Music Stars Making a Social Impact: Why & How Micah Huang Is Helping To Change Our World

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Artists who do so can achieve material success quickly, but they are doing a disservice to their public by sucking up all the oxygen in the room with their self-narrative.

As a part of our series about stars who are making an important social impact, I had the pleasure of interviewing Micah Huang.

Micah Huang (any pronoun) is a musician and interdisciplinary performance artist with a passion for celebrating Asian American communities through public creativity. Much of Micah’s socially engaged work is focused on LA Chinatown, including past projects such as the audio drama Blood on Gold Mountain, as well as present projects such as the 2024 LA Hungry Ghost Festival, which Micah’s team is co-organizing on a California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellowship. Micah’s work has been covered by local and national media outlets, and supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, UCLA Chancellor’s Award, Fulbright Fellowship, and others. Micah is currently pursuing a PhD in Creative Practice, Critical Inquiry at Harvard University.

Thank you so much for joining us on this interview series. Can you share with us the backstory that led you to this career path?

This is a great question; I feel like making sense of our backstories is a really important part of being a creative worker that sometimes gets neglected in the day to day hustle.

In a way, my story is very different from the stereotypical “Asian American Creative” narrative because I’m second generation, and my folks are both people for whom music (classical, in their case) was a really important part of their assimilation process, to the extent that it became their career. As a result, most of my role models growing up were musicians, cultural workers, etc. Very Bohemian.

The creative professions are amazing, but they’re not always very stable. That was sometimes challenging for me growing up, but I was really fortunate to have the support of amazing communities. In middle school and high school, I couldn’t always go home; I used to hang out a lot in a music store in Claremont CA called the Folk Music Center, which is owned by the Guitarist Ben Harper and run by his mom, Ellen. Her younger son Joel really advocated for me, allowing me to stay there for hours day after day. He’s just as amazing of a guitarist as his brother, and taught me how to play the Blues-informally and for free- which was incredibly kind and generous of him. That’s pretty much the foundation of everything for me.

In High school I lived with some friends who had a drum kit, so I was able to figure out how to play that. I used to hang out in form of the local record store a lot and that led to me meeting a lot of folks from the Punk Rock community. I played in Punk Bands until I was 19, at which point I had (barely) made it to college. College was great, because I was able to learn about all these performance styles and traditions I would never have been able to access otherwise.

After College, I was lucky enough to get a Fulbright Fellowship to go and work with Romungro (Roma in US-speak) musicians in Hungary. That really changed the course of my work, because it showed me how music can really make a difference to the ways that communities face and handle really severe political adversity. During that work, I got attacked by a bunch of fascist (literal, not figurative) vigilantes and something clicked for me- it felt so familiar based on my experience in the US. That was a huge part of what made me decide to bring the philosophy of music as a force for social change, and empathy across difference back home, and try to put it into practice in my own communities.

It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

The funniest, stupidest mistake I made in my 20’s was to reject digital technology and social media. This wasn’t entirely my fault- I didn’t have internet access (except on a shared computer at a friend’s house where I stayed for a while) until I was halfway through high school. I flatly refused to get a smartphone until I was 25 and my homies were all like “you know you can work delivering food and make your own schedule if you get a smartphone, right?” Even then, when people told me I should get on Instagram, etc I had this attitude that I was good, I knew what I was doing, and I didn’t need to pander to something as base as social media. That attitude lasted until embarrassingly recently.

That was ridiculously obtuse of me. The internet is a very complicated, often toxic place but it’s totally unavoidable in 21st century life, and especially in the creative fields. Idealism is good, but it can also be a huge obstacle to your professional growth and material welfare.

What would you advise a young person who wants to emulate your success?

This is a great question, and I’m not sure I’m qualified to answer it. What I can say without any doubt is that it’s not “success” that matters. What matters is that you do what feels right for you and for others. Ideally, you do it without resorting to methods that harm people who are different from you as well. Life for most of us is not a crystal stair, and nobody knows how long they have left. As long as you’re alive and still care about anything, anything at all, then you’re being called to create. Your best, truest work doesn’t come from you: it comes through you. Sometimes it resonates with a public, and sometimes it dies with a whimper in total obscurity. Sometimes you have to work a stupid, worthless day job to support it. Sometimes you have to beg, borrow and yes, even steal. Sometimes it pays the bills and makes shallow people want to hang out with you. Usually not. You have to give yourself over to the work, and learn to recognize the feeling of unobstructed flow. That’s all that matters, in the end.

Is there a person that made a profound impact on your life? Can you share a story?

