There’s a video floating around cyberspace that shows Japanese middle school girls in tears at a live classroom performance of Tegami—Haikei Jugo no Kimi e (Letter: Dear 15-Year-Old You) by composer-singer Angela Aki. Shot by an NHK camera crew, it’s reportedly unstaged and rather moving.
Born in Itano, Tokushima Prefecture, Japan 29 years ago, Aki moved to Honolulu, ironically, at the age of 15 where she attended the Iolani School and later graduated from George Washington Univ. in Washington, D.C., with degrees in political science and music.
Angela, born Kiyomi Aki to a Japanese language school exec and an American mother, has enjoyed international notoriety (and geeky sex symbol status) since 2005 when the bespectacled Tiny Fey lookalike composed and performed the theme song (Kiss Me Good-bye) to the Sony Playstation hit role-playing game Final Fantasy XII
Upon Tegami’s release in mid-September, Japan’s hopelessly wired schoolgirls spread the song’s promo video (PV) and lyrics via text messages and streaming media from Hokkaido to Okinawa and the song shot into Japan’s top five in the blink of an eye energized by an emotional connect only a young girl can parse.
The setup: It’s 2008 and Asia is beset with terrorism, pollution, economic malaise, natural disasters, melamine and an alarming rate of teen suicides. The composer sends a letter of hope from the future to her 15-year-old self, saying that more or less everything’s gonna be chill. Here’s an English translation:
Factory Girls: ‘To Die Poor Is A Sin’
October 7, 2008
“Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China is a fascinating ethnography of the young women who labor in the factories of Guangdong, China’s richest province, a land of boomtowns where wealth and scams and exploitation and warmth and courage all abound,” writes boingboing’s Cory Doctorow. Read his entire piece here.
Chang, the Harvard-educated former Beijing correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, spent three years following the successes, hardships and heartbreaks of two teenage girls, Min and Chunming, migrants working the assembly lines in Dongguan. The author’s incorporation of their diaries, e-mails and text messages into the narrative allows the girls-with their incredible ambition and youth-to emerge powerfully upon the page.
This summer, Chang wrote about her creative process at The China Beat.
Here’s some Barnes&Noble flackistry: “A first generation Chinese-American, Chang uses details of her own family’s immigration to provide a vivid personal framework for her contemporary observations. A gifted storyteller, Chang plumbs these private narratives to craft a work of universal relevance.”
