“And I Shall Hear, Though Soft You Tread Above Me”

Abstract

Initially known as an Irish folk song, “Danny Boy” is incorporated by the Sinophone writer Hsien-yung Pai into his short story of the same title, depicting the life of diasporic queers in New York City during the AIDS pandemic. Instead of analyzing Pai’s story from a regional studies’ perspective, this paper discusses the queer rendition of “Danny Boy” in a multiethnic context, with Asian diasporic queers, poor Irish workers, and African Americans interacting with one another. Such a critique of homophobia and racism within minorities via music invites the reader to envision the possibility of claiming territories through singing, like the migrant birds. Building upon the pivotal point where sound studies, queer of color critiques, and animal studies interact, this paper argues that claiming a land through music instead of racial identities is to acknowledge singing and even speaking as resulting primarily from physical vibrations of bodies. Furthermore, such bodily vibrations convey a sense of physical intimacy beyond the symbolic marker of race and sexuality in the lyrics/language. Frightened by the radical potential embedded in music, Roshanak Kheshti points out that some white bourgeois listeners project rhythms and vibrations on African music, thus securing their own identities. Tracing back this logic, the paper reveals the queer physical intimacy as internal to a piece of Western music like “Danny Boy.” This way, those diasporic queers may claim New York City like migrant birds as they touch/vibrate with each other and the land via shared sound waves.