Kit Yan

“Knockout spoken-word!”
-New York Magazine

“Incredible slam poetry”
- Curve Magazine

“The eloquence of Kit’s spoken-word delivery lies in the anti-racist, anti-homophobic, gender-inclusive, language that ties his lyrics together.”
- Bitch Magazine

“Fierce Stories!”
-Hyphen Magazine
- NY Mag, Bitch Mag, Curve Mag

These two quirky performers
are taking the U.S. by storm.
By Kamala K. Puligandla
Kit Yan and Melissa Li have got a plan: one car, two performers and a whole lot of America. This is the Good Asian Drivers Tour, and, as the name suggests, it’s not your typical cross-country jaunt. Yan, a 23-year-old transgender slam poet, and Li, a 24-year-old lesbian folk rocker, are on a mission to defy stereotypes and to share the experience of being queer and Asian American.
Sure, at first the originality of the tour might be lost on you: Two twentysomethings want to see the country and show off their expressive artistic endeavors. What else is new? But after some research,
you realize how few other queer or trans Asian American performers
there are, and that the odds of them stopping in your town (depending on where you live) are not too good. Plus, when you ask the dynamic duo about what inspired this tour, their answers make clear the groundbreaking
nature of their plans. “Our…mission is about visibility. Queer API [Asian Pacific Islander] visibility in whatever shape and form it comes in,” Yan says. “You do a simple Google search or you try to look online or watch TV or read magazines and find someone out there that looks like you or sounds like you and, for me, I don’t encounter it.”
Both Yan and Li admit that it would have been easier for them, growing up, if they had seen somebody
like themselves in the media. It’s hard enough finding acknowledgment from society if you’re queer or Asian American or an artist; being all three at once doesn’t make it easier. Yan jokes lightheartedly, saying, “As an Asian American, I’m sure you know, there are all these things you’re supposed to do and, well, Melissa and I don’t do much of that.” When pushed to be more specific, they throw out the usual
things that people, from both outside and within the Asian American community, expect from them:
become investment bankers or play the violin. Li adds that her family questions what she’s doing: “They’re always like, ‘Why don’t you get a real job? What are you writing about?’” All of which only further pushes their point about visibility. Maybe if more people saw what they could become, they’d choose something different.
With that in mind, Yan and Li have decided to hit the road to become the role models they never had. The work they perform directly addresses their identities and is often based on incidents in their personal lives. Li says that her music makes who she is and what she’s singing about very clear. “When I write love songs, like all singer-songwriters
do, they’re always very direct…I don’t play the pronoun game. It’s like, ‘I’m gay’, ” she says. Yan’s poetry also directly confronts the issue of being trans, addressing both the challenging aspects and the “lighter side of my tranny life.” Although these two performers have some very serious messages to spread, Yan and Li maintain a wonderful sense of humor and a positive outlook that is evident in their work. “A lot of times, you only hear the stories
that are real downers, and I really want to get out there and talk about…[how] it doesn’t have to be like that. It doesn’t always have to go down that path of rejection and hate and most of those mainstream ideas about…coming out [especially] in the Asian community,” Yan says. This fresh perspective
is what the Good Asian Drivers Tour is all about, and sharing it certainly seems worthy of a trip across the country. n
Kit Yan (back) and Melissa Li
hit the road - Curve Magazine July/August 2008

Good Asian Drivers, shown above, performed a concert at afterHOURS Tuesday night as part of NU Pride Week.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A sense of NU 'Pride'
Good Asian Drivers perform at afterHOURS during NU Pride Week
By: Mike Rougeau
Posted: 10/9/08
Melissa Li said she came dangerously close to being made into a stereotype.

"When I was 5 [years old], like all Asian children, I was forced to play the piano and the violin," she said. "But at some point I was like, I'm just not going to play what they want me to play."

Li said she came out to her mother at the age of 11. Two years later, she began writing her own music. The singer-songwriter describes her songs during that period as "cheesy piano ballads, like really awful."

She said a thoughtful benefactor changed her life forever.

"When I was around 14 or 15, somebody gave me, and this sounds really cliche ... somebody gave me an Ani DiFranco album and a guitar," Li said. "It absolutely 100 percent changed my life."

Li, along with Hawaii-born transgender slam poet Kit Yan, who together are known as Good Asian Drivers, performed Tuesday night at afterHOURS as part of NU Pride Week.

Em Dunham, co-chair of NUBiLaGA, Northeastern's gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer, questioning and straight alliance, said the main goal of Pride Week is to raise awareness about diversity and try to achieve things like gender neutral housing, gender neutral bathrooms and access to appropriate healthcare from the health center at Northeastern.

She said they want to create a more inclusive campus for sutdents of varying sexual orientations and make sure they have a safe space at Northeastern.

Dunham said NUBiLaGA is working toward this goal by hosting entertaining and educational events all around campus this week. Organizations including Sigma Sigma Sigma, the African American Institute, the Asian American Center, the Asian Student Union, the Progressive Student Alliance and Students for Choice collaborated with NUBiLaGA to plan the week's events.

Delia Cheung Hom, director of the Asian American Center, said she was happy to see a diverse group of students coming together for the Good Asian Drivers concert.

