FOREIGN: Bohan Phoenix
Story by Jiaqi Kang
This interview was originally published in Issue #2 “COLOR 彩”. Read it now on BLURB.
A pagoda sits atop a pier somewhere in Beijing. Its pillars — red for prosperity and happiness — and tiled, tilted roof are reflected in the quiet greyness of the lake below while traditional Chinese music plays softly in the background. Ripples begin to form in the water when two figures appear in the side of the frame, walking briskly along the pier. Behind them loom tall apartment blocks, grimy from pollution.
Cut to within the pagoda: two men sit on the floor, playing Chinese chess and smoking. The hurried figures — a Chinese man with shiny eyes, accompanied by a loyal, skinny white friend — arrive, slightly breathless. As their footsteps approach, one of the chess players, a black man with sharp cheekbones and somewhat cheap-looking silk pyjamas, flips a fake braid attached to his vaguely Qing-era imperial yellow cap. A twanging sound effect is heard as the frame freezes on his bulging eyes and gaping mouth. An intertitle introduces him: Black Sesame. “Bohan?” he squawks in faux surprise, looking up at the Chinese man. “I haven’t seen you in thirty-five years. What the fuck are you doing in Beijing?”
“Somebody’s got Chewy, man, they got Chewy!” comes the answer from Bohan. It had barely been twenty-four hours since he’d received the international call, which informed him that his cousin in the capital had been kidnapped and that the ransom was 3.5 billion yuan. He’d immediately flown from New York to Beijing to scour the streets for Black Sesame, hoping that his old friend would help him. “Where the fuck can I get that type of money ‘round here?”
“I don’t know,” says Black Sesame. He rubs his temple in exaggerated deep thought, then consults his chess opponent. “What do you think, Howie?”
Howie Lee raises his head, a strange gaze staring from behind thick glasses. “Neng shuochang ma?” he asks in Mandarin. “Can you rap?”
And suddenly, like a stage curtain falling away, everything solid melts into air. The soft light and peaceful lake setting is gone, abruptly replaced by an unnamed Beijing concert venue. An ominous, piercing chant appears out of nowhere, accompanied by frantic drums and the sudden figure of a man shrouded by darkness. It takes a second for us to realise that this is the same Chinese man as in the previous scene — he has removed his thick hoodie and is now shirtless and defiant as he barks into a microphone behind a blurred lens, his entire body writhing to the beat. An excited audience sways around him, pale arms and hands glinting for the briefest of moments under nervous, flashing lights. The visuals, which storm by on fast-forward, begin to fuse together into a swirl of neon colors and pixels.
This is Bohan Phoenix, Chinese-American rapper extraordinaire, utterly brash near the three-minute mark of the music video for Motivasian, a song taken from his latest EP entitled Foreign. It’s a track in which, like much of his discography, his boyish, insolent voice masterfully switches between English and Mandarin as he raps about his experiences. As someone whose identity is composed of two vastly different cultures, he is a foreigner everywhere he goes — too Chinese for America, and too American for China.
Bohan Phoenix is a rising figure in the hip-hop circuit. As one of a tiny handful of Asian-American rappers, his ethnicity makes him stand out from the crowd and his music is anything but ordinary. Unlike most other non-black hip-hop artists, he doesn’t merely mimic the conventions of black music culture, but works to bring traditional elements into fusion with rap. Phoenix’s smooth incorporation of Mandarin into his music distinguishes him from many Asian-American rappers who did not grow up speaking their mother tongues, and this double fluency allows him the potential to thrive in his native country. And yet, by embracing this notably unique style, Phoenix runs the risk of alienating a chunk of his Western audience and may not become a big star anytime soon — though even those who don’t understand what he is saying admit that he has an obvious affinity for rap. Although he doesn’t even have his own Wikipedia page yet, this independent artist is part of the new online generation that doesn’t need to be signed to a label to be well-known. With over 210’000 plays on his Soundcloud and fans from all over the world, the twenty-four-year-old Phoenix is slowly and steadily conquering the globe.
