My Spotify is my most honest form of social media. Instagram is a polished, composed image of my hilarious, cool city life. Twitter is a library of my witty refrains, dry remarks, and endless pop culture commentary. LinkedIn is for employers who don’t want to hire freshers and scammers who ask me to fill out a survey for a gift card. My Spotify is just for me. “What are you listening to?” dives into each of my playlists and explores how my musical tastes have grown with me over time.

Music has been part of my life since my childhood. I grew up listening to the Beatles and other old-school legends on our CD player, dancing to “Eleanor Rigby” and falling asleep to Karen Carpenter’s drum solos. Our family musical tastes were surprisingly American – we loved the Beatles (and didn’t realize they were British until a few years ago), knew old school hip hop songs by heart (like real New Yorkers ) and watched our dad dance embarrassingly on everyone. The song he claimed was our mother’s “favorite.” On the rare occasions we drove, I filled the car with my enthusiastic, slightly off-key voice.

Growing up in a decidedly anti-screen household, I rarely knew what the voices of Gen X America actually sounded like. America. It wasn’t until middle school that I watched the music video for The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” and its brightly colored three-piece suits, women in grass skirts and overwhelming whiteness. Looking through my childhood discography, the closest I came to representation was long-haired John Lennon. The music in my life was fun, catchy and danceable, but it wasn’t for me.

Unlike most Taiwanese-American families, I did not grow up listening to Teresa Teng. I discovered the iconic singer not from my mother, whose immigrant parents sacrificed their native language for her assimilation, but in my high school Chinese class. As I grew older and became aware of my confusing mixed identity, I began to resent my family for our ignorance of my culture. We celebrated Christmas with turkey rice porridge but forgot about the Mid-Autumn Festival. We exchanged hongbao, red envelopes for the Lunar New Year, but we never called our older family members. Like our musical tastes, we were fundamentally American.

Even though I pass as white, the small cultural differences between my family and the all-American members who share our musical tastes feel like an unbridgeable chasm. Friends walk through my apartment in their shoes. His classmates call “Gangnam Style” the greatest song of all time – Psy is the first Asian artist they know. I’m sitting somewhere in this dark space below – the sound eventually goes down, but none of it is doing it for me. Music and media do not reward the complexities of identity, rather they find a binary and push it to the extreme, maintaining white as the norm and symbolizing everything outside of it. I am, in a sense, distanced from the music I love.

A few years ago, I discovered that one of my best friends was just as much of a Carpenters fan as I was. As we sang “Close to You” she looked at me in confusion as I sang “so they sprinkled moon dust in your hair and laughter in your big brown, brown, brown eyes”.

“Jenny, those aren’t the words. It’s “the starlight in your blue eyes.” Are you sure we like the same song? I was disconcerted to say the least. I didn’t sing for the next few minutes. Was I a fake fan? Later, I realized that my parents had changed the lyrics to make the song a song about me. I don’t have golden hair and my eyes aren’t blue. The beauty of girls as described in my childhood songs did not match mine. So they rewrote the song to include me.

I always sing “Close to You” with the wrong lyrics for two reasons: First, I honestly don’t think I could remember the original without significant mental effort. Secondly, this song is the first time in my life that I felt connected to music. Music and art in general cannot be understood in isolation; it exists for what we need at that moment. When I needed to feel like I belonged, my family changed music for me. I learned to shape my songs based on who I am.

Now I use music as a tool to understand my current state of life. Last October, during college application season, the atmosphere was frenetic and depressing. Last August – right before I left for college – it was pure nostalgia. Every December, at least three Christmas songs are selected. When I put on my headphones and turn up the volume on a playlist created two years ago, I’m immediately transported to a younger me whose heartbeat resonates in the percussion and whose emotions resonate through the lyrics. I borrow the feelings I had before, but they sound like me.

Listening to The Carpenters, The Beatles or Talking Heads, I am reminded of the seemingly monumental problems of childhood (my brother took my toy! I can’t find my teddy bear. Why can’t I stay up late tonight ?) and I let my old anger, joy and excitement wash over me as if they were new again. It’s an anchor in my past that helps me move forward. With my old music, I feel like I can face the future with the same vivacity, passion, and raw emotion that I felt as a child.

What are you listening to?

Listen to it playlist here.