"People were really responding to the different things that Kit and Melissa were saying," Hom said. "We're really happy with the turnout."

The Center co-sponsored the event with afterHOURS and the Office of Student Life.

Yan said Good Asian Drivers sometimes gets questioned about where its name originates.

"[We] came up with the name Good Asian Drivers because we were doing a driving tour, but also to challenge and confront stereotypes in a really positive way," he said.

The songs Li performed Tuesday ranged from rock anthems featuring Weezer-like guitar riffs to love ballads. The range of her vocals was matched by her acoustic guitar.

Li said in an interview with The News that her songs come from the heart.

"A lot of it is very personal," she said. "I write a lot about love, and I write a lot about Asian-American issues. My upbringing was here in the states where we feel very much a minority."

Li said Yan's approach to poetry is different.

"Kit's pieces are very much about education," Li said. "A lot of times I feel like his work is really about showing people different aspects of the queer community and different issues."

Both artists said their lyrics exemplify their pride about who they are. Li said she has no qualms about writing love songs to women and that Yan's poems about gender identification are powerfully raw.

They opened the set with a duet about their experiences together so far.

"We can't be artists and we can't keep creating unless we have the support of the different communities that we operate in," Yan said. "So it's kind of a thank you piece and a reflection piece of being on the road and all the people that we met throughout that."

The two met as teenagers when they were both participants in "the queer Asian performing arts scene in Boston," said Yan, who added that they saw each other numerous times at the same venues and clubs.

Yan said the idea to go on tour came to him one day when he saw Li in the back of a drag bar.

"I said to her, 'Hey, you want to quit your job, go on tour across the country?' and she was like, 'Yeah!'" he said.

When met with prejudices, both band members said they prefer to reason with people.

"We run across a lot of stupid people that say lots of racist stuff to us, especially about our name," Yan said. "Like, 'Good Asian drivers? None of those exist.' … We're not incredibly confrontational, so we just have conversations with folks."

More than anything, the duo said they want to help people reach understandings about sexual and gender identity today.

Li said fans who come to their shows buy the group's merchandise and leave comments on their website that help rea - Huntington News

016 HYPHEN FALL.08
As a touring performer, I know that maxing out your credit
card renting a Ford Aerostar so you can burn up the roadways is
no easy task. You need a big supply of Mylanta and the ability to
drive from Minneapolis to Missoula in 10 hours.
Transgender slam poet Kit Yan and lesbian folk rocker Melissa
Li have those magical powers. They’ve taken their Good Asian
Drivers tour from Boston to Vancouver, Canada, with stops in cute
college towns, Wisconsin cafes, gay bars in Billings, MT , and the
“secret Asian communities in Texas” that Li laughs about. Their
vision: bringing grass-roots queer Asian spoken word and folk
music to the masses.
Yan and Li hatched their plan to dominate the nation’s roadways
in early 2007 while backstage at The Gated Lounge, a
monthly queer Asian and Pacific Islander cabaret in Boston. Both
have been mainstays of Massachusetts’ queer and Asian performance
scenes since they were teenagers. “I’d always wanted to
tour the nation and one day I told Melissa and she was like, ‘Yeah,
me too,’ and literally the next day we were planning it out,” recalls
Yan on his cell phone from Vancouver, as he and Li were driving to
an interview at Shaw TV, “the multicultural television station.”
The duo wanted to check out queer and Asian communities in
all 50 states and bring their own fierce stories to the mix, whether
it was in the San Francisco Bay Area or small-town Wisconsin.
“People [we’ve met on tour] say it’s amazing to see queer Asians
performing because there aren’t that many of us, and in the Asian
community, art is still not seen as a career path,” Yan says. “For
me as a trans person, my voice is not often a voice that is heard,
so a lot of people we play for are saying, ‘Wow, I’ve never thought
about a lot of issues you’re bringing up, or known a trans person
before.’ ”
This is not a new experience for Yan. After he publicly came
out as transgender last year in Sampan, a Boston-based bilingual
Asian newspaper, people started stopping him on the streets of
Chinatown. “These were people from my parents’ and grandparents
generation telling me that I was brave, which really took me
by surprise. I hope that other queer Asians see and hear stories
like that and take comfort in knowing that our community can and
will surprise us.”
Both Yan and Li are deeply rooted in Boston’s Asian American
communities and cultural networks. They have been involved
with Boston Progress, an Asian American politicized arts collective
that organized the 2005 Asian/Pacific Islander Spoken Word
& Poetry Summit, a biannual national gathering for APA poets and
spoken word artists, and East Meets Words, one of the few APA
monthly open mics in the city.
So far, their tour gigs have been co-booked by queer and
Asian college student groups, but Li and Yan have also performed
at queer youth drop-in centers and shelters in red states too. In
Montana, they played at gay bars where they were the first queer
Asians the community had ever seen.
“We played at The Loft, which is the gay bar in Billings, and
we were the only Asians there. But everybody was so sweet and
came up afterward to talk to us—they were really appreciative of
our coming, and we got to hear their stories too,” Yan says.
Seeing videos of Li playing guitar to accompany Yan’s intense
poetics feels sweet. You can feel the love the two have for each
other and their energy and drive to connect with the audience.
The next minute they’re staring into each other’s eyes and crooning
a duet together in a queer Asian version of a Phil Collins video,
and I’m cracking up as hard as if I was in the audience.
Why the name Good Asian Drivers? “It just made sense because
we’re driving across country, and we also wanted something
that confronted a stereotype about Asians in a fun way,”
Yan says. “We were making T-shirts, and we Googled it first because
we didn’t want to make something that someone had already
done. It was shocking, because every other T-shirt with that
phrase had something incredibly offensive, like ‘Chinese men,
go back to driving rickshaws’ or ‘Student driver’ with ‘Student’
crossed out and ‘Asian’ put in.”
Not only has humor helped Yan and Li combat stereotypes,
but it also got them through futile attempts to find vegan donuts in
North Dakota and a Bank of America in Vancouver. Though slated
to end in July 2007, Yan and Li extended their tour through October
2008, inspiring (and humoring) other queer Asians in even
more college towns and tiny villages across the country.
Who knows? Maybe their tour will encourage more queer
Asian poets to rent a hot pink van and take to the streets. Move
over, Ani DiFranco. Good Asian Drivers is coming to a truck stop
near you.
For more information, to send love notes, or book them, hit up
www.goodasiandrivers.com.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, a queer Sri Lankan writer, poet, and the
author of Consensual Genocide, regularly p - Hyphen Magazine