I find Phoenix on the porch of a quiet suburban house to the west of Boston on a fresh summer morning. Wearing a plain white T-shirt, old sweatpants, and a gaudy leopard-print bandana reminiscent of nineties housewives, he invites my two friends and me into his mother’s dark, cluttered home. There’s that familiar greeting the Chinese use: “Have you eaten?” As we pass through the kitchen, he gestures towards the stove, where a pot full of congee sits alongside a tray of multicolored dumplings. His mother made him a special meal the evening before because he’d come from Brooklyn to visit her, he tells us as he sits back down in front of his laptop on the dining table. Mrs. Phoenix, it seems, is enthusiastic in the kitchen: I brush past a pile of glazed pillows made of marzipan, and sit down with my elbow next to a sponge cake in the shape of a ukulele.
Phoenix’s last name is Leng, which is the same as his mother’s, as he has only met his biological father twice. His parents weren’t married, so when his mother became pregnant, she had to return to Hubei province and marry her high school classmate in order to avoid the stigma surrounding single mothers. Phoenix is like many children of the jiuling hou, post-90s, generation that sprung up after Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms in the eighties. New economic opportunities pushed millions of young Chinese to newly prosperous cities, where they made money to send back home to family. Phoenix was raised by his grandparents in Yichang, a provincial city with a population of 4 million on the banks of the Yangtze, while his mother migrated to work in booming Shenzhen in the south. He struggled in school, and his mother realized that she would never be able to to keep up with the strict Chinese education system once he was in high school. She worked in real estate and was better off than most migrant workers, who, even today, bounce listlessly from factory to factory for years, unable to scrape together enough money to find a way out.
And so, at the turn of the millennium, she moved to the United States in search of better opportunities for her son. Phoenix followed in 2003 at the age of 11. When he first arrived, he spoke no English and was unable to communicate with his white stepfather. He recalls crying almost every night for home. His grandmother died not long after, an event that, Phoenix tells me, “took away a reason for me to go back to China.” After a couple of years in the States, he finally adjusted and settled down, becoming close with his stepfather, who treated him as his own flesh and blood. It didn’t hurt that he discovered hip-hop classics like Eminem and Tupac, whose music helped him to learn the language and gave him something in common with the local kids.
Back in the dining room, Phoenix busies himself on his computer as he waits for us to finish eating the dumplings. He strokes his meagre goatee while whistling and occasionally checking Pokémon Go on his phone. He makes easy small talk and, once he finds out that one of my friends will be interning at a Hong Kong music festival this autumn, he immediately begins speaking over the phone to a contact at VICE China about appearing in the line-up. Phoenix is jittery and active, always on the lookout for the opportunity to hone his craft, his ears constantly tuned into the soundscape around him — on one occasion, deep into our interview, he stops abruptly to listen to the beeping sound of a van as it backs out of its parking space, casually commenting, “That’s a nice sound,” before returning to his original line of thought, his expression equally intrigued and amused.
There’s also a boyish innocence about him; he flits from topic to topic, his thoughts bouncing around and colliding with one another. He chats about House of Cards and going camping, and we have a brief conversation about Chairman Mao’s infamous infected pimple as he drives us in his mom’s Honda to a nearby park. There, the Wednesday sunlight rests modestly on pale green grass, and Phoenix plomps down onto dusty bleachers to admire the stark blue sky. Even when sitting down, he constantly fidgets with his various accessories: he takes his sunglasses off, then puts them on again; he twirls his bracelets around on his wrist — there’s an innate skittish energy that seems to seep out of his very pores and sink into his music. His lyrics are at times playful and light-hearted, reflecting the laid-back way he enjoys life: Motivasian includes the tongue-in-cheek lines I heard they don’t ever pay attention / Spit a few in Mandarin to check if they listenin’.
