Karaoke, the Universal Language
Area Immigrants Find Support and a Taste of Home Through Song

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 31, 2006

One in a series on how Washingtonians

spend their summer.

By day, Adalid Saavedra paves roads. His sweat runs and drips in the suffocating outdoor oven of a hot Washington summer.

By night, he's cool. He is Mexican balladeer Alejandro Fernandez. He steps in front of the crowd, grips the mike and croons in velvety Spanish Craaaaazzy as violins soar. They call me crazy because I talk to the birds .

The crowd is low-key. For a few minutes, it is his. Until the next karaoke act.

It's Friday night at Las Americas, a small restaurant in Falls Church where karaoke in Spanish is on the menu six nights a week. Outside is a strip mall on the edge of the city's immigrant community, far from the Bolivian foothills where Saavedra grew up -- where everyone in Saavedra's family, he would say later, is a singer.

Just as Saavedra and others brave of voice and full of abandon are tonight.

In the Washington suburbs, where this Salvadoran-Mexican restaurant sits next to a Vietnamese deli, karaoke transcends borders. At hole-in-the-wall cafes and crowded bars, song lists come in Filipino and Korean and Spanish and Chinese, allowing laymen of all tongues to unleash their inner singers.

Some things are universal no matter the language: A few singers have voices smooth as silk; others are abysmal. Songs are steeped in memory and distance. And many are about heartbreak.

Alan Reyes sat with his brother in the back of Las Americas, at a table topped with a tiny vase of pastel carnations. The room was half-full of customers, mostly men and a few dates, slicing heaping plates of grilled meat and shaking salt into Mexican beers.

He was not -- not -- taking the microphone, no matter what. "It scares me," said Reyes, fortyish and stocky, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans.

The brothers, partners in a Lorton construction firm, preferred watching the two young women hosting. The women -- one bubbly, one aloof, both in heels and denim -- sang when patrons did not.

At the moment, they were Colombian pop diva Shakira, wandering slowly among the tables with microphones in hand and eyes darting to the upper corners of the room, where lyrics scrolled across television sets.

"Wow!" Reyes shouted to them. "I'm having a ball!"

He ordered a tequila shot, his first ever, he said. It was delivered by a waitress in a white blouse who moved through dimness tinged by colored Christmas lights draped high along the walls. Patrons smoked and sipped but rarely chatted. Thunderous ranchero music made conversation nearly impossible.

Owner Freddy Merino stood by the cash register in a pressed paisley shirt and trim mustache, watching over it all like a headmaster. The karaoke was a business strategy.

Merino first tried a mariachi group that charged for songs sung tableside, but the stiff prices angered patrons. Next, he hired a piano player. Too mellow. Finally, he settled on karaoke -- but not in the traditional free-for-all sense, which Merino thinks encourages drinking. At Las Americas, karaoke is part show: The two hostesses sing, choosing songs that rev up clients but maintain a family ambience, Merino said. There is no stage, just cleared-out space against a mirrored wall.

"It is a team: music, cooking and waitresses," said Merino, a Salvadoran immigrant.

Up front, Saavedra and two friends smiled as they slapped the backs of three newcomers to their table, where they sipped beer mixed with Coke to keep it "softer," he said.

Nearby, Falls Church carpet installer Otoñel Rivera, 24, drank Coronas alone and waited to sing, as he does every Friday.

"I do not have friends," he said between cigarettes.

He had sung once this night and was signed up for more, but he couldn't remember which. The Coronas have added up.

The women summoned him to sing a hit by the Mexican rock band Maná.

"Excuse me," Rivera said. His was motionless as he sang. His voice drifted around the octaves in ways that did not always match the music.

I am stuck, I am wounded

I am drowned in a bar

Desperate in oblivion, love

I am drowned in a bar

A bit later, the hostesses took a break in a side room.

For Jenny Segovia, 24, who left El Salvador two years ago in search of better opportunities, it was a thrilling gig.

But for Ana Torres, 22, it was a way to forget everything. That's what drives many to the microphone, she said. "They have fights with their wives. They come from work tired. Sometimes they feel sad about their countries," she said.

She wants to get ahead, but she lacks the means. Every spare dime, she said, goes to her twin 6-year-old daughters in El Salvador. She last saw them four years ago.

Her head dropped. She fought tears, then wiped them away.

Then she headed toward the music -- to sing, and to forget.