Tony Giampetruzzi July 09, 2008
Making Beautiful Music Together
Kit Yan and Melissa Li Return to Boston for CD Release Party

What do you get when you pair up a 23-year-old transgender Chinese slam poet originally from Hawaii, and a 24-year-old Chinese lesbian folk/rock singer-songwriter, who has been performing in Boston since she was 15?
Good Asian Drivers … and beautiful music … and music that’s returning to Boston after a several-months hiatus.
On Friday, July 11, Kit Yan, an award-winning composer, singer-songwriter, and filmmaker Melissa Li — together known as The Good Asian Drivers — will return to Boston after a successful 12-week cross-country road tour to celebrate their homecoming and hold a CD release party.
Scheduled for The Midway Café in Jamaica Plain, the event will feature Li and Yan, Homecoming Queen Becca D’Bus, and will feature a special performance by The Femme Show.
The performance marks the official release of two new albums, Li’s “2 Seconds Away” and Yan’s “Live Album.”
For the uninitiated, Li’s debut, “2 Seconds Away,” features rock-driven tracks tempered with layered vocals and contains audience favorites such as “Extra” and “Weapon of Choice.” Yan’s “Live Album” captures the energy and spirit of his performances and contains the college hits “Badass” and “Queer Nation.”
The tour began in February with performances on college campuses and other venues in the New England area. In April, the duo embarked on a road trip spanning over 30 states with performances in more than 20 major U.S. cities. Their adventures were captured and uploaded weekly on their Web site, www.goodasiandrivers.com.
Originally from Hawaii, Yan traveled to Boston for college. During this time, he physically and socially transitioned from female to male, an experience that inspired the poetry he has taken to stages across the U.S.
Li has been performing in Boston since she was 15, and, in 2007, she won the Jonathan Larson Performing Arts Foundation award for her debut musical “Surviving the Nian” — she had been writing the piece since she was 19.
This week the pair chatted with the New England Blade about their adventures, their mission and food — good and bad.
New England Blade (NEB): You say that the mission of the Good Asian Drivers Tour is to increase exposure for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer Asian-Americans throughout the country, and that the tour will have tremendous social impact on these under-represented groups, especially in areas of the United States where their voices are not often heard. Do you feel that you’ve achieved that mission?
Melissa: Absolutely. Traveling for 12 weeks and going into communities that haven’t had a lot of exposure to the queer community let alone the Asian American queer community was amazing. In a lot of places, places like Billing, Montana, where there is only one gay bar, I think it really opened people up to a new experience.
Kit: Just going in as Asian Americans had an impact in many places.
NEB: Your work is definitely gender-bending. Do you find that most people “get it?”
Kit: I think so. So much of our work comes from a personal point of view, audiences are listening to experiences that they can identify with, and a lot of it comes from daily life, not just being Asian American or an Asian American trans person.
Melissa: I think our work can be universally accepted because we talk a lot about love and relationships, and it’s always pertaining to our life experiences. And, we don’t shy away from talking about sexuality.
NEB: What was the best experience you had out on the road.
Melissa: Our latest YouTube video is all about us marking all the places we had incredible food. I think the best was Vancouver — we had amazing food there.
Kit: Yeah, when we weren’t performing, we were basically getting fat.
NEB: What was the worst experience?
Kit: Hmmm …
Melissa: Well, Kit is vegan, so a lot of places did have really horrible food choices …
Kit: And over the course of three months, we were only physically separated twice, and one of those times I was by myself and got a flat tire, and Melissa was on the other side of town.
NEB: It seems that your presence is growing, with national media taking note. Did you expect this level of attention?
Kit: No, not at all.
Melissa: You know, we really only started performing together about eight months ago. We quit our jobs to be full-time artists, so this is totally new.
NEB: Blogging and using the Internet has helped a lot of people make big leaps in the business. How has it helped you?
Melissa: It’s been really important, especially the way the industry is now. It’s really important for artists to provide fans with accessibility. We strive to do that, to create something people can watch on YouTube every so often, our clips … Without that we wouldn’t have gotten as much attention.
NEB: What can people expect at the Midway?
Kit: Some new pieces inspired by the road, maybe bus - New England Blade