For much of his career, Phoenix was convinced that he needed to create what he describes as “poetic rap”: contemplative, introspective music with artistic symbolism. It’s with this mindset that he churned out the 2013 mixtape X Years. Its title referred to the ten years he has spent in each of his two home countries: China and the United States. Although it received critical acclaim, only traces of it can now be found as Phoenix has wiped it from the Internet. He tells me that he felt the music didn’t properly convey the concept of his split cultural identity. “I probably had, like, 3 lines of Chinese on that entire thing,” he says. “Afterwards, I was like, ‘This doesn’t make sense.’ So it took it down.” From the few videos that I can find through some minor YouTube sleuthing, it seems that making X Years was tantamount to coloring within the lines. A review on the Hip Hop Speakeasy praises Phoenix’s talents but notes that he “rhymes over classic instrumentals”. He had grown up listening to great hip-hop, but had not yet, at the time, found his own voice. His embarrassment at X Years is evident in the fact that it no longer exists.
Another song that Phoenix is considering removing from the Internet is So(ul) Faded, a 2014 singsong track set to a closed-eyed piano melody created during what Phoenix calls his “J. Cole phase,” after the North Carolina-raised rapper famous for his lyrical hip-hop. In the music video, which is entirely in black-and-white, a dismal-looking Phoenix gets a haircut as he raps pessimistically about the desolate state of society today. The song is dark and heavy, and features news footage from the Boston Marathon bombing that took place in April 2013. “So(ul) Faded makes me so fucking sad,” Phoenix says. “It’s depressing. I don’t like performing it. I don’t like listening to it.” But what Phoenix doesn’t mention are the hints of imitation. It’s been pointed out to me that the haircut Phoenix is getting is a fade, and that he’s sitting in a traditional black barbershop. In the world of hip-hop — a music scene created and led by African-Americans — Phoenix and other non-black rappers of color straddle the line between dealing with their own racial marginalization and seeking refuge by unduly engaging with black culture. As a result, this adoption of attributes, including black hairstyles and language (African American Vernacular English, abbreviated as AAVE), presents an obvious problem as black people themselves are condemned for the display of their own culture, but non-black people can freely perform it with little censure.
Asians in hip-hop often feel racially alienated. Jaeki Cho and Salima Koroma, the filmmakers behind Bad Rap, a 2016 documentary about the topic, wrote in an email that not only do Asian-American rappers face the regular racial stereotypes, but, on top of this, there “aren’t many Asian-American artists, executives, and media personalities to start,” according to Cho. “Also, until recently, East Asian culture discouraged participation in art and entertainment, while praising conformity.” And then there’s the toxic dichotomy — while black men have historically been wrongfully perceived as aggressive and dangerous, cultural distortions emasculate Asian men. As Phoenix himself says, nodding: “Dongfang ruo fu.” The weak man from the East.
“Hip-hop has always been an art that encourages machismo,” Cho tells me. So perhaps to overcome misconceptions about being effeminate, Asians in hip-hop across the world will attempt to compensate by appropriating black culture. They pick the most appealing aspects and try them on like new clothes, with little regard for the brutal history of social and systemic discrimination specific to African-Americans that led to the creation and evolution of black culture in the first place. Keith Ape, the Korean rapper whose It G Ma went viral in 2015, wears braids in his hair and grills in his teeth; Brian Imanuel, an Indonesian comedian who raps under the name ‘Rich Chigga’, has used black slang as well as the N-word. Phoenix acknowledges that copying black culture can lead to quicker success. “Without all that,” he admits, “it takes way longer to blow up.”
There can sometimes be a thin line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation. Phoenix doesn’t consciously try to imitate black culture, appearing to disapprove of such an act. He believes that using the N-word is unnecessary. “It doesn’t make sense,” he explains. Non-black rappers, he says, will imitate trends that they think is ‘cool’ without thinking about the meaning behind it. “People don’t think about why they’re doing things anymore. Keith Ape? He’s super original in his own way. But outside of that, it’s all carbon copy.” When Phoenix finds fame, it’s going to be through his own creative efforts. But he tugs at his wrist, where he sports a bracelet that looks like a metal fork bent into a circular shape, and shrugs. “I’m not gonna knock it, because that’s their hustle… I think time will tell who’s gonna have longevity,” he says. “I wanna have longevity,” he adds.
