Yen Sung: Defiance
Lisbon’s adored Yen Sung talks about her family and its steely determination; past, present, and future.
When Yen and I meet on this May afternoon, the sun peeks through the tall, green, low-hanging trees of Lisbon’s Jardim da Parada.
A group of old men are hanging around a cluster of park tables playing card games, as they do most days. A group of attractive couples and friends are hanging by the kiosk, as they do most days. And a group of red-beaked Muscovy ducks are swimming in the murky green pond, as they do most days.
But Yen is tired today, which she isn’t most days. It’s not surprising. She had spent the entire previous day talking about her life to another interviewer. And quite the life she has had. From her time spent defying barriers, both socially and musically, to her being one of the most revered artists in Portugal, all encapsulated within her 30-year residency at the capital’s famed Lux nightclub.
It can be cathartic to talk about one’s life, but exhausting two days in a row, and Yen understandably doesn’t feel too keen on talking about herself two days in a row.
“What are you having?” Yen asks me outside A Padaria Portuguesa.
“I'm just having a water. You?”
“I'm having a coffee. Can you get it for me, please?”
“Just a normal coffee?”
“Yeah, just an espresso. But, cheio. Do you understand?”
“No, not really.”
“Just tell them café cheio.”
I walk in to order our drinks and poorly attempt to pronounce cheio. I look outside and see Yen is talking to a passerby in a familiar fashion while cars amble by and music plays from the cafe’s speakers. I return to a park bench with our drinks.
“Is that what you asked for?” I double check.
“I mean, cheio is more full, but yes.”
“A taller coffee?”
“Yeah, it's more full.”
“Maybe it was my pronunciation.”
“What did you say?”
“I think I said cheio.”
Yen smiles and nods approvingly of the pronunciation.
“I need to work on my Portuguese,” I say. Yen laughs, her eyes lighting up through her thick sunglasses as she tops up on some caffeine ahead of another interview.
“Were you born and raised in Lisbon?” I ask.
“No, I was born in Mozambique,” Yen says. “My parents are mixed. My mother is half South Chinese, half Mozambican. My father is half Portuguese, half Mozambican. I was born there and I came to Portugal when I was seven.”
“So how many flags do you feel like you're carrying on your back now?”
“I definitely have mostly Portuguese and Mozambican. Ironically, I use my Chinese name.”
We both laugh.
“Most of my family are in Mozambique,” Yen says, “because my Chinese grandfather escaped from China during the war, so he could never go back. He was 18 when he arrived in Mozambique so he lived there his whole life. To the government, he was dead because he disappeared during the war.”
“Which war?”
“It was the Communist war. The Mao Tse-tung war, you know. I don't know all the details.”
“Would you be a believer in intergenerational trauma?” I ask. A conversation I had had recently piqued my interest on such a matter.
“I definitely believe that you carry all of your ancestors' legacy, for sure,” Yen says. “I mean, your choices are your choices, but in a way you’re the result of what has preceded. And this is what I am. Because of my roots. I can do whatever I choose to do but I'm a woman and I have this colour. It's still part of what I have to face-”
Yen’s phone starts ringing. It’s her mother. She answers the call, talks enthusiastically for a few minutes, before continuing her point without breaking stride.
“-I'm a daughter of immigrants. I am myself an immigrant. An African immigrant. And a woman. I've been having all of these obstacles put in front of me throughout my life. This is not new for me. For me, this was the way my life was. My parents told me when I was young that this was life and this is how it is. So you get that mindset of life being like this and then you realise that life isn't like this for everyone. That's when I started to think about the way I looked and trying to do what I wanted. I can choose, but in reality, it is not like that. Every choice I make, I have more obstacles than my white, blonde friends. I never realised that growing up-”
A man comes over looking for change. Yen engages in a friendly conversation with him before digging through her purse and handing him a two euro coin. She, again, resumes our chat without breaking stride.
“-When my daughter was seven,” she says, “it really hit me. I would look to her and imagine her going through what I went through at that age. I used to talk to myself as a little girl and say 'that it was so unfair you.'”
“Have you seen a changing attitude,” I ask, “towards race and racism in Portugal?”
“Yes.”
“You think it's better now?”
“It is better but sometimes, even if people don't say anything racist, there are so many layers that it doesn't really change in one generation. But the thing is, we are not in the States. I think living there, right now, or until now, must be really terrible. I don't even want to compare because you can't make comparisons. It's never fair to compare things. This is still a friendly country, so I'm not comparing us to the States.”
“Do you know Dean Blunt?” I ask.
“Dean?”
“Dean Blunt.”
“No, what is that?”
“He's an artist from England,” I say. “I think he comes from a Nigerian background. At the time of the Black Lives Matter movement, maybe two years ago, let's say, he was saying that as Black British people they need to stop comparing themselves to the African American struggle. It's a different struggle.”
“Exactly. It's different. I don't like those comparisons because they're not the same.”
“So the Afro-Portuguese struggle is different?”
“It's different. I don't like when people start to compare the two. It's different. The whole reality is different; What happened to them and what happened to us; What happens here and what happens there.”
Myself and Yen sit back and enjoy our day in this quaint park while we can. She is busy with social plans in the evening and can’t stay for too much longer but our conversation instils in me the notion that I could never unravel the full story of Yen Sung. Not over two days, not over two years. She acts as one of many, but she is truly one of a kind.
Myself and Yen talk of her time in London, in Berlin, in Da Weasel, in anger at the lack of female DJs on the European club circuit.
We talk of her becoming a mother, becoming the co-head honcho of her new label Alphabet Street, and becoming one of the most admirable women I have had the pleasure of meeting.
“I always thought of myself as someone who could do anything,” Yen says. ”Then I realised, no. I could, but there are so many obstacles. Maybe they are there but I don't even see them because I am so used to them. But that's not the way I see myself. It's just the way things are projected onto me.”
“But like you said, you can't change these things completely over the course of a single generation,” I say.
“Exactly,” Yen says.
“All you can do is leave it in a better place for the next generation to pick it up from there.”