“Slam is fierce. It’s so open and completely honest,” raves Kit Yan, an award-winning transgender slam poet. “And then people judge you on it, which is so heart-breaking.” After attending a poetry slam for a college assignment, he tried slamming. “And I really sucked,” Yan laughs. “I was awful. I lost every single slam that I entered for a whole year. But…eventually, I got it.”
Two years ago, Yan joined a national slam team and won the world’s largest individual slam competition and he hasn’t stopped since.
Now 23-years-old, Yan is taking his poetry on the road with award-winning composer, singer-songwriter and lesbian filmmaker, Melissa Li. The duo performs under the moniker Good Asian Drivers (goodasiandrivers.com) to confront negative stereotypes. Next month they hit the road on a cross-country tour through 30 states that they hope will raise awareness of queer Asian Americans. Capitalizing on Li’s filmmaking skills, they are also videotaping weekly video blogs, “to sort of take everyone with us,” Yan says.
He typically starts the show by slamming poetry on trans issues, while Li follows with an acoustic sound and a hip hop vocal style, ranting about love, loss, and social injustices. Despite the heavy topics, Yan promises a lighter side. “We’re really good about having a good time while we we’re talking about these things. A lot of my work is really trans focused, but it’s not always serious. I’d hate for someone to get the picture that my life was…awful all the time, because that’s just not it. My poems take really serious issues and then make it possible for a broader audience to understand.”
He’s already reaching new audiences. “A lot of the feedback I get when I talk about trans issues is from people who aren’t even queer. Older generations of…Asian Americans can relate to not being understood by…parents.”
After Yan wrote about coming out trans in Sampan, a bi-lingual newspaper in Boston, people stopped him on the streets of Chinatown. “These were people from my parents and grandparents generation telling me that I was brave, which really took me by surprise! The article was sharing a part of my journey, not a persona-altering event that [changed] my acceptance in the Chinatown community. I hope that other queer Asians see and hear stories like that and take comfort in knowing that our community can and will surprise us.”
Yan identifies as transgender and queer, and says his views on masculinity weren’t informed by American stereotypes. “To me, being masculine doesn’t necessarily mean facial hair and huge muscles and the kind of [things] I see in mainstream media. For me it’s okay to be a really feminine man. If you look at the typical pop stars in Japan they’re all androgynous looking. I never thought that being feminine in that way was not okay.”
A Chinese American from Hawaii, Yan says his background has influenced his experience of gender. “I was supposed to…meet an Asian guy and marry him. But now that I’m male - and my family treats me pretty much as male all the time - their expectations have changed. [Now] my mom…is never on my case to get married. Now she’s always asking me…‘Why don’t you come move back to Hawaii?’ Because in the Chinese culture, the guy is supposed to move home.”
“We have a long history of trans people in Hawaii,” Yan maintains. “In high school, there were people transitioning and it wasn’t that big of a deal.”
Nonetheless, Yan insists, being in Boston is critical. “When I hit the slam scene…I never see other trans people talking about these issues. It’s important for my voice to be here. I feel like my work here is really important just because of the lack of visibility.”
Good Asian Drivers will be in San Francisco this May.
Trans author Jacob Anderson-Minshall co-authors the Blind Eye mystery series. He has an essay in the just released anthology, Men Speak Out: Views on Gender, Sex and Power, which examines his transition from lesbian feminist to straight white guy.
- SF Bay Times

Good Asian Drivers
BY ALEX HO
In print | April 17, 2008
In his next life, transgendered slam poet Kit Yan wants to be a “baaadass,” while folk musician Melissa Li wants to show-up Mr. Mighty to get the girl. The duo, called the “Good Asian Drivers,” bared their most personal and embarrassing aspirations during their show at Olde Club this past Monday night as part of APIA Month. The gig at Swarthmore was one of the many stops in their 12-week cross-country tour to colleges, queer youth community centers, Asian cultural shows and “just community spaces,” Yan said.

On skill alone, the “Good Asian Drivers” played a great show of spoken word and folk music. But the duo also spent plenty of time poking fun at themselves and connecting with their intimate audience, all for the purpose of giving a voice to queer Asians. As Yan says on their website’s promotional video, “Queer Asians need role models, because I don’t think Margaret Cho is cutting it, or Tila Tequila.”

Yan, a champion of numerous slam competitions, masterfully struck a balance between flowery prose and stand-up comedy. His poems stretched beyond the regular rabble-rousing to challenge even conventional notions of queer identity. One poem criticized restrictive gender roles, “Gender is birth certificates for babies born into gender. Housing applications, checkboxes and even getting an email address — this is gender … But most of the time, gender is, fuck you, mind your own business,” while another poem noted problems in the queer community, “You can still hear butches treat femmes like second-class citizens. You can still hear women fighting for voice and … space at gay pride parades.”
There was also plenty of comedy in Yan’s act. Yan sheepishly admitted that he went to B school (which, he had to explain to the audience, meant business school) and remembered thinking in class, “If more people bought sex toys, then the price of sex toys would go down.” He then proceeded to perform a poem, equal parts activism and hilarity, saying, “I do not wear a strap-on out of penis envy. I wear it because it’s hot. It’s pretty, and I like to have sex with it. And of course it comforts me at night. It reads me a bedtime story and then it irons my shirt.” In another poem, Yan described his fantasy of being reborn as a hyper-masculine badass. “In my next life, I wanna eat meat, drive a pimped-out, rimmed-out black hummer SUV.”