To Phoenix, the originality and sincerity in his art is paramount: “My mentor tells me that the day you decide to be yourself, your life becomes easier and easier.” His mentor is his gospel choir teacher, Sheldon Reid, also associated with the Kuumba Singers of Harvard College, and who was the first to truly encourage his enthusiasm for rap, during the last two years of high school. He had Phoenix write verses that he would perform solo, with the choir backing him up, in front of the entire school. That gave Phoenix the confidence to perform, and drew him towards music as a profession. Ever since his gospel days, he has been constantly renewing himself for his art — and it’s no surprise that the moniker he picked for himself is so representative of his mindset: a phoenix dies only to rise from the ashes again, stronger. Though Phoenix may have started out with more traditional hip-hop, his evolution means that he has now grown out of it and has begun to forge his own path. After a slew of small projects, Phoenix seemed to have stumbled upon something big when he founded loveloveN¥C.
To love the concept of love — lovelove, or 爱爱 in Chinese — is Bohan Phoenix’s thing. Call it a motto, a message, a perspective, a vision, or whatever you’d like — it’s the phrase under which he and his friends, who include producer Jachary (who also played Black Sesame in the Motivasian music video) and tattoo artist Ralph a.k.a. M4, operate. It’s the name of their studio in Brooklyn, and it’s inked onto T-shirts, baseball caps, and Phoenix’s left arm. It’s an encouragement to embrace positivity and face the world as a good person. “Being nice is the coolest thing,” Phoenix informs me. “Seriously. I mean, love is the coolest thing — ever.” It’s the message that he wants to resonate across the world, and he’s still figuring out how to do it through his music.
In early 2015, Phoenix put out loveloveEP, made up of four songs produced by Jachary, his roommate and closest collaborator. Infused with soft percussion and jazz-funk inspirations, the EP began to showcase what would become Phoenix’s distinctive style, which mixes honest autobiographical lyrics with cheerfulness and humor. Obama probably blowin’ trees and just keeps it lowkey, he raps in So Responsible, a track about smoking marijuana. The songs are catchy and fun to listen to, and their creation allowed Phoenix to experiment with new production processes such as working with live instruments. But Phoenix isn’t satisfied with it. The EP, which was completed in a week and a half, “could’ve been better,” he admits. It was much too short, and didn’t properly convey the idea of lovelove. Its mismatched title would cause listeners to misunderstand his message.
Phoenix finally found his voice when he began collaborating with Beijing-based producer Howie Lee (who starred as the antagonist in the Motivasian video) — for one, it now contains more Mandarin lyrics. Songs were once lightly peppered with Chinese elements; now, the blend of cultures is an even mix. Phoenix also takes himself far less seriously as he’d previously done on the rambunctious four songs from his Foreign EP, which was released in March of this year.
Lee’s beats incorporate unconventional sounds and Chinese instruments such as the guzheng, and make each of the songs absolutely entrancing: Loveloveworldwide is haunted by an ominous humming of unknown origin; Motivasian is backed by urgent staccato clicking sounds that make listeners’ heartbeats quicken with anticipation; They Don’t Know is reminiscent of a crazed child’s glockenspiel; and a hypnotising drum persists in the eponymous track Foreign. Such groundwork by a creative producer sends Phoenix’s voice flying through the air to match it with lurching rhythms and impressive versatility. His voice sounds unleashed as it switches from loud and boisterous to robustly fluid. “Foreign was different,” Phoenix explains, “because Howie’s beats were so different. I tried being serious on Foreign and I couldn’t — it didn’t work. I just decided to have fun.”
On these tracks, Phoenix juggles English and Mandarin impressively. He alternates between verses and even, at times, in the middle of a sentence — deftly switching to another language to make a line rhyme with the previous one. Interestingly, much of his Mandarin lyrics are reminiscent of his childhood days and refer to his family, with whom he communicated in that language. Some lines evoke scoldings from his mother, like Bu yao chouyan, yiding yao nianshu (“Stop smoking, you must study harder”), while others are his own words: Mama wo huilai le (“Mom, I’m home”). In English, where Phoenix has a wider, more mature vocabulary, he nonetheless makes references to his ancestral culture with allusions to “tai chi” and “Beijing”.
