BY ALEX HO

In print | Published April 17, 2008 — Updated April 26, 2008 10:10

In his next life, transgendered slam poet Kit Yan wants to be a “baaadass,” while folk musician Melissa Li wants to show-up Mr. Mighty to get the girl. The duo, called the “Good Asian Drivers,” bared their most personal and embarrassing aspirations during their show at Olde Club this past Monday night as part of APIA Month. The gig at Swarthmore was one of the many stops in their 12-week cross-country tour to colleges, queer youth community centers, Asian cultural shows and “just community spaces,” Yan said.

On skill alone, the “Good Asian Drivers” played a great show of spoken word and folk music. But the duo also spent plenty of time poking fun at themselves and connecting with their intimate audience, all for the purpose of giving a voice to queer Asians. As Yan says on their website’s promotional video, “Queer Asians need role models, because I don’t think Margaret Cho is cutting it, or Tila Tequila.”

Yan, a champion of numerous slam competitions, masterfully struck a balance between flowery prose and stand-up comedy. His poems stretched beyond the regular rabble-rousing to challenge even conventional notions of queer identity. One poem criticized restrictive gender roles, “Gender is birth certificates for babies born into gender. Housing applications, checkboxes and even getting an email address — this is gender … But most of the time, gender is, fuck you, mind your own business,” while another poem noted problems in the queer community, “You can still hear butches treat femmes like second-class citizens. You can still hear women fighting for voice and … space at gay pride parades.”

There was also plenty of comedy in Yan’s act. Yan sheepishly admitted that he went to B school (which, he had to explain to the audience, meant business school) and remembered thinking in class, “If more people bought sex toys, then the price of sex toys would go down.” He then proceeded to perform a poem, equal parts activism and hilarity, saying, “I do not wear a strap-on out of penis envy. I wear it because it’s hot. It’s pretty, and I like to have sex with it. And of course it comforts me at night. It reads me a bedtime story and then it irons my shirt.” In another poem, Yan described his fantasy of being reborn as a hyper-masculine badass. “In my next life, I wanna eat meat, drive a pimped-out, rimmed-out black hummer SUV.”

Alternating with Yan’s acts, Li also had her share of rallying cries and funny self-effacing one-liners, but hers took a different form. As she explained in one of her songs, “My little red guitar is my weapon of choice.” Li, a singer and guitarist for nearly a decade, forsook classical music for folk and at fifteen, met and was heavily influenced by Ani DiFranco.

One of Li’s songs, arguably the biggest hit with the crowd, was “Such a Nice Guy,” dedicated to “the lonely straight guy in the back.” The song, which Li described as “like a lesbian anthem,” had Li trying to make a relationship work with a nice boy, while she couldn’t help getting involved with his ex-girlfriend. When the refrain, “Men just honestly don’t do it for me,” elicited a lot of knowing laughter from the audience, Li cried, “I don’t understand why you guys are laughing … It’s a really sad song. I’m breaking up with him!”

One of the duo’s big beefs, media representation, was tackled head on in one of Li’s songs. The song equally indicted mainstream media, “the assholes who control this world have boiled down to two — the white man on the left and the white man on the right,” and those who complain but don’t want to make change. As Li sang, “It’s a sad state of affairs when nobody cares.”

In another song, Li addressed both image issues among Asians and the importance of not selling out, singing, “They say I’m pretty enough to be on TV, but I got a girl by my side and she still wants to be with me.”

Li also works in film and musical theater, two additional talents that had their small place in the show. During the show, the duo filmed one another for a documentary that they are making about their tour, snippets of which can be seen on their website, enumerating various misadventures that may indicate that Yan and Li aren’t as good of Asian drivers as they think. Li, who recently premiered her award-winning musical “Surviving the Nian,” also wrote and composed a cute number for the night, which she called “Good Asian Drivers: The Musical.”

“You pretend to be an angel in front of my momma,” Li complained, while Yan retorted, “I hate it when you talk about your lesbian drama.” It’s too bad the musical stopped there, especially because Yan described the third act as “a rap off.”

Despite performing on a Monday, “Good Asian Drivers” managed to draw enthusiasm from the crowd and thoroughly rocked Olde Club. In a fair world, these two would be all over TV.

To hear more of the “Good Asian Drivers” and see clips of their documentary, please visit them at www.goodasiandrivers.com.

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