Alternating with Yan’s acts, Li also had her share of rallying cries and funny self-effacing one-liners, but hers took a different form. As she explained in one of her songs, “My little red guitar is my weapon of choice.” Li, a singer and guitarist for nearly a decade, forsook classical music for folk and at fifteen, met and was heavily influenced by Ani DiFranco.

One of Li’s songs, arguably the biggest hit with the crowd, was “Such a Nice Guy,” dedicated to “the lonely straight guy in the back.” The song, which Li described as “like a lesbian anthem,” had Li trying to make a relationship work with a nice boy, while she couldn’t help getting involved with his ex-girlfriend. When the refrain, “Men just honestly don’t do it for me,” elicited a lot of knowing laughter from the audience, Li cried, “I don’t understand why you guys are laughing … It’s a really sad song. I’m breaking up with him!”

One of the duo’s big beefs, media representation, was tackled head on in one of Li’s songs. The song equally indicted mainstream media, “the assholes who control this world have boiled down to two — the white man on the left and the white man on the right,” and those who complain but don’t want to make change. As Li sang, “It’s a sad state of affairs when nobody cares.”

In another song, Li addressed both image issues among Asians and the importance of not selling out, singing, “They say I’m pretty enough to be on TV, but I got a girl by my side and she still wants to be with me.”
Li also works in film and musical theater, two additional talents that had their small place in the show. During the show, the duo filmed one another for a documentary that they are making about their tour, snippets of which can be seen on their website, enumerating various misadventures that may indicate that Yan and Li aren’t as good of Asian drivers as they think. Li, who recently premiered her award-winning musical “Surviving the Nian,” also wrote and composed a cute number for the night, which she called “Good Asian Drivers: The Musical.”
“You pretend to be an angel in front of my momma,” Li complained, while Yan retorted, “I hate it when you talk about your lesbian drama.” It’s too bad the musical stopped there, especially because Yan described the third act as “a rap off.”

Despite performing on a Monday, “Good Asian Drivers” managed to draw enthusiasm from the crowd and thoroughly rocked Olde Club. In a fair world, these two would be all over TV.

To hear more of the “Good Asian Drivers” and see clips of their documentary, please visit them at ww - The Phoenix

April 22, 2008

Good Asian Drivers ... rolling into your town?
So, those of you who are regular Quench readers probably know that we here have a tendency to turn into the Kit Yan Fan Club on a fairly regular basis. Which means you can no doubt imagine my delight when, upon finding ourselves in Chicago this evening, a very good friend and I decided to catch the University of Chicago leg of Kit's Good Asian Drivers tour (with the also amazing Melissa Li, singer-songwriter extraordinaire).

The event was co-sponsored by U of C Pride Week and PanAsia, so there was a pretty fabulous mix of people . . . and, oh my god, you guys!! It rocked. so. hard.

(yes, I'm sleepy and this is fangirlish and not very substantive. sorry.)

After the concert - several poems by Kit, several songs by Melissa, and a couple of joint efforts - I went over to be my usual awkward "I-adore-you-so-much-I-can't-speak-in-sentences" self. (You should hear how incoherent I get when I meet famous linguistics professors.) I start off by saying, "Um, have you - by any chance, you know - possibly - heard of the blog, Quench, that's run out of Harvard?" I figure that should put me in some social context, since for all the times we've mentioned Kit here, maybe word has floated back to him somehow, and then it won't seem so weird that I'm introducing myself. It's like press credentials, right?

Mm-hmm. Turns out, you guys, Kit Yan loves Quench. Possibly not as much as we love him (because I wasn't getting the vibe of nearly-creepy devotion that sometimes we can give off), but let's just say it was definitely a mutual admiration moment. Very exciting.

Incidentally, the other Good Asian Driver, Melissa Li, is definitely a Person to Add to Our List. Think a little bit Ani, a little bit Christine Lavin, with a dash of the other Melissa (Etheridge) just to make sure the whole package is sufficiently gay. Below you will find her highly silly (and criminally catchy) music video, "Such A Nice Guy," but I also suggest you check out "Mr. Mighty," which is on her MySpace, and (hint, hint) on her CD, available for purchase at goodasiandrivers.com.




(It's appropriate that Kit is playing the Nice Guy here, because he totally is - surprisingly, he's pretty soft-spoken in person, but really friendly and approachable.)

Anyway.

All told, I had a great night. If you live west of Chicago, or are attending the UU General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale, you can also have a great night with the Good Asian Drivers tour, because that's the direction they're heading. See where Kit and Melissa will be next. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have CDs to listen to. (And, um, homework and stuff to do.)