There are so many. Every single person I’ve met and worked with on this journey has been instrumental in my process. We’re all connected, and individuality itself often feels like a fragile illusion. That said, my partner Emma has had perhaps the most profound impact of all on me. We’re worked together on many things, from the national spotlight to no-name dive bars, but even when we’re each doing our own thing, there’s no one who’s ever made me, as a person, as an artist, as anything, feel so seen. When things have gone badly for me, and I’ve been broke, mocked and laughed down by folks on the scene, treated like dog shit on account of being who and what I am, she’s been able to look past the noise and hear what I’m doing, where I’m trying to go with it, whether it was working or not. Likewise, when things are going well, she’s not distracted by the bright lights and smiles (real and otherwise) and she can still hear what’s happening for what it is, whether it’s actually good or not. I think that there’s nothing more important than that kind of clarity, especially from someone you love and whose judgement you trust.

How are you using your success to bring goodness to the world? Can you share with us the meaningful or exciting causes you’re working on right now?

Music is always doing something. Sometimes all you’re doing as a performance artist is selling bullshit (usually shitty alcohol, usually indirectly) for people who don’t care about anything that you care about. Sometimes you’re filling a specific, narrowly circumscribed social function, like playing acoustic arrangements of top 40 at a stranger’s wedding. However, no matter what the ostensible purpose of music or performance is, it’s always always doing one very important thing: creating connection between people.

My work these days is all about exploring 1) how to build connections between people who are superficially very different from each other and 2) how to cultivate our understanding of the ways in which music and performance create connection, so that we can do it more effectively and in ways that are as real and lasting as possible.

Can you share with us a story behind why you chose to take up this particular cause?

One of the reasons my work fits well with the Asian American or AAPI (even though that terms is now anathema to a lot of social theorists) movements, such as they are, is that those terms don’t really stand up to scrutiny. The categories are just so broad that if you think about them enough, the idea of ethno-political identity starts to seem kind of like a waste of energy. That’s very relevant to me, personally. As I mentioned, I’m second generation. I’m also mixed race, and not only that: my parents are both ethnically mixed in very interesting- some might say problematic ways. For instance, my Dad is half Hakka and half Hong-Kong Cantonese. It’s impossible for westerners to conceive of how much those two groups hated each other, historically. We’re talking millenia of conflict, including occupation, multiple large scale genocides in both directions, you name it. These people made Israelis and Palestinians look like friends. And yet, people like to call my dad Chinese even though he was born in Jersey and, for various reasons, my grandparents would never have been allowed to live (together or at all) in modern china. It’s so complicated that it makes me want a drink, even though I’ve been dealing with it my entire life. And that’s just one side of my family!

All this to say, getting along across difference and sometimes across outright hostility and hate is fundamental to my existence. I try to work on creating empathy through music, stories, and rituals because that’s what I know, and because it seems to work. It’s not ideological for me, it’s equal parts common sense and basic survival.

Can you share with us a story about a person who was impacted by your cause?

When I was in high school, my daily life was peppered with a litany of anti-Asian bullshit. This was the aughts, when racism (except for some highly explicit forms of anti-Blackness) was not seen as problematic by most public high school students. I inherited my frame and bone structure from the Cantonese side of my family, so in my case there was a lot of sexual harassment, with a certain amount of physical attacks thrown in. To get to the point of dating and romance, I had to break through what seemed like an insurmountable wall of explicit hate and ostracism, which was backed up by violence. It was not optimal. I got in so many fights that I ended up attending three different high schools.

At my second school, I met someone who just didn’t treat me the way other people did. She treated me like I was a normal, even attractive person. She was beautiful and popular, and white. I was suspicious of her behavior, but I was also curious and so when she invited me to sneak out in the middle of the night and watch her favorite movie, I pocketed the key to the stick shift car my dad didn’t think I could drive, and went to check it out. That movie was The Crow, starring Brandon Lee who stood on that gothic rooftop, playing electric guitar and looking exactly like the son of a Cantonese martial arts hero, because that’s what he was. Later, as I drove home (stalling at every stoplight) I realized that it wasn’t coincidence that the person who loved this movie- the music, the storytelling, the costumes and the intense, almost overwhelming emotions which they created- was capable of looking in my face, and seeing someone worthy, viable and human. It was such a stark contrast to others who, raised on stories and songs that treated people like me as non-entities, treated me accordingly.

In the end, it was only a tentative high school romance. A first brush with what it felt like to be a person who was more than just a background Asian, and who could connect to other people in this most critical and delicate of ways. Eventually, the white boys in her orbit got overexcited, one of them got hurt and I got kicked out of school. But it was a start.

The stories and rituals in our lives are what gives us our deep, subconscious frameworks for who is attractive, who can be trusted, and who matters. Politics and policy are important, but they will never be able to touch the heart in this way.

Are there three things or are there things that individuals, society, or the government can do to support you in this effort?

We need more bad Asians. Unfortunately, the stakes here are very high. Society at large is very, very unforgiving of Asians who don’t play to the stereotypes. For femme coded people, it’s the exoticized sex kitten/ladyboy, submissive model minority wife, Dragon Lady, or pathos inducing old woman. For masc coded people, it’s the sexless nerd, submissive model minority sidekick, Kung Fu guy, or evil patriarchal figure.