The front tables were empty at Cafe Muse, in the heart of Annandale's Koreatown. But in the back -- where groups sing in private, windowless rooms -- a slice of the world lay behind every door.

In one room, kung fu teacher Hon Lee sat on a hard black bench surrounded by his nine students, who are originally from Japan, Iran, Korea and the United States and usually gather at a Reston martial arts center. A strobe light bounced multihued disks of light across the checkered linoleum floor and the blank walls.

In the private rooms, the group controls the vibe. Bachelorette parties tend to be raucous. The kung fu class was not. Members politely passed the microphone, tapping their feet through Green Day, Smash Mouth and U2.

Then Kiyoshi Yamamoto, 36, a self-professed veteran of Japan's "karaoke era," found his groove. Halfway through Kelly Clarkson's "Since U Been Gone," he began to jam. Seated, the spiky-haired massage therapist and computer consultant first pulled out the vibrato -- go-o-o-o-ne -- then leapt an octave to a hysterical falsetto.

The room erupted in laughter. Yamamoto kept the falsetto until the final notes.

Shut your mouth, I just can't take it

Again and again and again and agaaaaaiiin!

"That rocks!" someone shouted.

The class was celebrating Lee's completion of an exam that would certify him to practice Chinese herbal medicine.

Karaoke was the teacher's idea, the students said.

This was hard to believe. Lee, 62 and bespectacled, sat quietly apart from the group, hands on knees. A few songs later, he slowly rose.

"This is mine," Lee said. On the huge flat-screen television came scenes of sunset and romance. Still serene, he began the 1950s Platters ballad "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

Mina Choi ducked into the hall and quickly returned with two tambourines.

"Oh, now she's getting into it!" someone said.

Choi, 27, handed one to Allie Shaw, 32, and together they kept a slow beat: Ching, ching, ching .

"These add a little flavor," said Choi, after Lee ended on a high note.

Soon the group called it a night. As people gathered purses and put down microphones, Lee stood near the door to thank his students for their "support" and to offer a revelation: He chose the Platters because his immigrant mother had loved the song. But knowing only Chinese, she had lent her own meaning to the lyrics.

"It sounded to her like . . . 'salt fish,' " he said. "So she translated it into, 'Where can I get my salt fish?' "

The students smiled.

In a smaller room across the hall, seven new friends paged through fat binders of song lists in Vietnamese and English. A few cans of Corona and a water pitcher sat on a coffee table. The light was low, the strobe light off.

Members of a Vietnamese "meet group" who had previously socialized over ice skating and wine tasting, they were now bonding over song.

Scenes of azure skies and golden fields appeared on the television.

"Oh, this is the George Bush thing!" shouted one man in a crisp gray button-down. The comment drew puzzled laughs. But when the words started, everyone chimed in.

This land is your land,

This land is my land

Sitting close to the television in a red sweater and rhinestone-encrusted sandals, Duong Kim Ngoc, 56, the group's unofficial ringleader, sang with gusto. Ngoc was a pro: A teacher of Vietnamese, she owns a machine that lets her do karaoke on her television every morning before her classes.

"You warm up the vocal cords," she said, adding that karaoke is also useful for teaching the six tonal sounds of Vietnamese.

At Cafe Muse, it was a way for Vietnamese people to connect.

"It's a miracle that I can still speak Vietnamese," said Danh Tran, a Fair Oaks real estate agent who grew up in the United States and has visited Vietnam. He leaned back and considered this and the scene around him, as if searching for higher meaning. Karaoke, he concluded, was a way for them to feel "back home again."

The screen filled with people riding old-fashioned bicycles on streets lined with low-slung stores, a video for the Vietnamese song "Saigon, Vietnam."

"It's not called Saigon anymore. It's called Ho Chi Minh City," Tran said. "So when we sing it, we think about the old times."

Old times meant different things. Ngoc flipped pages in a song folder, searching for an oldie whose name she could not remember. After a few minutes, there it was: "Nguu Lang Chuc Nu." The lyrics told the story of lovers split by family and society -- a theme common in Vietnamese music, Ngoc said.

"It's the typical way in Vietnam before," said Bao-Loc Nguyen, 43, a Fairfax City employee. "The parents picked how you should be married. The woman had no say in it. If your parents don't approve it, it's like the whole village doesn't approve it."

But it was close to midnight in Annandale, and there was little time for wistfulness or regrets. The Vietnamese group's members had one more destination. They were going dancing at a Latin club.