to believe that war is the only condition
that leads to forced migration, we would still have to contend with the
finding of the historian Will Durant according to whom "there have been
only 29 years in all of human history during which there was not a war in
progress somewhere." "War,"he adds, "is not an occasional interruption
of a normality called peace; it is a climate in which we live" (quoted in
Botsford 1997:6).
It seems, therefore, that in the confrontation between the migrancy of
refugees on the one hand, and the general assumption of migrancy as a
phenomenon born of voluntary migration on the other, lies what Thomas
Kuhn called an anomaly-a departure from a prevailing paradigmfor which
an explanation must be sought.
I wish I could say that it was this reasoning which led me to study
forced migration. But consistent with previous patterns, it was serendipity
and the natural affinity between anomaly and otherness that led me to fol-
low one trajectory of the Vietnamese refugees' journey.
Migrancy and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience

The route was circuitous and long. The exodus which I attempted to
trace traversed geopolitical, continental and cultural boundaries; in many
cases it took more than ten years between departure and arrival in the
United States. Resettlement as immigrants or as Vietnamese-Americans
would take a few years more. A narrativedescription even in summaryform
is therefore of little use on this occasion. I can offer only a fragment or two
to suggest that in forced migration lies not only a rich ethnomusicological
lode waiting to be tapped but an intellectual imperative that follows from
the above facts about migrants, voluntary and non-voluntary; the lack of fit
between those facts and the premises that underlie the methods used to
study musical migration phenomena; and the claims that we make about
the inextricability of context to ethnomusicological description and expla-
nation. Precisely because what follows are fragments lacking a clear narra-
tive thread, they must at all times be referred to a unifying perspective.
The Framework
In the twentieth century, and particularlyafter the Second World War,
refugee flows, especially at their inception, came to be treated as group or
mass movements. Intended to facilitate immigration arrangements and the

administration of aid, this bundling of large numbers of people also ob-
scured the fact that refugees are not only as internally diverse as are volun-
tary migrants. More often than not, they are made even more diverse by a
proliferation of labels ascribed by others, labels hardly acceptable to the
labeled but assigned and legislated by the agencies-international, nation-
al, political, humanitarian--that deal with refugees. Escapees, evacuees,
asylees, exiles, displaced persons, ODPs, TPSs,2 and economic migrants are
only a few of the designations that differentiate forced migrants from each
other and from the rest of the local or host population. In an overwhelm-
ing number of cases, refugees pass through camps on their way to reset-
tlement. For some individuals and groups, this is a brief episode. For oth-
ers, like the Palestinians, it may last for more than a generation. Many
children born in camp or brought there at a very young age know no oth-
er life.
Camps run by or under the supervision of international organizations
like the United Nations or the Red Cross are local manifestations of a de-
cidedly global set of phenomena. Camp sites are provided by national gov-
ernments; they are staffed by local and internationalpersonnel and are fund-
ed by private and public, local and international institutions. Many camps
hold people who have become stateless upon crossing their own country's
borders. In the best-known instances, the UNHCR has oversight of the
camps in partnership-frequently uneasy-with local authorities. Power
relations between refugees, refugee camp authorities, the refugees' coun-
try of origin, and their host countries are therefore highly asymmetrical.
In refugee camps, some of our assumptions about what makes for so-
cial stability are seriously challenged. It is the paradox of refugee camps as
institutions that refugees who stay the longest are the most destabilizing.
In a situation where the common aspiration is to move on to resettlement,
where the temporary character of camp existence is what sustains refugees,
flux is the norm and the possibility of permanence is corrosive.
These extreme conditions of uprootedness and dislocation are central
to the context within which musical life is shaped and reshaped. Looking
back, one sees the signposts pointing to the camps as places where the
usual boundaries--social, cultural, ethnic, musical-are as traumatized as
the people they are supposed to encompass. Heterogeneity is the rule. And
in the continual flow of personnel, refugees as well as staff, marginality
prevails. Here among the refugees, our conceptual signposts loom large and
have special relevance.
This is the background against which I would now like to sketch one
piece of the trajectory that over the last few years I have tried to follow. It
must be emphasized that the refugees I will be referring to are but a seg-
ment, albeit a very large one, of that extremely complex category that the
UNHCR has officially labeled "refugees."
The Emergent Picture

