Art of Artistry and Intentional Living by Vienna Teng

The entire scene is brightly vivid in my head. The very moment, as well as the subsequent story beats, of my being exposed to the person who is, looking back at my life, one of my top few favourite artists of all time. My freshman year roommate had his desk under his bunk level bed, while I had mine adjacent to my (non-bunk altitude) bed where we weren’t directly across from each other while studying, but could both tilt our heads about 30 degrees right and left respectively and we would be facing each other. He was already in the dorm room studying when I had come in, late one evening mere weeks into our freshman year, where I had quietly sat down and was doing my best to pleasantly utilize silent peer pressure to also study instead of dilly dallying. He asked me if it was cool that he was playing music out loud, and if he should switch to headphones, which I declined. I would eventually figure out that music does confuse my brain while studying (at least music with lyrics) so it wasn’t ideal for me. Nonetheless, it was the picture perfect image of what for years I imagined college would be like while fantasizing about going to a top school in States from half a world away. I wasn’t even 18 at the time, and knew nothing about life. So my best guess as to the best decisions could be were measured according to how cinematic it looked sand felt.

So I began studying for the very first mini examination of my collegiate life, a quiz for Physics I for Engineers: forces, vectors, momentum sort of basic stuff. A good variety of chill music was rotating out of his IBM think pad. Then a particular song played, and it was very clear to me, viscerally, that it made me feel good. In my chest. It made me feel pleasantly enough that it actually distracted me. I kept veering my attention back to the sample quiz our German physics professor had posted on Blackboard, but I was pingponging between the unit conversions I was trying to make sense of on my screen and the way the song was making me feel. This lasted for quite a while, at which point I realized that unlike all the prior ones, this song was actually playing on repeat for a while.

It felt ok to interrupt: “Dude, what IS this song?” He lifted his head with not even a hint of someone who was distracted out of a precious focus, but instead the soft and satisfied face of someone who was about to generously share a valuable piece of information with his fellow man: “It’s an artist my sister just found and forwarded to me. The song is The Tower by Vienna Teng. It’s kinda amazing, isn’t it?” It sure was.

We proceeded to play that song on repeat for the next several days. Luckily, our brains, in some ways, worked similarly. Which actually was the reason why we arranged to live together after meeting as next door neighbors just weeks prior. He didn’t have much of a connection with his roommate, and my roommate was an insufferable nimrod that our entire dorm, and even the school at large grew to dislike in the following months and years. We pushed for it, and I moved in right next door a week into the Fall semester, and then I guess we proceeded to listen to songs on repeat immediately. I never even had a habit of sleeping with music on, but when he asked if I would be ok with it, with this particular song, my response was a straightforward “I wouldn’t mind giving it a shot”, since the idea of falling asleep to sound of the September rain of Pittsburgh outside and the confusingly calming melodies of The Tower sounded great to me. Life was good.

I was legitimately grateful to my roommate’s sister, who was two years our senior, a junior at MIT doing Electrical and Computer Engineering at the time. He seemed to consider his sister a good role model, and they would sometimes have long and wholesome phone conversations in the dorm room, which also made me a fan. It was only during the rest of the year where I would hear other tidbits of elderly advice from her through my roommate that I started questioning, in general, probably for the first time in my life, that maybe people older than me didn’t always know better. It was extremely admirable that, as a youngling, she decided that her ideal life involved studying the hardest thing she could at MIT, and then she proceeded to do whatever it took to accomplish that. Neither he, nor I had gotten into MIT, so just with the resume of a 20 year old, she got to pull rank. But eventually I would overhears phone conversations that made it sound like she hated computer engineering, and she was getting very passionate about art and design. But apparently she had zero interest in not getting her engineering degree, along with negligible interest in taking arts-related classes either (“as many hard science classes as I can take while I have access to being here” was the response I believe). MIT has a the whole Media Lab unit, a top architecture program, and a lot of options for creative coursework––not to mention all the opportunities to also take classes at Harvard half a mile down the street. Apparently, “college [was] about building tolerance towards doing things you really hate, so that once you’re in the real world doing a job, you’re used to it and can power through all the tasks you don’t want to do”. Sure; this is a Chinese-American family from the Midwest where parents preach all sorts of tiger-ish advice like “if in life you have chance to get a BS over a BA, always go for the BS”, and the implicit message that the kids won’t be receiving approval and affirmation unless they are scientifically oriented in their endeavors. But, holy hell; college is about getting used to eating shit by the shovel-loads because that’s what’s waiting for you for the rest of your life? Looking back, this might be one of the first instances of me hearing loudly the deranged shrieks of what I (in my own mindscape) call ‘The American Disease’.

