COVER STORYventionally attractive woman.”
Heat Rocks podcast founder and Character
Media contributor Oliver Wang notes that
Asian American musicians also encounter
questions of “racial inauthenticity” that rein-
force their perceived incompatibility with the
U.S. musical canon. “The idea of authenticity,
as ill-defined as it may be, is ver y important
to most people,” he says. “Because of the his-
tor y of race in American music, what we tend
to think within our collective imagination as
authentic performance tends to focus primar-
ily around, first, men, and second, black and
white men, almost exclusively.”
Zauner didn’t just wrestle with concerns
about her own authenticity as a musician,
but also with the perceptions that come with
being an Asian American woman, especially
as a teenager. “I was constantly grappling with
the sense that I’m never going to be a neutral
body, that I’m always going to have a stereo-
type projected on me. And that gave me a lot
of anxiety, and felt like that was something I
never had the words for,” she says. “My mom
wasn’t someone I could even talk to about it
because, to my mom, I was American.”
Zauner told The Fader last year, as she’s told
many other publications, that she created
Japanese Breakfast in the aftermath of her
mother’s sudden death from cancer in 2014.
But this traumatic event isn’t the defining
source of the entirety of her creative output,
as the majority of media coverage about her
would suggest.
Sure, her first Japanese Breakfast album,
2016’s Psychopomp, dealt with her grief
head-on. The cover art features a photo of
her mother, while Psychopomp has songs like
the sweeping “Heft,” with a verse referencing
how she “spent [her] nights by hospital beds.”
Zauner even donned her mom’s wedding han-
bok in the video for “Ever ybody Wants to Love
You,” which she co-directed, during a night of
fun in Philadelphia’s dives and streets.
Living in the wake of her mother’s pass-
ing is also central to “Cr ying in H Mart,” her
2018 New Yorker essay (and eponymous forth-
coming memoir) that explores how learning
Korean cooking helps her connect with her
mother’s memor y. And during the photo shoot
for this stor y, Zauner plays with a cabbage that
she’s planning on pickling for kimchi.
But all of these connections risk overshad-
owing the present and future that Zauner now
writes for herself. For instance, she now chan-
nels her quest for human connection through
cuisine into Close to Home, the food show she
hosts for Vice’s Munchies channel. Episodes
about Uyghur kebabs and the U.S. militar y’s
inf luence on Korean American staples ref lect
the increased platform she has to show her
followers how they can connect through their
own narratives.
However, the increased attention on Jap-
anese Breakfast also comes with vitriol from
Asian American incels, who’ve harassed her
online over her multiracial identity and mar-
riage to a white man. The f lipside to that coinis that she now has an engaged and perceptive
Asian audience. In 2017, one of those crowds
included her mother’s older sister and broth-
er-in-law, who saw her perform in Seoul. “It
was ver y sweet, and she was proud of me,”
Zauner says. “I made a joke that my aunt didn’t
really get what I do for a living [because she]
asked who paid me and where was my office?
And then to the crowd, I was like, ‘Emo (which
is aunt in Korean), this is my office!’”
Zauner says that with her larger platform
comes a sense of responsibility to uplift other
women of color. For instance, she’s enlisted
artists like Dianna Settles to design merchan-
dise. Gabby’s World, the project of multiracial
indigenous song writer Gabrielle Smith, has
opened for Japanese Breakfast on recent
tour legs. Zauner describes being an agent of
change as “mostly a good pressure.”
The last time I saw Zauner was as magical
as the first, but in a ver y different context:
at a New Year’s Eve concert in Philadelphia’s
renowned Johnny Brenda’s (where Adonis
sees Bianca perform in Creed). With Craige
on bass, “Soft Sounds” co-producer Craig
Hendrix on drums and her husband Peter
Bradley on guitar, she was ever y bit the racon-
teur-slash-rock star she was meant to become.
As she tore into “Ever ybody Wants to Love
You,” with confetti falling from the ceiling, I
realized, nearly a decade after I first saw her
perform, that what I saw had come to frui-
tion. She made her own mold, then shattered
it completely. CM