This piece is set in Palawan, an island that lies between the Sulu Ar-
chipelago and the South China Sea, in a camp of first asylum, for many, the
first stop after escape from Vietnam, and the first indication that they had
escaped with their lives. The remoteness of the island used to serve the
purpose of isolating two feared populations, lepers and criminals. Now the
leper colony is gone; only the penal colony remains. In the few fenced acres
by the sea which the refugee camp occupied, I was constantly reminded
of the small, self-contained units upon which ethnomusicology had lavished
much of its attention. But I was also constantly reminded of the island of
Manhattanand its irreducible complexity, a complexity abundantly shared
by the Palawan refugee camp.
There were three sets of actors whose interactions shaped the social
and musical life of the camp. There were the Philippine personnel who
ranged from the military in charge of security to the teachers, the service
providers, and the manual laborers. Then there was the international con-
tingent of UNHCRofficers, voluntary agencies, and representatives of po-
tential host countries who came from all over the Western world and in-
troduced the refugees to a diversity of cultures. Finally there were the
Vietnamese refugees themselves, whose numbers fluctuated from approx-
imately 2000 to 7000, and who varied widely in religious affiliation, socio-
economic status, educational background, ethnicity, and urban or rural
orientation.
The differences among the Vietnamese were underscored and exacer-
bated by the housing arrangements which threw strangers together in
crowded quarters. The old social order had been abruptly and seriously
disrupted by the expediencies of escape. The deference usually accorded
to the intelligentsia, for instance, yielded to the power of boat ownership
and expertise in navigation. Once in camp, the hierarchy was redefined yet
again. A Vietnamese Refugee (VR) Council elected by refugees had charge
of refugee internal affairs. The VR Council was accountable to the Philip-
pine military, which was accountable to the national government. Volun-
tary agencies were contracted either by the national government or by
international institutions, and, in a rather loose sense, the camp operation
was under the general supervision of the UNHCR. Social interaction was
both enriched and complicated by the fact that this camp was what was
called an open camp, i.e., the refugees could come and go as they wished
as long as they were back in camp before the 10:00 P.M.curfew. Children
were bused to town schools about a mile away, refugees sold fish and pro-
duce raised in camp to townspeople with whom they also socialized, and
townspeople learned some basic Vietnamese to facilitate transactions.
Out of what at first glance seemed like a collection of incongruities
emerged a coherent sociomusical life that bore the marks of the different
cultural and musical systems that the refugees and the non-refugees brought
to this arena of human interaction. The resulting order was a testament to
the human capacity to respond creatively under the most trying conditions.
Vietnamese participation was shaped by the events that had brought
them to Palawan. Many of the musical sounds that came stored in their
memories could not be actualized for lack of means. The circumstances of
their departure from Vietnam made it virtually impossible to bring musical
instruments; many, after having been pirated at sea, arrived only with the
clothes on their back. Of the instruments available locally, only the guitar
could be adapted to the needs of the Vietnamese musical system. Guitars
were scalloped, that is, their fingerboards were dug deeper between the
frets to allow the strings greater play and hence better ability to respond
to the pitch and embellishment needs of Vietnamese music. These con-
straints on the live performance of instrumental music were compensated
for through the media. Some refugees who had been in camp long enough
to receive gifts from friends or family already resettled had cassette play-
ers or boom boxes that brought in Vietnamese music from abroad. Song,
already a dominant part of musical life in Vietnam, assumed an even great-
er role. It could be heard live in Buddhist temples, churches, billets, indeed
everywhere.
There were two basic musical idioms in camp: one based on Western
tonal harmony, the other based on the distinctively Vietnamese system of
pitch and time organization and its manner of ornamentation. The idiom
based on Western tonal harmony was what was familiar to the camp as a
whole; it was the musical lingua franca. The Vietnamese idiom was con-
sidered "theirs/not ours" by the non-Vietnamese. The Vietnamese musical
repertory drew from both the Western and Vietnamese musical idioms. The
Filipinos and Westerners, as a rule, were conversant only with the West-
ern idiom.
The repertory heard in camp can be classified according to convention-
al criteria: religious/secular, vocal/instrumental, love songs/work songs,
popular/traditional, etc. The Vietnamese repertory could be categorized
according to Vietnamese regions (conventionally North, Central or South)
or according to genres, many of which have regional connotations. Hat
cheo and hat cai luong, for instance, are musical theatre types from the
North and the South respectively. But in the first case the resulting order,
while useful may reflect more the general Western conventions governing
musical typology than those features that shed light on the musical life of
this camp. And conventional Vietnamese typology may be of limited use