Posted by maudite entendante at 00:34
- Quench Zine

Best not to go to the Good Asian Drivers expecting to hear the sassy pop in their YouTube video “I Kissed a Girl — The Real Gay Version,” because it’s not them. That’s not even remotely how they sound live or on record — the GAD are lip-synching to Katy Perry’s version of the song. Perry also made a sexy video to go along with her monster hit, and even though Rolling Stone magazine ranked her version of “I Kissed a Girl” among the top 100 hits of 2008, they called Perry “vanilla.” That’s where the Good Asian Drivers come in. Their version is a mélange of gay girl-girl making out. So much so, in fact, that it is as if the GAD are on a mission to show the world that they know what the song is really about and that Katy Perry has missed the boat.

The Good Asian Drivers are Kit Yan, an award-winning transgender slam poet, and Melissa Li, a lesbian singer-songwriter and filmmaker (Ashley Baier is their tour drummer). The band’s live gig is a mixture of frank and intimate folk arts and funny rants about things like strap-ons and penis envy. Kit Yan comes off more like a comic than an angry poet. His stuff is personal and humbling (“God forbid I’d want a normal life — my favorite pastime? Garnering harassment”). And he talks about things you’d never think of, like making the switch from women’s to men’s bathrooms. Li, on the other hand, is rewriting the basic Greek plots. In “Such a Nice Guy,” the elderly story line of boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl gets a face-lift: “I’m sorry we didn’t last very long/ We didn’t look that cute together anyway/ I think I’ll give your ex-girlfriend a call.”

But it would be a shame to read the GAD as a show for lesbians only. Unlike Katy Perry, theirs is a crafty inventory that addresses cultural mythology and negative stereotypes.
- San Diego Weekly Reader

Ashley Baier, a Mountain Maryland native and accomplished percussionist and drummer, has recently joined the nationally-acclaimed spoken word/folk-rock band The Good Asian Drivers to aid in the production of their first full-length album. Baier joined the group after Melissa Li and Kit Yan (founders of The Good Asian Drivers) tackled a daunting cross-country tour in the 2008 that proved to be an all-out success story. This summer, she’s joining them on the road.

In the summer of 2008 folk rocker Melissa Li and seasoned slam poet Kit Yan loaded up a car and began a country-wide music tour that would introduce The Good Asian Drivers to not only America, but the world as well. However, this tour proved to be anything but a regular musical jaunt across the country. Both Li and Yan are Asian Pacific Islanders and, being an outspoken lesbian and a transgendered individual, respectfully, the duo set out to give a voice to the “queers” and Asian Pacific Islanders of the United States. This desire to spread the word about their race and genders was conceived as a result of there being a noticeable void of public representation in terms of homosexual (or “queer” as Yan and Li often refer to themselves) Asian Pacific Islanders in the country during the pair’s younger days.

Following the conclusion of their nationwide 2008 tour that included 30 states in 12 weeks, Li and Yan were joined in their musical endeavors by Ashley Baier. Baier was raised in the mountains of Western Maryland and began playing the drums at age nine. Holding a Bachelor’s in music from the University of Maryland and Master’s from Mannes College the New School for Music, the percussionist is now based out of New York City and is in high demand in the music scene.

With the band now a three member group with instrumentation including spoken word (Kit Yan), vocals, piano, and guitar (Melissa Li), and drums and percussion (Ashley Baier), the Good Asian Drivers set out to write and record their first full length album.

Drive Away Home, the band’s debut album, was released this June and is packed with honest lyrics and stereotype-defying songs that are sure to have listeners tapping their toes to the sound, if not all out dancing across the floor. The first track off of the album, “Here’s To You,” alternates between Li’s potent voice and lyrics and Yan’s spoken word poetry that is brutal and frank. This song speaks of a love and respect for all women including the lesbians, the defiant, and the females of the world who are, as Yan puts it, “humanity’s perfection molded by soft hands and love.”

Perhaps the most bold and empowering song included on Drive Away Home is “Third Gender.” This track is comprised entirely of Kit Yan’s slam poetry including musical accompaniment. The poetry of this track gives listeners an in-depth look into how Yan feels about gender identity as a whole, and more specifically about how he feels defying the rigidly imposed gender roles in the United States. “As if sexuality and gender were something that you could purchase on impulse/pulling up to the register and carefully picking out/gay straight/man or woman,” says Yan on the complicated and highly debated subject of gender. However, the theme and attitude of the song are best summed up with the words, “See there may be as many as a million gender identities and sexualities/just floating around waiting for the right person to snatch them up.”

“Drive Away Home,” the track that gives the album its name, is a loose chronicle of the 12 week journey that Li and Yan took across the States in the summer of 2008 to begin defying the stereotypes of “queer” Asian Pacific Islanders across the country. This particular song speaks of being able to call virtually anywhere your own, and the lessons to be learned while traveling on the open road. The album concludes with “On The Road With You,” an almost musical-like duet with Yan and Li where each jokingly speaks of the others’ annoying habits and attributes but recognizing at the same time that they have a truly loving friendship. “On The Road With You” is a lesson for all of us that teaches listeners to look through the superficial flaws that we all definitely possess and finding the irresistible capacity for love and goodness that we all have.