It is startling how malleable Mandarin becomes on Phoenix’s tongue. He reshapes it to fit the heaving flow of his verses. Phoenix references Tang dynasty poet Li Bai in one of his songs, but I’m sure Li would be astounded to hear the way this young tributary has squeezed the neat, tidy, paced syllables of Chinese into a raft and sent them careening violently down a bounding cascade. Inspired by prodigious Taiwanese artist Jay Chou, who helped pioneer the incorporation of rap into mainstream Mandopop, Phoenix also abandons the four tones of Mandarin that enable listeners to distinguish meaning from sound, replacing them with flattened versions. At first, it just sounds like Phoenix hasn’t mastered the language, but this is obviously not the case — he does it on purpose. Mandarin sounds too choppy otherwise, Phoenix says. “But I have some friends in Chengdu and they speak in the Sichuan dialect and it’s like, that dialect is perfect for rapping.”
He’s referring to the Higher Brothers, a group of rappers who are part of the Chengdu Rap House and with whom he collaborated while on tour in China in the spring of 2016. The Motherland Tour, backed by VICE China, also featured Howie Lee and Zhang Yang from Lee’s do hits group and two other diasporic Chinese musicians: Mike Gao and Nehzuil, who grew up in Los Angeles and New Zealand respectively. This was the third time returning to China in the past year for Phoenix, and with each visit his appreciation for his birth country grew. In March 2015, he’d met his biological father for the second time ever and discovered to his surprise the uncanny similarities in dress, body language, and personality between the two. Later, in October 2015, he brought his American friends along to visit Beijing for the first time and to shoot the Motivasian video. This third time, Phoenix was not only accompanied by his loveloveN¥C friends while performing all across the country, but also met a slew of acquaintances during his travels. He was able to see China through the eyes of a tourist. Whereas before, when he returned to China, he would simply visit his family in Chengdu, he now goes sightseeing and partying with an entourage of equally energetic minds and is thus able to discover a totally different — and perhaps far more entertaining — side of China.
Rediscovering China also allowed Phoenix to rediscover himself. He was able to unearth that unique aspect of his identity through these extended visits, and it has been a factor in his transition from darker, more traditional hip-hop to his current playful style. “I don’t wanna shoot any videos in America now,” he confesses. “It was so much fun [in China]. Everything was dope there.” He compares China to New York, where he now lives, that has for more than a century been the hub of American art and culture. “It’s easier not to be creative when you’re shooting in China,” he says, because of how refreshing it is simply to see a different backdrop in a music video. “New York is so overshot. Everything [there] is overshot.” He now realizes that he can bring China into his creative career and allow his aspect of him to let him stand out as an artist. He also sees the market potential in China — the hip-hop scene in the country is still in its early stages, and he wants to help shape it. Due to a lack of major music platforms — Soundcloud, the West’s most popular music-sharing site, is blocked, and there is no real equivalent to alternative media outlets such as Pitchfork — independent music has a harder time gaining widespread attention. But Phoenix is confident that the scene will develop, and that audiences in China will receive his message of lovelove.
Similar to Oscar Wilde, who famously applied the theories of aestheticism to his daily life, turning himself into an eccentric celebrity of the literary world, Phoenix embodies what he preaches. He’s already living the lovelove lifestyle by stubbornly treating everybody with respect, which is one of the reasons why he refuses to openly criticise other artists. From Phoenix’s point of view, all conflicts, such as the controversy over NYPD officer Peter Liang’s conviction, boil down to misconception; a lack of love. Phoenix tells me about his aunt in Chengdu, China, with whom he and his friends stayed during their tour. Immigration rates are extremely low in the country, and most Chinese have never met a black person in their life. In a documentary about the tour released by Noisey, a VICE channel, it’s revealed that Phoenix’s aunt once texted him saying, “Your mom tells me you’re worshipping black people.” She explains in the film that, to her, black people are at the bottom of society and that their misery fuels their music. After three days spent with Ralph and Jachary, though, Phoenix recalls her exclaiming, “Wow! Black people are so nice!” But Phoenix trails off just as he begins to get heated about race — it’s obvious that he doesn’t like to think too much about it. “I don’t know,” he mumbles. “It’s too complicated.”