in the face of ethnographic reality. In addition to the lack of the proper
musical instruments and the proper occasions and practitioners for certain
types of music such as the chau van and other forms of what Pham Duy
called "cult music" (1975:89), there was also the fact that there were only
South Vietnamese in Palawan. This situation, unusual for refugee camps in
Southeast Asia, resulted from the fact that Palawan and South Vietnam are
on the same latitude. When boats failed and were left to the mercy of the
tides, or when refugees took advantage of the monsoon winds, the likeli-
hood of their ending up in Palawan was considerable. The very few who
came from the North did not volunteer that information so as not to trig-
ger speculation about where their loyalties lay. Thus, the functions and
priorities that had governed conventional musical typology, like those that
had governed the social hierarchy, were thrown to question.
Searching for alternativeprinciples of organization,I benefited from the
remarks of an experienced UNHCR field officer who told me that asylees
in Palawan felt little need to assert their Vietnamese identity because they
were among other Vietnamese in what they saw as a Vietnamese environ-
ment. I recalled my experience in Manhattanwhen I learned much by step-
ping away from conventional labels for the music the city had to offer-
opera, rock, salsa, jazz, symphony, bomba, rai, etc.-and looking instead
into patterns that came out of ethnographic data.3
In Palawan, when I asked Vietnamese what kind of music they were
playing or listening to, they did not name a Vietnamese genre, assuming
perhaps that I would not know or be interested. But farther along the mi-
gration trajectory, when I found myself among the Vietnamese in New Jer-
sey and California, I realized that they were not just being considerate of
my ignorance. They were also expressing what was uppermost in their
minds at the time in terms understandable not only to Vietnamese but also
to non-Vietnamese, an important consideration given the refugees' sensi-
tivity to the larger society within which they now find themselves. Over
and over again, they told me that the music they performed and listened
to most were "sad songs" and "love songs."
The acoustic features-they were mostly in the Western harmonic id-
iom-and the lyrics of each song justified the descriptive terms. But their
significance as potential or quasi- categories came from the songs collec-
tively, as statement of historical fact and of ideology. This assignment of
significance was later supported by the narratives and the growing body
of published accounts by former refugees.4
The historical basis for the dominance of these songs offered by Viet-
namese in Palawan and, subsequently, in the United States, lay in the years
of continual warfare-with the Chinese, the French, the Japanese, the
Americans, and the Viet Cong-that have made separation and loss part of
virtually every family's story. The ideological grounds for preferring "sad"
songs and "love" songs lay deeply embedded in the Vietnamese exodus.
Until the late 1980s, the Socialist government of Vietnam had prohibited
love songs and songs nostalgic for pre-1975 Vietnam (see note 4). To sing
"sad songs" and "love songs" in Vietnam was therefore an act of defiance
or of self-differentiationfrom those who accepted the government proscrip-
tion. In Palawan, singing those songs became both an exercise of the free-
dom from that proscription and a means of compensating for past depri-
vation.
The textual, historical, and ideological bonds that bound these songs
as a class found continual reinforcement in the pervasive sense of both
release and loss that would remain a dominant theme in the lives of Viet-
namese as they moved from camp to camp, from status to status as escap-
ee, then asylee, then refugee, and finally resettler. But although this account
sheds light on Vietnamese music-making in camp and beyond, it tends to
extricate the Vietnamese from the complex network of interactions that
defined their life in Palawan. It tends to decontextualize the Vietnamese
part within that network.
What seemed more revealing of the camp as a whole, as an organic
social unit, was a basic contrast between music as private and as public act.
That contrast illumined all participant-groups' views of each other, the
resulting dynamics, and the nature of the relations between dichotomous
musical and non-musical worlds that had to be forged in order to construct
the social unit that was specifically the Palawan camp. In this respect, the
contrast presented a picture of the Vietnamese refugees' migrancy at this
particular stage of their migration story. At the same time, in the integra-
tion of the musical and the more broadly social made possible by focusing
on the response of one to the other, the public-private contrast as organi-
zational principle yielded a more comprehensive ethnomusicological pic-
ture of the total camp situation than a characterization of the Vietnamese
musical component alone could have afforded.
Privacy is a highly relative term in a camp as small and as densely pop-
ulated as this one. Asylee huts were huddled close together, there were no
doors to speak of, and the thinness of the walls made audible what they
hid from sight. Under these conditions, by "private"I do not mean what is
commonsensically understood. Rather, it is a consequence of the opposi-
tion created by camp life and the relationships within it. The substance of
the opposition lay in the Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese perceptions of
each other's music, the accommodations that they made in response, and
the motivations of each group to make those accommodations. The pub-
lic and the private thus emerged from tacit understandings between the
interacting groups and consequently can be said to represent something

