These days, Charlene Kaye only gets back to Ann Arbor on tour, but she launched her music career playing open mics as a U-M English major in the late aughts. After moving to New York City, she became a working musician: a guitarist in the band and opening act for U-M grad Darren Criss’s StarKid show Space, a frontwoman for the indie rock collective San Fermin, and a solo artist both under her full name and the name KAYE, producing numerous EPs and albums along the way.
Musician and former U-M student Charlene Kaye performs her spoken word show Tiger Daughter May 3 at the Blind Pig. | Photo courtesy Charlene Kaye
On May 3, she plays the Blind Pig, not with a backup band but with her solo spoken word show Tiger Daughter: Or, How I Brought My Immigrant Mother Ultimate Shame. It’s described as being “about what happens when you rebel against your immigrant Chinese tiger mom’s dreams of you playing Carnegie Hall” and “instead become a slutty shredder in an all-girl Guns N’ Roses cover band called Guns N’ Hoses with the slogan ‘Welcome to the Vajungle!’”
Her mother, Lily, grew up in poverty in 1960s and 1970s Singapore, resulting in a scarcity mindset and, to Kaye, an outsized concern about her daughter earning a living as a musician. An outrageous, larger-than-life character, with “more self-confidence than Beyoncé,” Lily dreamed of becoming a singer herself and even asked Kaye to record and produce a full album of Lily singing Kaye’s songs.
When Kaye began taking acting classes, she saw how she could mine Lily’s audacious personality, along with the deep emotional material of their relationship, for a one-woman show. Lily saw the show and loved it, giving Kaye the short-lived idea that she had “fixed” the relationship. But of course parent-child connections are far too complicated for that, Kaye says; the challenges—and rewards—last a lifetime.
The show explores the taboo subject of mother-daughter competition, the trope of the tiger mother, cultural gaps between generations, especially in immigrant families, and how the people closest to you can be the most alien. It poses the question: “Do we need to understand people in order to love them?” Laughter is punctuated by occasional tears from audience members, and Kaye says she’s been moved by people coming up to her after the show to talk about their own mothers.
Kaye has been performing the show for about a year, making small changes as she goes. After Ann Arbor, the show makes stops around the U.S., in London, and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August.
With the show, she’s happy to add at least two more complex and realistic depictions of Asian women to the culture. When she was a teenager in Scottsdale, Arizona, she saw a lot of racist stereotypes in popular culture but not many Asians on screen or stage who were authentic human beings until 2018 and Crazy Rich Asians. Kaye’s nascent acting career has included a walk-on role at Kendall Roy’s birthday party in Succession, and she’s slated to play a 1980s punk rocker in an upcoming Margaret Cho movie.
But music will always be her first love. She’s inspired by The Collective, the latest album by seventy-year-old alternative rocker Kim Gordon (Sonic Youth), to “continue building a rock ’n’ roll matriarchy.” Even as she tours with Tiger Daughter, she is writing songs and working on her next album.
The very things you’re scared to share are the same things that connect to people, Kaye notes. Years ago, she wrote a song about a difficult conflict with her mom that she tucked away and did not record because it made her feel too vulnerable. As part of Tiger Daughter, she described the song but still didn’t play it on stage. In a recent performance, she finally sang that song.
