This week I chose “China Town Everyday” by Vinh Ngan AKA Triad God, a London-based Chinese-Vietnamese rapper(?) – whose music is mostly monotonously mumbled, chanted, half-rapped-sung Cantonese, over sparse, experimental dancehall-ish beats.
In “China Town Everyday” (off of his album 黑社會 Triad), Triad God repeatedly stumbles through a loose description – of praise and ownership – of a Chinatown; he speaks of convenience, affordability, the busy streets and businesses, claiming this metropolitan ethnic enclave as belonging to its people. This feels like a fitting song to reflect the main setting of And China Has Hands, and specifically of Wan-Lee’s journeys through Manhattan’s Chinatown in Sections IV-XI.
With And China Has Hands’ content, style, and context continuing our considerations of identification, genre, and obscurity, Triad God’s music also runs the lines of legibility, categorization. The meandering and inaccessible – perhaps unexciting – lyricism and tone of Ngan’s seemingly illegible work, not to mention the haunting, off-kilter production, speaks to the kinds of alienation and negotiation of space, race, class, and cultural difference experienced by Wan-Lee and Pearl, and even H.T. Tsiang himself.
Here’s a tinymixtapes.com review that does a far better job of articulating the cultural/technological moment of Triad God’s first album, the courses of electronic music and hip hop, hauntology, and 黑社會 Triad ’s political implications on genre, audience, and the invention of futurities: https://www.tinymixtapes.com/music-review/triad-god-hei-she-hui-triad