And so when the MIT sister sends word that she’s gonna watch Vienna Teng live in a few weeks in Cambridge, we are crumbling in jealously. And what’s twisting the knife after the insertion is that Vienna is actually coming to Pittsburgh, but it’s a 21+ venue and we can’t go because we both barely just turned 18. Is this what I was gonna end up needing a fake ID for? Holy Batman.

But then serendipity would have it, the Awareness of Roots in Chinese Community (ARCC) asks her to do an extra concert while she is in town at a small theater at one of the Carnegie Museum buildings and immediately our lives are epic, and we live at the heart of where it’s happening. Moving up in the world!

Part of the reason why the members of this Chinese-American family was gushing about Vienna (who is Taiwanese-American) also had to do with Vienna’s own background and education. She had a Computer Science degree from Stanford, and worked for Cisco for several years before quitting to do musical full time. Honestly, I wouldn’t be surprised if the roommate’s sister was initially drawn to the story before she started listening to the songs. This girl sees a potential role model who basically goes “Yeah, being raised in this Asian-American culture in NorCal, there was a lot of pressure on me to study sciences and get the degrees and accolades. But eventually, I couldn’t resist it any longer and I realized I had to dedicate the rest of my life to music”. And upon hearing this, it sounded like her internal narrative said something like “Oh my god, she’s amazing. I also want to study absurdly hard for things I don’t, but the rest of the society (and especially my parents and the relatives and neighbors who are gonna ask them about me) cares about; get all the degrees and accolades, with top marks; and then eventually, much later in life, proceed to start doing some of the things I actually personally care about. I mean that’s how you discover your interests in life, right? By completely neglecting engaging with them until after you gave your parents something to show off with. Ok, great. Fantastic. I wanna be just like Vienna”. Not that, as a famous person who gives interviews, she was gonna deter people from education in public speech. But it was really fascinating how the advice Vienna was gently giving to young people who looked up to her was flying right over their heads. Her anecdotes about thinking about music while wrestling with CS problem sets, or some of her best memories of college being the mini concerts she would give in the dorm common room that had a piano––I guess they won’t nowhere for some. Not me though.

It might be because these ideas (and what I’ve read in interviews) may have gotten into my head that towards the end of my first semester I started dating an Art major who was also absurdly good at freestyle jazz piano. She also had the same exact name as one of the lead actors in Full House, which I actually knew because I had spent my high school years as an IMDB nut, which she had really appreciated. I distinctly remember the first time I found out that before she settled on fine arts, she was a serious pianist who composed her own pieces and all. After some kind of social event at Mudge Hall, the two of us had ended up in the common area on the ground floor of Mudge, which was a gigantic living room with a massive fireplace and a piano at the corner (Some of the old mansions really close to the campus had been converted to dorms, while maintaining some of their architectural mainstays). I had known nothing of it until we had entered the room and she had said that she felt like playing the piano. And I was aroused in atypical ways while she told me full stories about recitals and how she’d go about composing her own music while cresting the musical score for the evening with her fingers simultaneously.

The concert with Teng was everything I wanted it to be, except she didn’t play The Tower. When it was my turn to have her autograph her first two albums that I had bought there, I asked about its absence. She said that The Tower had felt worn out and people usually had gotten a bit tired of it. Even then, as innocent and impressionable and taking-everything-I-hear-at-face-value as I was, I could tell that it was actually her who was tired of the song. We took a picture together, called it an incredible night, and continued to feel good about the people we were becoming two months into semi-adulthood. The very first finals week was still about 3 weeks away, so nobody had gotten a good reality check smackdown of college-making-you-do-things-you-don’t-really-wanna do yet.

Those two albums ‘Waking Hour’ and ‘Warm Strangers’ helped me though something extremely difficult that transpired at the end of my second semester, as well as the entire sophomore year, during all of which I was pretending to be strong and fine (even to myself, convincingly) with that thing that happened. She came out with another album when I was a sophomore, which was moodier, that I guess fit my needs at the time. It was grayer, and rainier. Is that’s my synesthesia talking? Is it just the way our brains categorizing things via images and the album cover being black and white? Or is it Pittsburgh being one continuous monsoon September to May? Do we think certain types of music naturally implies warming one’s own hands with a hot liquid in a cup while staring out a window––or does the chicken come out of the egg? The very last module of Human Nature (an anthropology course) that I took in grad school was about the neuroscience of music, and suggested certain built-in implications about fundamental associations in the human brain contingent on musical stimulus. But I suppose I can’t disentangle the self-imposed musical score of a year during which I was grieving from the music itself.