organic to their relationships.
Music as public act was music that was presented specifically for pub-
lic consumption in a public arena or through a public venue. On the level
of acoustic phenomena, music in the Western toial idiom, with or with-
out Vietnamese text, and regardless of who performed it or for whom, was
the most frequently presented as public act. But music in the Vietnamese
musical idiom can become public act on those occasions when the Viet-
namese as a community celebrate special events. These celebrations require
official recognition as public function and permission for performance in
a common arena. An example of such an event was the performance of a
full-length cai luong, a distinctively Vietnamese form, in the center of camp
as part of the commemoration of the mid-autumn festival, an important
Vietnamese celebration. Underscoring the difference between public and
private act were the rehearsals for the event. These belonged to the pri-
vate sphere and were conducted in the camp's periphery.
But perhaps more illustrative are the following two accounts of my
experience, one because it exemplifies the rule and the other because it
provides the exception that could prove the rule.
I was dismayed when a well-meaning staff member introduced me to
the chairman of the Vietnamese Refugee Council as someone who wanted
to know whether music-making made life in camp easier. As though re-
sponding to a cue, the chairman, apologizing that he could not come up
with professional musicians, some time later provided me with a program
of Vietnamese folk songs and guitar pieces by Andres Segovia played by a
former Saigon Conservatory student. According to an officer of the Coun-
cil, the camp had heard about my arrival through the public address sys-
tem. Some asylees, upon hearing the announcement, had come to him to
volunteer to sing and play for me. From that self-selected group he had
picked out those who could play what he thought I had come to hear, that
is, what he thought my non-Vietnamese hosts had expected me to hear. This
conjecture was borne out when I finally convinced him that my interests
did not necessarily coincide with those of my official hosts, and that I was
not looking specifically for professional musicians. I was then allowed into
the "private"musical sphere.
The move from a public repertory, one based on a Vietnamese and non-
Vietnamese common denominator, to a private one, that is, one in a musi-
cal language comprehensible only to the Vietnamese, was paralleled by a
spatial move. When the Vietnamese Refugee Council saw its task to be
responding to the camp administration's request by accommodating me,
its representative arranged a music session in the VR Council office, locat-
ed in the center of the camp, and part of a complex of offices for camp
personnel. The spatial equivalent of music as private act was in the periph-
ery of the camp where there were no other non-Vietnamese in sight or
within earshot.
The walk to that location also symbolized the cultural distance between
the musical idioms involved. Since this communal music-makingtook place
mostly at night, when the refugees' "public" routines were finished, the
walk, although short, involved picking my way with a flashlight through
informally arranged living quarters and small flower or vegetable beds un-
til I reached a clearing with some partially-walled bamboo structures. I
needed the guidance of a VR Council member to find the way; I doubt that
any of the Filipino or Western staff members would have led me to that
location at the proper (i.e., music-making) time.
Here, the scene resembled a gathering in a social club. There were
people playing board games, others gossiping with each other, and some
just looking on. Two Buddhist monks were supervising cai luong rehears-
als, and a solitary guitarist off in one corner played softly to himself. In one
of the structures, men were resting on a bamboo platform that served as
sleeping or eating area. A few feet from the platform was a longish table at
which people sat singing, one after another, songs that they said they had
learned from each other, or brought from Vietnam, or composed them-
selves. There were poetry recitations and folk songs. In contrast to the
individuals who had volunteered to perform after they heard of my pres-
ence through the public address system, those making music here were not
self-selected for my purposes. They were doing what they wanted to do
with and for each other in an environment of their choice. Here in the
periphery of camp, musical activities that were kept away from the center
of things out of consideration for, or perhaps self-protection from, uncom-
prehending Western ears, were freely enacted.
The exception that could prove the rule was an incident that involved
one of the vong co singers I had met in the "private"sphere who turned
out to be a worker in the office of the military administration.Jokingly, the
secretary in the office (a non-Vietnamese staff member who knew nothing
of the young man's singing activities) suggested to the worker that he may
wish to sing for me. To the secretary's surprise, the worker jumped at the
chance, ran out to gather some friends and came back to take over the
conference room for our session.
The young Vietnamese interpreted the secretary's suggestion as an
invitation to sing "private"music-vong co in this case-in public premises.
Frustrated that my tape recorder was not really the kind of play-back ma-
chine that would enable them to broadcast what they were doing to their
fellow Vietnamese outside, they decided to borrow the officer-in-charge's
boom box. The young man sent on the errand was instructed to say that I
was the one borrowing the box. When I demurred, the group argued that
it was the only way they could have their music-making heard by the rest
of the camp under these circumstances. In other words, they recognized
that this occasion was an exceptional one: a departure from the unspoken
distinction between public and private music-makingthat, on this occasion,
had been made admissible by my presence and by the "invitation"of a staff
member.
The mutual accommodation reflected in musical life and evident in day-
to-day interaction was, of course, not motivated by altruism or goodwill
alone. What effectively translated that accommodation to social cohesion
was a recognition by all actors of their interlocking interests. For non-Viet-
namese, having the Vietnamese attend to security and internal order was
an efficient use of scarce resources. The presence of people who were
exemplars of resistance to communism had propaganda value for the Phil-
ippine government which, until the 1980s, was grappling with its own
problems with communist insurgents (Hitchcox 1990). The Vietnamese in
turn were exercising the utmost care that nothing would jeopardize their
resettlement. This meant not only strict adherence to regulations and co-
operation with those who can facilitate resettlement, but also the suppres-
sion of anything that can be misunderstood. This particularstrategy-what
Knudsen (1988:chapter 5) called the "privatization"of problems and per-
sonal feelings-found expression in the singing of sad songs and love songs;
what cannot be said can often be sung. It found expression as well in the
public-private contrast that came to play an important role in the organiza-
tion of Vietnamese sociomusical life in camp.
Migrancy and "Home"

