Family Association 9+

Put on your headphones and explore Manhattan’s Chinatown from a new perspective! “Family Association” is a GPS-enabled piece by composer George Tsz-Kwan Lam.

“Family Association” (2022) is a site-specific, interactive soundwalk designed for Manhattan’s Chinatown neighborhood. The work combines collected oral history recordings from five members of the Chinese-American community as part of an interactive soundwalk in Manhattan’s Chinatown. Listeners will hear from five members of the Chinese-American community as they recall their extended families, how their families emigrated to the United States, and whom they imagine their ancestors to be — including those who left their homeland to seek a new future in the U.S. decades (and perhaps centuries) ago. Using GPS technology, “Family Association” embeds the recordings within sites of actual family associations in Chinatown. Such associations have created tight-knit, supportive, social, and imagined communities based on a common family name, and their locations serve as a way for the listener to interact with the stories that they hear.

Throughout the work, the listener will hear a combination of the interviews and instrumental music inspired the rhythm and contours of the recorded speech. When the listener approaches the site of a family association, the speech becomes more prominent, recalling the way in which these micro-communities have helped generations of Chinese-Americans to both reconstruct and reconnect with their past. Over the course of the 16-minute experience, the recorded testimony gradually focuses on the interviewees’ vision of their legacy for the next generation. At the conclusion of the experience, listeners will also have the opportunity to record and upload their own memories, which may be incorporated into future versions of the project.

“Family Association” is co-presented by The Performance Project at University Settlement and MATA Presents, and is made possible with support from Music At The Anthology, Inc. (MATA), and from a Faculty Impact Fund grant from the Faculty of Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University. The “Family Association” app is developed Roundware, an open-source contributory geo-located audio platform. For more information, please visit https://www.gtlam.com and https://roundware.org/