Angela Chong
How did you become interested in the EASC Graduate Fellowship?
A friend of mine in the History Department shared the good news that I might receive funding for my research in Taiwan via the EASC Graduate Fellowship. As a doctorate student in Music Teaching and Learning at USC Thornton, I had begun to develop a Taiwanese American music curriculum based upon principles from a Hungarian pedagogy called Kodály. Much of my past research had focused on the early 20th-century history of Kodály’s development in Hungary and the U.S. However, when I started teaching my Kodály-based Taiwanese American music lessons to 2nd-graders in the historically Taiwanese community of Arcadia, I realized I needed help contextualizing certain Taiwanese Indigenous children’s songs whose language, history, and culture were unfamiliar to me and my Taiwanese contacts in the U.S. I dreamt of making it out to Taiwan to engage in this research and became interested in the EASC Graduate Fellowship as a way to make this dream real.
What is your research focus?
I study how race and ethnicity have impacted music education in the U.S., Hungary, and Taiwan. The USC Thornton Music Teaching and Learning Department includes many students who are seasoned music educators now beginning to hone a multi-disciplinary array of research methods. Traditionally, our department has focused on quantitative and qualitative social science methods, and some of my research projects take these approaches, such as a current survey study I am running with my advisor, Dr. Beatriz Ilari, on musical parenting in U.S. immigrant families. I am also a History minor at Dornsife, and in my archival research in Hungary, I have used letters, memoirs, manuscripts, photographs, and scores to document the role Jewish women have played in the development of Hungarian music education. My Taiwanese research started out as a way to develop accurate context for my Kodály-based Taiwanese American music curriculum, and has now become an ethnomusicological research project involving song-collection and fieldwork especially among Taiwanese Indigenous children and culture-bearers. In all three countries, I use music as a lens to examine how racial and ethnic minorities navigate assimilation and resistance to nationalist narratives.
In what ways did the EASC Graduate Fellowship impact or help your research?
Without the EASC Graduate Fellowship, I could not have begun what is now the Taiwan arm of my research. I started my doctorate program thinking that I would be primarily a Kodály scholar. The part of the Kodály pedagogy that I found most interesting was how to teach racial and ethnic minority children music from their own heritage in their mother tongue. This was a complicated question for U.S.-born Taiwanese American children like myself, and I sought to answer it at first using theoretical tools for addressing U.S. racial and ethnic diversity. The EASC Graduate Fellowship jump-started my inquiry into how collecting songs from racial and ethnic minorities, such as Indigenous peoples, in the homeland might reshape immigrants’ self-understanding in their new home. Through my EASC Graduate Fellowship experience I became a Taiwan scholar in addition to a Kodály scholar.
Can you share any anecdotes about your fellowship experience?
I traveled to Taiwan with my two children, then ages 8 and 9, and my husband, and they accompanied me to various Indigenous villages for my research. We hired a driver to take us up winding mountain roads in the Alishan region to a Tsou Indigenous village famous for its home-grown teas and coffees. My kids and husband enjoyed bubble tea and Tsou-style mochi while I chatted with the baristas, who ended up being quite knowledgeable about Tsou children’s songs. In the end, a barista who was widely respected as a Tsou culture-bearer not only helped me translate the Tsou children’s fishing song and game, “Yungu Yungu,” but also taught me another Tsou children’s song, “Kaemema,” about cockroaches. The baristas informed me that “Kaemema” was by far more popular. They had all learned it as small children, singing the song while playing the very same children’s circle game reminiscent of London Bridges. Now back in California, my children love to sing and play both Tsou songs, no doubt because they had such a great time in the Alishan eating delicious Tsou food and meeting some genuinely kind Tsou people.
Do you have any recent publications or other accomplishments you would like to share?
My experience this summer among Taiwanese Indigenous peoples led to my publication of a Smithsonian Folkways Music Pathways K-2 online lesson called “Island-scapes of Taiwan,” based upon my Taiwanese American music curriculum. This lesson features the Tsou Indigenous song, “Yungu Yungu.” As a result of this lesson, I was invited as a Smithsonian artist to perform Taiwanese American music for 3rd and 4th graders in a November 2025 children’s concert at Oberlin College and Conservatory in my hometown of Oberlin, Ohio. For this concert, which included a few other Smithsonian artists on traditional instruments, I learned the pipa, a lute-like instrument traditional in Taiwan, and played it as accompaniment to both “Yungu Yungu” and “Kaemema” while children from the audience volunteered to play the game on stage. Later, some of the children wrote in thank you notes that their favorite part of the concert were the Taiwanese songs and games! This was particularly heart-warming for a girl who grew up in Oberlin as one of few children of Asian descent for miles around.