The Palawan camp represents just a tree in the forest that is the refu-
gee experience. Nonetheless, if trees hold clues to the secret that is the
forest, what clues might this camp hold? The question is itself questionable
because it seems to imply a logic constantly belied by the unpredictability
of the form and direction events take. Policies and legislation governing
refugees change on the local, national and international levels. Whether
some country would receive them and if so, which and under what condi-
tions, are matters that compound the disruptive effects of "coerced home-
lessness."5
Prior to arriving in the U.S., most Vietnamese refugees had gone
through the process of painfully learning routines totally alien and almost
incomprehensible to most of them as they passed from one camp to an-
other. Each move meant severance from support systems that seemed to
grow increasingly fragile with each step. In the United States under a pol-
icy of dispersed resettlement, many were sent to live in assigned locations

where there may or may not be co-nationals to ease adaptation. For many,
the search for a new home would not be over until they had found the
wherewithal to settle down in a place of their own choice.
It is therefore all the more remarkable that certain structures or cer-
tain elements of structures have persisted through this series of disruptions.
Part of this persistence comes from the determination professed by many
refugees to conserve a culture that they believe the communists have de-
stroyed. Especially in the years immediately following the exodus, this
determination and a deep longing for home were the most openly ex-
pressed parts of a relationship with homeland that, on the whole, was highly
complex, therefore resistant to clear articulation, often suppressed but
nonetheless ineradicable. Even as relations with mediating agencies faded
in importance as the legal status of "refugee" was adjusted to that of "im-
migrant"in the new homeland, there remained the obligatory relationships
between the Vietnamese based not only on their common culture but also
on their shared experience as refugees. These relationships, both rooted
in what Nietzsche called fictive reality-one idealized and past-oriented, the
other, a constant and survival-related presence which continued to in-
fluence refugees even after their survival was assured-were among the
structures which, like leitmotifs, lent coherence to the discontinuous and
sprawling drama that was the refugee experience. And exemplifying them
were the sad songs and love songs first encountered in Palawan.
Particularized by the Vietnamese and endowed with specifically Viet-
namese meanings that draw from an ideological and historical matrix, those
songs recall a pre-1975 Vietnam, a culture that many former refugees be-
lieve must be conserved away from those they believe were agents of its
destruction. The content and the references of the songs made manifest in
music and text are further confirmed by visual images when the songs are
performed abroad on videocassette, on television, or in clubs. Such imag-
es employ slow motion, double exposure, sepia tones to suggest a time
gone by. The songs are accompanied by idyllic scenes of the Vietnamese
countryside, scenes of parting as lovers go off to war, or scenes of parades
with the flag of the old Vietnamese Republic prominently displayed.
Through these means, these songs have been made repositories of Vietnam-
ese history and culture as seen through refugees' eyes. For this reason, many
of them have been admitted into the repertory of Vietnamese traditional
music performed in the United States.
The breaching of typological boundaries that this represents, from tan
nbac, which Phong T. Nguyen (1987) describes as "modem," "Western-
ized," "popularmusic" to Vietnamese traditionalmusic,6 demonstrates both
the pragmatic nature of typology and the dynamic, transforming nature of
migrancy. The former abandons its customary dependence on acoustic