We have to break these. It’s not going to be some big thing that comes from systemic or government factors. We’re not considered a significant voting block (7% of population) and despite the model minority myth, we’re not exactly an economic powerhouse. Asian millionaires are about as numerous as Black millionaires with each accounting for 8% of that group, while White millionaires account for 76% of millionaires. Asian Amerians also have the largest wealth gap of any racialized category. This means that it’s really up to communities, and creative communities in particular, to take our narratives into our own hands. We need to support each other, whether that’s in person, on social media, or in institutional contexts. We also have to understand that some ideas that many of our families brought from severely traumatized Asian societies- that racism is a small price to pay for having access to food and shelter, that it’s best to keep your head down and not complain, that its always better to try and blend in with some more established cultural community- are not applicable in the case of Asian American life. We’ve been self deprecating and satisfied with marginal, forever foreign status for too long. No matter what perspective on America we might have from the atrocities many of our families endured (directly or indirectly) at American hands, we’re Americans now. We have to adapt, and to work within the cultural context where we find ourselves. That culture pays attention to and respects groups with obvious cohesion, and it respects outward markers of power. Loudness. Aggression. Muscularity and danger. We need to embrace the side of our communities that can actually command American respect.

Why do you think music in particular has the power to create social change and create a positive impact on humanity?

There are many reasons. One of my favorites is that when you experience music with other people, your brain and nervous system literally start to fire in sync. As musicians, we know this intuitively, but I’ve gotten a whole new perspective on it since I started studying Neuroscience and working with Neuroscientists. In East Asian culture, we have this concept of Qi, which is basically a way of understanding the flow of energy through the universe, and through the body. In martial arts and traditional medicine, the harmonious flow of Qi is the key to wellness and thriving, and that also applies between people. A good team (sports or workplace) good relationships, good sex, these things are all dependent on the free and harmonious flow of energy between people.

Music harmonizes our Qi. The biological measurements that scientists use to document this phenomenon are only part of the story, because real life is so much richer and more complex than what even very advanced machines are able to quantify. However, there’s some really exciting science being explored around the rhythms of empathy, for example, with profound implications about music, dance and performance as forces that tune and attune our brains/bodies/spirits to each other, if the vibe is right. You can read more about this on the NeuroMusic page of my Website, which is concerned with the more experimental, research oriented aspect of what I’m working on in my PhD program.

What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started”?

Don’t try to hide your cultural background. If you don’t seize the narrative other people will fill it in with stereotypes that are not accurate.

Creativity is its own reward, but capitalism is its own system. Fulfillment is tied to the honesty and quality of your work, but recognition is tied to production values more than anything else.

Leaders eat last.

Compromise is the secret suce of effective creative process, and produces the best work. If you follow your own vision at the expense of others’ visions, nobody will like the work as much as you do.

Don’t take yourself too seriously. Artists who do so can achieve material success quickly, but they are doing a disservice to their public by sucking up all the oxygen in the room with their self-narrative.

You’re a person of enormous influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

I’m very lucky to be in the position I’m in, but I’m not a person of enormous influence, by any stretch of the imagination. However, I do come from an underground music background and if I could start a movement, it would be a network of shows that existed outside of the cash and attention economies. This could be free, volunteer run shows like the Punk house parties where I cut my teeth, or something new and creative. No-phone zones. Places where people could achieve a kind of sanctuary and release from the overbearing pressure of work, bills, social media and the obnoxious one-upmanship that pollutes monetized creative scenes.

Can you please give us your favorite life lesson quote? And can you explain how that was relevant in your life?

Heaven and Earth are not benevolent

to them, all things in the cosmos are Straw Dogs

The Dao aware are not benevolent

To them, the people are Straw Dogs

Between Heaven and Earth is a bellows

empty, but inexhaustable

The more movement

the more powerful the flow

more knowledge brings fewer paths

better to keep hollow

stay open

Chapter 6 of Laozi’s Dao De Jing, translated by Ken Liu

Straw Dogs are ritual effigies that are dressed up in elaborate decorations, and then discarded or burned. We are all straw dogs in the long run, whether we are able to handle the truth of our condition or not. Acceptance of this means a kind of freedom, a way of appreciating and savoring all aspects of our experience, that is beautiful and bittersweet beyond reckoning.

We are blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

I would be so interested in chatting with some of the amazing culture journalists who have their fingers on the pulse of society- not the filter-bubble caricature that most of us get, but the real thing, which they know through research and personal experience. Jia Tolentino comes to mind, as does Tyler Austin Harper. These are folks who I think could, thanks to their unique perspectives, help me question my own perspective and learn more about people.

Thank you so much for these amazing insights. This was so inspiring, and we wish you continued success!