The Good Asian Drivers’ debut full-length album Drive Away Home will surely leave all listeners eagerly awaiting new releases from the band. The toe-tapping beats provided by Ashley Baier, the guitar riffs courtesy of Melissa Li, and the undeniably catchy slam poetry of Kit Yan offer something for all listeners. Although The Good Asian Drivers’ seem to cater especially to the sexually oriented and racial minorities of the country, all sexes, races, genders, and sexual orientations are appreciated in Drive Away Home, an album that affords great folk-rock/pop music to the masses. - The Appalachain Independent

Good Asian Drivers
BY ALEX HO
In print | April 17, 2008
In his next life, transgendered slam poet Kit Yan wants to be a “baaadass,” while folk musician Melissa Li wants to show-up Mr. Mighty to get the girl. The duo, called the “Good Asian Drivers,” bared their most personal and embarrassing aspirations during their show at Olde Club this past Monday night as part of APIA Month. The gig at Swarthmore was one of the many stops in their 12-week cross-country tour to colleges, queer youth community centers, Asian cultural shows and “just community spaces,” Yan said.

On skill alone, the “Good Asian Drivers” played a great show of spoken word and folk music. But the duo also spent plenty of time poking fun at themselves and connecting with their intimate audience, all for the purpose of giving a voice to queer Asians. As Yan says on their website’s promotional video, “Queer Asians need role models, because I don’t think Margaret Cho is cutting it, or Tila Tequila.”

Yan, a champion of numerous slam competitions, masterfully struck a balance between flowery prose and stand-up comedy. His poems stretched beyond the regular rabble-rousing to challenge even conventional notions of queer identity. One poem criticized restrictive gender roles, “Gender is birth certificates for babies born into gender. Housing applications, checkboxes and even getting an email address — this is gender … But most of the time, gender is, fuck you, mind your own business,” while another poem noted problems in the queer community, “You can still hear butches treat femmes like second-class citizens. You can still hear women fighting for voice and … space at gay pride parades.”
There was also plenty of comedy in Yan’s act. Yan sheepishly admitted that he went to B school (which, he had to explain to the audience, meant business school) and remembered thinking in class, “If more people bought sex toys, then the price of sex toys would go down.” He then proceeded to perform a poem, equal parts activism and hilarity, saying, “I do not wear a strap-on out of penis envy. I wear it because it’s hot. It’s pretty, and I like to have sex with it. And of course it comforts me at night. It reads me a bedtime story and then it irons my shirt.” In another poem, Yan described his fantasy of being reborn as a hyper-masculine badass. “In my next life, I wanna eat meat, drive a pimped-out, rimmed-out black hummer SUV.”

Alternating with Yan’s acts, Li also had her share of rallying cries and funny self-effacing one-liners, but hers took a different form. As she explained in one of her songs, “My little red guitar is my weapon of choice.” Li, a singer and guitarist for nearly a decade, forsook classical music for folk and at fifteen, met and was heavily influenced by Ani DiFranco.

One of Li’s songs, arguably the biggest hit with the crowd, was “Such a Nice Guy,” dedicated to “the lonely straight guy in the back.” The song, which Li described as “like a lesbian anthem,” had Li trying to make a relationship work with a nice boy, while she couldn’t help getting involved with his ex-girlfriend. When the refrain, “Men just honestly don’t do it for me,” elicited a lot of knowing laughter from the audience, Li cried, “I don’t understand why you guys are laughing … It’s a really sad song. I’m breaking up with him!”

One of the duo’s big beefs, media representation, was tackled head on in one of Li’s songs. The song equally indicted mainstream media, “the assholes who control this world have boiled down to two — the white man on the left and the white man on the right,” and those who complain but don’t want to make change. As Li sang, “It’s a sad state of affairs when nobody cares.”

In another song, Li addressed both image issues among Asians and the importance of not selling out, singing, “They say I’m pretty enough to be on TV, but I got a girl by my side and she still wants to be with me.”
Li also works in film and musical theater, two additional talents that had their small place in the show. During the show, the duo filmed one another for a documentary that they are making about their tour, snippets of which can be seen on their website, enumerating various misadventures that may indicate that Yan and Li aren’t as good of Asian drivers as they think. Li, who recently premiered her award-winning musical “Surviving the Nian,” also wrote and composed a cute number for the night, which she called “Good Asian Drivers: The Musical.”
“You pretend to be an angel in front of my momma,” Li complained, while Yan retorted, “I hate it when you talk about your lesbian drama.” It’s too bad the musical stopped there, especially because Yan described the third act as “a rap off.”

Despite performing on a Monday, “Good Asian Drivers” managed to draw enthusiasm from the crowd and thoroughly rocked Olde Club. In a fair world, these two would be all over TV.

To hear more of the “Good Asian Drivers” and see clips of their documentary, please visit them at ww - The Phoenix

Students from Berklee and Harvard music classes packed around a dimly lit stage in Berklee's recital hall to watch Good Asian Drivers perform on Jan. 27th. Good Asian Drivers is the pet project of transgendered slam poet Kit Yan, 23, and lesbian folk rocker Melissa Li, 24.

Using music and poetry to give voice to their opinions, Yan and Li have worked to increase "queer" Asian-American awareness in the United States. Yan loves to tell the story of how they began their 12-week cross country tour, which eventually encompassed 30 states and 20 major cities. "We were sitting in a drag bar, and I went up to Melissa and said, 'Let's just quit our jobs and go on the road.' That's what we did."