features to characterize a musical type or genre in order to gain better ac-
cess to the latter. Thus migrancy stands better revealed in the evolving
network of relations-historical and contemporary-of which migrants are
a part.
Codetta
All migration sets up a tripartite relationship between the migrants,
their homeland, and the host society. It is their relations with the home-
land which migrants use as reference point when they present what they
want to be understood as traditional in their new home. What then is the
significance of presenting, as traditional, songs that had been proscribed
in the homeland, songs that, as a rule, use a Western musical idiom and
Western musical instruments?I have dealt with this issue elsewhere in te ms
of the disjunction between the meaning system and the expression system
in some facets of Vietnamese music, and in terms of the conflict in the aural
representation of traditional music in Vietnam and in the United States.7I
will here cite only what is pertinent to the present discussion.
In Vietnam, traditional music has been subjected to government con-
trol, has become more institutionalized, more differentiated in form and
function from popular musical genres in the Western musical idiom that
have now become part of mainstream musical life in Vietnam.8As a result,
the traditional music repertory has become more narrowly circumscribed.
In the Vietnamese-American context, the inclusion of so-called sad songs
and love songs indicates an expansion of the scope of what can be consid-
ered traditional music: the concept is subject not to government approval
but to communal recognition. This bifurcation cannot be attributed solely
or principally to temporal and physical distance from homeland. It is, rath-
er, the musical consequence of phenomena intrinsic to forced migration.
For among voluntary migrants, the music that they present as traditional
in their new home, no matter how different from the home version, "is
nonetheless an affirmation of rootedness or identification with homeland,
a tribute not only to what it was but to what it is.... [In contrast, the mu-
sic that is evolving as traditional among former Vietnamese refugees] is an
affirmation of identification with the Vietnam that was and a declaration
of difference from what it now is" (Reyes Schramm 1995:20-21).
This is why two flags represent the Vietnamese in the United States
despite their country's unification. Until 1992, when I last conducted field
work in California, it was the flag of the old Republic that flew daily in
Orange County's Little Saigon, and it is what is used in the Procession of
Flags that opens Tet celebrations in New York and New Jersey. This is why
the deep longing for home that refugees have consistently professed in both
speech and song has not been acted upon by many refugee-resettlers, de-
spite the removal of official barriers to return.
The differences between forced and voluntary migrants in the context
of the tripartite relationships mentioned above are confirmed in studies such
as those of the Vietnamese community in Paris (Bousquet 1991) and in
Quebec City (Dorais et al. 1989), of Chileans in California (Eastmond 1992),
and of Cubans in Miami (Rieff 1993). Perhaps it is time for ethnomusicology
to look more closely at migrancy and forced migration not just as subject
matter but as methodological frontier. For here we see boundaries becom-
ing more elusive than ever. Beyond heterogeneity lies what Iain Chambers
has called heterogenesis-the transformation of a single historical origin to
multiple histories made and re-made, the "interlacing of what we have in-
herited and what we are" (1995:15). And we return to the city, not as we
had found it in mid-century but as it has become and is in the process of
becoming. Tina Rosenberg has recently called New York "the nation's larg-
est refugee camp," with its wealth of immigrant communities attracting co-
nationals fleeing repressive regimes (1997:32-33). Andre Aciman, relates
his status as exile to his "home," New York:
An exile is not just someone who has lost his home; it [sic] is someone who
can't find another, who can't think of another. Some no longer even know what
home means. They reinvent the concept with what they've got. New York
....
is my home precisely because it is a place from where I can begin to be else-
where-an analogue city, a surrogate city, a shadow city....(1997:35-37).
The city's signposts have pointed to refugee camps. Refugee camps have
come to the city.
This transformation in our understanding of movement, marginality and mod-
em life is inextricably tied to the metropolitanisation of the globe, where the
model of the city becomes... the model of the contemporary world. The mi-
grant's sense of living between worlds, between a lost past and a non-integrated
present, is perhaps the most fitting metaphor of this (post)modern
condition.... The previous margins now fold in on the centre" (Chambers