There were years where I would forget about her, only to remember and look her up to realize that I had two whole new albums to discover and enjoy. Then, just like a few other artists would do from time to time (usually, again with multiple albums that I needed to catch up with), the music would dominate a certain period in my life. Again, self-imposed musical score is the right terminology to keep using here. You go full Abed and make sense of the world by watching movies and TV shows, and you end up music-coding your own history and build an Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for what happened to you. This time, Vienna’s Inland Territory, Aims, and the live album The Moment’s Always Vanishing are painting a North Carolina winter, and then a spring, and a summer. And then a big trip to the Pacific Northwest and Canada. Actually the Canada part was more dominated by the music of Corneille that I was also catching up on at the same time. Why had I all of a sudden started looking up artists I had discovered or listened to a lot in my early college years? Oh, I totally know. At the time I was living right by Duke University and I had decided to improve some of my more technical skills and I had started walking into Computer Science lectures on campus. I had shaved my big boy beard to look younger to avoid excess attention and simply skipped the days of the exams, all the way to about a semester of CS under my belt. Along with the excitement of learning Python that lasted all of roughly 4 months, I guess I felt like a true freshman again and needed to reactivate how I felt when I legitimately was one.

I have distinct memories of teaching yoga classes with that music in the background. One time in particular, the very first time I had gotten a Saturday primetime slot at the studio I had recently gotten into, I taught the entire class to Inland Territory from start to finish, which had perfectly ended just before Savasana. It was a full class, my partner at the time was front row (whom I introduced to class, much to her social anxiety and awkwardness [I wanted to give her opportunities to break out of it]) and serendipity would have it, even my parents were in town. I put them in the back row so they’d be comfortable out of sight as the yoga novices they were. I always liked long holds of asanas personally, so my teaching was on the side of encouraging longish holds too. Downdogs were perfect opportunities for those. I always taught some yoga or anatomy tidbits, or talked about whatever I felt like during those pauses. There is no such thing as an awkward pause in the room where yoga happens; it is the job of the instructor to make all of those moments comfortable and natural. Nonetheless, I suppose…I had…a lot to say, that I wanted to say, out loud, to a audience of sorts––at the time. This is several years before I had become a therapist (and I guess was rewarded my audience to get my talking and listening rocks off to).

So I, of course, talked about Vienna Teng the artist to the class. I talked about the Asian-American experience and how its demonstration in folk music ended up being something quite lovely in this instance, which I wanted to share with them as the musical theme of the class. I guess it’s vaguely like low-grade DJ’ing, to make the experience of a 70 minute long practice more memorable. As I felt like talking about the album, ‘Grandmother Song’ was playing and I referred to it being about the exceedingly Asian experience of your elders constantly giving you advice about simultaneously overachieving but also finding good boy/girl to marry and pop out kids to pressure into overachieving and popping out further legacy. On and on. And it’s still so very vivid in my head, where I was in the room and how I delivered it, when I said “at some point in this song, she goes “all the good booooys, baby they’re in graaad schoool”” and then those lyrics came on within the next 5 seconds and the class erupted in laughter while contorted in half on pigeon poses. Feeling myself, I went in front of class to describe additional things they could do, per their flexibility or practice level, from the foundation of a pigeon: how you can loop your feet with your elbow crease, how you can grab your foot with one or two hands, or proved your Backbend is deep enough, “or you could reach all the way over your head with both hands and get into a king pigeon poses and holy hell, I just did it! Oh my god, this is the first time ever I got into this pose! Achievement unlocked”. My partner was laughing her ass off. I’m not sure what my parents were doing as the room was dark-ish with them so far behind. Did I ask them afterwards? I don’t think so. Maybe I will now, when I go back home from writing this at my favourite neighborhood bakery close to their house. The whole hour was just 10 our of 10 and, once again, she was the musical score of a memorable experience of my life.

One thing that shook me silly when I was rediscovering her during this time was how she at some point got bored and wanted to do environmental work. And to work towards this goal she matriculated into the MBA/MPA program at University of Michigan and moved to Detroit. If I remember correctly, the moving to Detroit part came first, because she was for some reason really smitten by that city, which was going through some extremely rough times at the time. House foreclosed right and left, downtown in tatters, and she found something endearing about how the people who remained were so community oriented and took extreme ownership of the struggle of the city. Woman was inspired by it, so she wanted to be close to that, and uprooted her life like the bad ass independent lady she is and moved there. As evidenced by her having lived in various places across the United States chasing adventure, her curiosities, and artistic expression. Had I noticed that she had also lived in Boulder for a while and saved that to a subconscious corner of my mind? Did that eventually contribute to my half decade long sojourn to Colorado? I wouldn’t be shocked if that were one of the earlier seeds.

So I guess she goes “I like school and am good at studying. Let’s see what cool stuff is happening at Ann Arbor” and then bangs out a dual degree in the next few years while doing non-music stuff for a while. Then follows a job in environmental non-profit work. Then comes the itch. And she has to go back to music again. Reinvention continues, cyclically––it never stops, for some.