Luckily for the young duo,Yan has a business degree and has been able to facilitate their expenses as traveling artists. Li arranges booking and serves as a press agent. They perform nationally at colleges, including Harvard University, Wellesley College, University of Maine, Tufts University and Northeastern University. The Berklee event was cosponsored by the Berklee Liberal Arts Department and Berklee GLBT Allies.

Li is a lesbian folk rocker who graduated from Boston University, and has gone on to write a musical based around Asian stereotypes called "Surviving the Nian," which was recently performed at the Boston Center for the Arts. Li said her musical inspiration is singer Ani Difranco.

Yan moved to Boston from Waipahu, Hawaii at age 18. He has been slamming in Boston and has won numerous slams across the country as a transgendered poet. He has performed with greats like Reggie Gibson, and Iyeoka Okoawo. He also performed with the Lizard Lounge national slam team, and won the largest slam in the world hosted at Worcester, MA in 2005.

Students cheered and snapped as Yan slammed, "Straight shot, straight answer, that's gender."

A transgendered person believes that they are not the gender culturally given to them. Li also sang songs about sexual assault and the pride of being a lesbian with her lyrics in the song "For Our Daughters."

While Good Asian Drivers seeks to promote equality and understanding of gender, some have negative reactions to their expressions. On Good Asian Driver's Facebook page, critics have sent discriminatory messages that target their asian background, sexuality, and feminism.

At Berklee, Li continued to sing and promote awareness with her song, "They Say." "Would you want me to stop questioning life and stop lighting fires
and would you want me to stop visiting that dyke next door?"

Berklee professors Michael Wartofsky and Lucy Holstedt organized the event and helped facilitate questions afterward. According Wartofsky, a new slam poetry class was piloted last semester and had a large following of students. This helped inspire the faculty to book Good Asian Drivers at Berklee.

After the performance, there was an opportunity to interview the artists at a banquet. When asked about the reaction they received from the Chinese community in Boston about their work, Yan said.

"We were published in the Boston area Chinese paper, that like, every older person reads. We came out and talked about our music and about being transgendered and the struggle of acceptance. We were nervous that people wouldn't do that. Actually it was the opposite effect. We had older people come up to us and say 'thank you for writing that piece. We didn't know that this was such an important issue." - Sarah Betancourt

Students from Berklee and Harvard music classes packed around a dimly lit stage in Berklee's recital hall to watch Good Asian Drivers perform on Jan. 27th. Good Asian Drivers is the pet project of transgendered slam poet Kit Yan, 23, and lesbian folk rocker Melissa Li, 24.

Using music and poetry to give voice to their opinions, Yan and Li have worked to increase "queer" Asian-American awareness in the United States. Yan loves to tell the story of how they began their 12-week cross country tour, which eventually encompassed 30 states and 20 major cities. "We were sitting in a drag bar, and I went up to Melissa and said, 'Let's just quit our jobs and go on the road.' That's what we did."

Luckily for the young duo,Yan has a business degree and has been able to facilitate their expenses as traveling artists. Li arranges booking and serves as a press agent. They perform nationally at colleges, including Harvard University, Wellesley College, University of Maine, Tufts University and Northeastern University. The Berklee event was cosponsored by the Berklee Liberal Arts Department and Berklee GLBT Allies.

Li is a lesbian folk rocker who graduated from Boston University, and has gone on to write a musical based around Asian stereotypes called "Surviving the Nian," which was recently performed at the Boston Center for the Arts. Li said her musical inspiration is singer Ani Difranco.

Yan moved to Boston from Waipahu, Hawaii at age 18. He has been slamming in Boston and has won numerous slams across the country as a transgendered poet. He has performed with greats like Reggie Gibson, and Iyeoka Okoawo. He also performed with the Lizard Lounge national slam team, and won the largest slam in the world hosted at Worcester, MA in 2005.

Students cheered and snapped as Yan slammed, "Straight shot, straight answer, that's gender."

A transgendered person believes that they are not the gender culturally given to them. Li also sang songs about sexual assault and the pride of being a lesbian with her lyrics in the song "For Our Daughters."

While Good Asian Drivers seeks to promote equality and understanding of gender, some have negative reactions to their expressions. On Good Asian Driver's Facebook page, critics have sent discriminatory messages that target their asian background, sexuality, and feminism.

At Berklee, Li continued to sing and promote awareness with her song, "They Say." "Would you want me to stop questioning life and stop lighting fires
and would you want me to stop visiting that dyke next door?"

Berklee professors Michael Wartofsky and Lucy Holstedt organized the event and helped facilitate questions afterward. According Wartofsky, a new slam poetry class was piloted last semester and had a large following of students. This helped inspire the faculty to book Good Asian Drivers at Berklee.

After the performance, there was an opportunity to interview the artists at a banquet. When asked about the reaction they received from the Chinese community in Boston about their work, Yan said.

"We were published in the Boston area Chinese paper, that like, every older person reads. We came out and talked about our music and about being transgendered and the struggle of acceptance. We were nervous that people wouldn't do that. Actually it was the opposite effect. We had older people come up to us and say 'thank you for writing that piece. We didn't know that this was such an important issue." - Sarah Betancourt