1995:28).
Notes
This article is a revised version of the Charles Seeger Lecture delivered at the annual meeting
of the Society for Ethnomusicology at Pittsburgh, October 25, 1997.
1. "... [O]ur age-with its modern warfare, imperialism and the quasi-theological am-
bitions of totalitarian rulers-is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass
immigration" (Said 1990:357). Said also cites George Steiner's thesis "that a whole genre of
twentieth-century Western literatureis... a literatureby and about exiles, symbolizing the age
of the refugee" (ibid.:357). And in his book, Modernity on Endless Trial, Kolakowski writes:
"We have to accept, however reluctantly, the simple fact that we live in an age of refugees"
(1990:59).
2. These acronyms stand for the Orderly Departure Program (ODP), an agreement be-
tween Vietnam and Western nations to facilitate reuniting refugees with their families, and
Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which allows those seeking asylum to remain in the Unit-
ed States while the conditions that led to their flight are still in effect.
3. See Reyes Schramm 1982. The advantages of using preexisting labels for musical types
or genres-for identification, or as a point of departure for comparative work, for example-
are obvious. But the potential disadvantages must also be carefully considered. Conventional
labels for established musical forms-such as vong co, nbac tai tu, hat cheo in Vietnam-
strongly suggest the usual contexts of their performance and use, and the historical and cul-
tural context within which they evolved. But when musical forms and behaviors are abruptly
and violently torn from their native or accustomed environment, the names by which they
are customarily known may mislead by conjuring up their old context when the new may
have altered or replaced their meanings. In this respect and under those conditions, automatic
reliance on conventional labels and typologies may not be the most efficient ethnomusico-
logical strategy.
4. For example, references to sad songs and love songs are scattered through Pham Duy's
Musics of Vietnam (1975). Nguyen Qui Duc conflates love songs and sad songs in what he
calls "sentimental songs" which, he reports, "disappeared"when the Viet Cong first came to
power in South Vietnam (1994:99). It is thus not only textual content and musical features
that make sad songs and love songs admissible as a class particularly during the period begin-
ning in 1947 in North Vietnam and in 1975 in South Vietnam. It is also, and perhaps more
importantly, their function as contrastive category to the art and music championed by the
Communist government. Jamieson writes that "the prescribed mode for all art, for all cultur-
al cadres was 'socialist realism"' (1993:212). The advocacy of revolution, of collective over
individual expression, of the Vietnamese Communist Party'smodel of a new and independent
Vietnam was vigorously promoted through poetry and music. Songs were used with great
efficacy as an instrument of control, in particularthose songs or tunes that "were widely known
and long remembered, providing a highly redundant source for transmitting to a mass audi-
ence the core values on which the ideology of the new regime was based" (ibid., 222). In
this context, love songs and sad songs as distinct repertories gain greater clarity not through
the positive identification of distinctive ftatures but through binary opposition-the recog-
nition of the features that make for mutual exclusivity despite shared "values" (Lyons
1968:127).
5. Ruben G. Rumbaut points to "the very essence of the refugee experience-the co-
erced nature of their homelessness. . ." (1989:167).
6. For a discussion of this topic, see Reyes Schramm 1995.
7. Reference here is to Reyes Schramm 1986 and 1995 respectively.
8. Data and analysis supporting these statements are in Reyes Schramm 1995.
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From Urban Area to Refugee Camp: How One Thing Leads to Another

Author(s): Adelaida Reyes

From Urban Area to Refugee Camp:

The Vantage Point: Biases and Labels

? 1999 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

mind, they were both the subject to be understood as well as an impor-

Signposts: From Cities to Refugee Camps

me, a neophyte ethnomusicologist, this situation represented liberation

Signposts: To Migrancy through the Vietnamese

Migrancy and the Vietnamese Refugee Experience

mass movements. Intended to facilitate immigration arrangements and the

The Emergent Picture

this camp. And conventional Vietnamese typology may be of limited use

interacting groups and consequently can be said to represent something

Migrancy and "Home"

icy of dispersed resettlement, many were sent to live in assigned locations

migrancy. The former abandons its customary dependence on acoustic

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