Shared Love of the Same Music Allow Maltese Families to Bond More than Asian Families Can Ever Hope to Do

I could not take my eyes off the third-floor booth. A family of six, what looks to be a grandmother, a set of parents, and kids, all in matching black T-shirts and dancing together with big smiles to the live performance on the stage they see below. Now, multiply that by some 40 booths, plus 900 seats at the first level, in one of the oldest and continuously operating opera houses on the island of Gozo. It was a sight to behold. From kids to the silver-haired, all gyrating and singing along to the tunes while standing on their feet, one of the most intergenerational concerts I have ever attended.

It would be an understatement to say that I was mesmerized by the sight in so many ways. The concert itself was, what I would call, an experiment in transcending age groups and musical interests. A mishmash of performers included a classical music-oriented wind ensemble, a three-piece rock band, singers trained in pop music ranging from their 30s to 60s, provided a playlist of Maltese, Italian, and English hits that range from the 1970s to the 2000s. Ambitious at the range may have been, the audience, ranging from pre-teens to retirees, clearly bought the act.

That sheer range, for a lack of better words, the time in existence, of the audience, the songs, and the performers is simply unimaginable for the cultural background that I come from. During my trip back to my parents' house in San Diego a year ago, I was treated to a marathon of songs that they used to enjoy while they were younger. As much as the songs sounded great, their foreignness from my own background as a casual music listener only served to underscore the massive schisms that underpin the development of popular music in East Asian cultures. 

Sitting in the opera house in Gozo, I realized that such schisms can be small enough to bring intergenerational differences. Whereas East Asian, and especially Chinese, pop music, saw massive changes from decade to decade based on openness to imports of foreign musical genres, such importation was much less of an upheaval in the Maltese context. Without the political, linguistic, and media restrictions of China, Malta has been a party in every evolution of Western pop music, allowing its populace to be familiar with the latest developments in styles and genres with little hindrance.

Because Malta has observed and participated in every part of the Western musical evolution, it is entirely conceivable that the more musically open-minded, many of whom were clearly in attendance at the concert, would have been able to slowly digest and accept every little gradual change that emerged in the Western musical scene. It is that consistently open musical environment that enabled family members of different generations to get together and dance to the same tunes, without anyone feeling a sense of awkwardness or being left out of the joy.

The same would simply be impossible for my Chinese family. The music each generation listened to growing up is just too different for them to be reconciled from a musical perspective. The suddenness of the Western musical influence occurred too suddenly and dramatically for my grandparents' and even my parents' generation to accept as a whole, making musical conversations across generations less of cross-pollination and more of washing away the old entirely before bringing in something brand-new. There just are no pop music numbers that can satisfy anyone from their teens to their 70s.

It is a missed opportunity for intergenerational bonding that I cannot help but lament. What if, like the Maltese families dancing to the music together in their concert, I have those musical commonalities with my older family members. Perhaps then we'd have more conversation topics when we meet up, besides the mundane like the food and the too sensitive like politics and race. Those family get-togethers would be less of a cultural minefield that incentivizes maintaining minimum personal disclosure, instead leveraging common interest in music to explore other shared values.

Indeed, because different generations of Asian families live in such different cultural worlds, activities that depend so much on the togetherness of family dwindle to those that further entrench a sense of formality that defines familial relationships. Wedding ceremonies, group dinners, and even funerals do offer ways for family members to talk, but they just cannot open up the same way that dancing together to the same live music can. Thought this way, is it any wonder that many Asian kids grow up to distance themselves from their parents and grandparents?