Across all these years of doing whatever she wants, wherever she wants, with humility and grace, touring across US and occasionally Europe, enjoying moderate fame, enough to experience life as a successful artist, but not too much that it would affect her life as a human in significant ways, that could make in unravel, or get out of control. Think of the burrito analogy Bo Burnham makes in the finale of ‘Make Happy’:

“Wouldn’t’ve got the lettuce if I knew it wouldn’t fit

Wouldn’tve got the cheese if I knew it wouldn’t fit

Wouldn’t’ve got the peppers if I knew it wouldn’t fit

Man I wouldn’t’ve got half of it like, half of it right now”

For a period of at least 3-4 years in my life, I would sometimes get a uniquely sentimental feeling bubbling up from my chest, which would make me wanna look up this song on YouTube, and I would proceed to get progressively more teary eyed into a good proper cry in the last two minutes of it.

“I can sit here and pretend like my biggest problems are Pringle cans.

And burritos.

The truth is my biggest problem’s you.

I want to please you.

But I want to stay true to myself.

I want to give you the night out that you deserve.

But I want to say what I think, and not care what you think about it.

Part of me loves you.

Part of me hates you.

Part of me needs you.

Part of me fears you.

And I don’t think that I can handle this right now”

My face ingested a lemon and my eyeballs got moist again goddamnit. This is what happens when someone says something truly profound. And I guess when you have the machinery to receiving the profundity.

And Vienna Teng avoided so much of what is awful about the American disease, and became obscenely well-educated, polymathic, multi-career renaissance woman who got the privilege to live like an artist while expertly avoiding seemingly a lot of the curses that usually come with the fame burrito. I changed cities, even countries every however many years in my early adulthood, chasing curiosities, experiences, knowledge, excitement, and sometimes peace. I knew that for the type of creative things I wanted to do, I first had to live a certain type of life for a while, so despite having written extensively in my early 20’s (to moderates success, and a small but loyal readership), I had taken various Detroit breaks and graduate school experiences. These days, finally, I might be ready for the “music” I was too young to produce back then, and I’m expecting the rubber band effect to start catching me up now.

And while I lied in wait all this time, during the ups and shocking downs of the journey all the way here, who was, looking back, definitively and unquestioningly, one of my clear north stars? It was Ms. Teng. Now I don’t know if my freshman year roommate’s sister saw Vienna as the same type of role model, for the same reasons as I did. Likely not. And we all say the dumbest things when we are 20 and know zilch about the world. For all I know she may have stopped doing things she doesn’t like to do to please her various asian grandmothers., Or maybe she’s a corporate zombie who is, to this day, postponing life while conforming with a still fully impressionable mind and is irreversibly forehead deep in the American Disease.

Or, she identified good role models in her formative years, who, in time, got her on the right track. Whatever was right for her.

Several years ago, Vienna quietly got engaged and married, which she communicated to her fans with a simple YouTube video. Recently, she took a year or so off from music to gestate and birth a child––and then once all that was under control, got back to making music and touring. Look at the YouTube comments under her handy cam live concert bootleg videos from touring in Europe. Random German people are writing mini versions of what I wrote above in the comments section of videos with a few thousand views. I am not the only one who feels as described above––not even close. I am the average Vienna Teng fan, with a story that might have different beats, but probably has the same core idea behind everyone else’s fandom of her. Goddamn it, she was straight up one of my foremost role models my whole life. That amount of intelligence is what I’m retroactively hoping I may have drawn in the genetic lottery; that amount of humility is what I’m trying to balance on while I do whatever I do in life; that type of creative life wrought on by a stable sense of curiosity is what I want to continue using as my fuel. I heard her, when I was 17, so I kept listening. And I looked what what I saw, and I said “I want that, for myself. I should live my years trying to see if I can be like that”––which is, of course, colloquial for a “role model”.

Now she’s rocking some greys in her bangs asking fans to record small clips of themselves to use in her new music videos. Sharing her process in the (musical) lab in random gonzo recordings uploaded on a whim. Working with whoever she finds the most artistically stimulating, treating it like a fantastical piece of never-ending senior theses for which she needs to go to the library and do research. I believe it was when she was describing her musical partnership with Alex Wong where she would talk about getting stuck on a musical problem during the composition of whatever they were working on. And then they would look up what the GOAT’s of music have done to see how, I dunno, Jay-Z may have solved that problem. I’m too musically ignorant to understand how Jay-Z songs can help with folk music composition. But I’m also old enough that I know how some lady from California that I’ve only ever met once can live in the corner of my mind and leading me by example whenever I needed help.

May you have a long career and a happy life Ms. Teng. For and towards my own success, I kinda need to keep following in these footsteps.

They’ve gotten me this far.