Later, when I push him to speak more about the racism I feel sure he’s experienced, he becomes irritable. He says he’s never faced hostility in the hip-hop scene as an Asian. “There’s one race: the human race,” he insists. Lovelove is supposed to overcome all superficial barriers — it’s what truly makes sense to him right now. Perhaps Phoenix has finally found what he has been looking for all along within this ideology, and perhaps in a few years he will reinvent himself again. When I email Jachary and ask him if he thinks loveloveN¥C will last, the reply is simply and staunchly: “lovelove forever.”
There’s a line from Loveloveworldwide, written by Phoenix after his second big trip to China:
我想搬回中国可我没勇气
Wo xiang banhui Zhongguo ke wo mei yongqi
I want to move back to China but I don’t have the courage
The phrase hits me deep in the gut. It articulates a feeling that resides within us both, and within many members of the diaspora — the calling of one’s ancestral roots and all the uncertainty it carries. With China’s rapid economic growth, culture is evolving just as fast, and each visit means that there is something new and fresh happening. “It’s amazing,” Phoenix says. There are so many things that haven’t been tried yet, beckoning the formation of a new avant-garde generation. And yet, at the same time, “it takes so much guts and so much spontaneity to just drop everything. Technically,” Phoenix confesses, “there’s nothing holding me back. But it’s all these things that I conjure up.”
Phoenix is increasingly splitting his time between the two countries and is working on building bridges between two cultures that often seem like they are in total opposition, whether politically or socially. Yet amidst the back and forth, Phoenix still makes time to unwind every now and then. As the official part of our interview wraps up, I snap some photos and Phoenix rolls a joint. We watch the high noon sunlight as it sits poised on the grass in the park — the same park where, years ago, Phoenix and his schoolmates used to smoke together. He recommends a list of good Asian restaurants in Boston. I mention being underage for tattoos, and he invites me down to New York so that Ralph can ink me, no questions asked. I politely decline. It’s his birthday this weekend, and he’ll be releasing a short song called Epilogue to celebrate. With its synthetic instrumentals and the visceral, desperate quality to the backup vocals, it’s simultaneously emotional and coolly rational. It’s a fitting conclusion to the Foreign era of Phoenix’s work, which also includes 3 Days in Chengdu, a 12-minute song produced by Jachary that begins with an unpretentious eulogy to his passed-away grandmother. After this, it’s a second EP with Howie Lee, and maybe some singles here and there. Another year lies ahead, six months of which will be spent in China. The future is brilliantly uncertain.
A small breeze rustles the trees. Phoenix shows me the cover that he’d originally intended to use for the Foreign EP: it’s a cartoon of him as topless baby Mao, smoking a cigar as he smiles at something in the distance, teeth glinting. VICE China, the platform on which he’d officially premiered the tracks, wouldn’t let him use it. Now, the picture shows him wearing a fuzzy panda hat and a gold chain; crisis averted. Phoenix puts away his phone. He asks me to take a Polaroid photo of him by the Honda, lighting a cigarette. He rests his water bottle on the roof of the car, where it perches momentarily, taciturn, before it’s retrieved again. He adjusts his bandana. “I’m going to go watch Finding Dory,” he says, getting into his car and tossing his cigarette butt without stepping on it. “I’m excited.”
Original interview by Jiaqi Kang. Medium article edited and uploaded by Jiaqi Kang.
Illustration by Jiaqi Kang. Video by Jiaqi Kang, with footage by Ariel Chan and Jiaqi Kang. Photography by Ariel Chan. With thanks to Iris Lang and Elysia Mac. Special thanks to Mariah Blake.
Sine Theta is a creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.
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