By In the garage of his San Gabriel Valley home sits Long Beach State sociology professor Oliver Wang.
He sits between walls lined with an immense collection of records that spans different genres and eras. Beside them, a menagerie of different trinkets and treasures are evidence of Wang’s time as a DJ and hip-hop journalist.
This accrual of life souvenirs is a representation of the years that Wang has spent dedicating his life to pursuing his passions.
Wang has been a professor of sociology at CSULB for almost 19 years now. Alongside that, he has also written and published articles in publications like NPR, Vibe and the Los Angeles Times.
Much of his work as a professor, sociologist, journalist and DJ, Wang said, is centered around the Asian-American experience and the culture and music of hip-hop.
Wang traces back the genesis of his life’s work to his time in high school when he listened to the hip-hop group De La Soul’s debut album for the first time.
“The game-changing album for me was De La Soul’s ‘3 Feet High and Rising.’ Without sounding dramatic, that album changed my life,” Wang said. “After listening to that, I wanted to listen to more music that sounded like this.”
After graduating high school, Wang attended the University of California, Berkeley to pursue a legal career, but quickly pivoted to pursuing being a college professor as it allowed him to study his life’s passions.
Fortunately for Wang, he cites his later formative years and early adulthood attending university as coinciding with the golden years of the culture and music of hip-hop.
“Because of hip-hop’s political and social aesthetics in the late ’80s, early ’90’s ‘Golden Era’ was so connected to issues of politics, power, race and the whole nine, and meanwhile I am learning about these same concepts in my sociology and Asian American classes,” Wang said. “These things all blended together.”
After finishing his undergrad, Wang would begin freelance writing about the Asian American community and cultural topics, along with, of course, writing about hip-hop.
Auspiciously enough, this would help Wang guide himself into how he would mold his post-graduate studies.
Wang went back to UC Berkeley in 1996 to complete his master’s and doctorate. All the while, he continued to be published in a multitude of music magazines and newspapers.
“So, throughout graduate school, I figured out what I wanted to study in grad school is to look at issues of race and popular culture through the lens of Asian Americans in music– which ultimately led me to write my dissertation on Filipino American mobile disk jockeys in the San Francisco Bay Area,” Wang said.
His original dissertation evolved into a book titled, “Legions of Boom: Filipino American Mobile DJ Crews in the San Francisco Bay Area”.
Most of Wang’s work as a teacher, journalist and DJ has centered around Asian Americans in music and entertainment. However, Wang now wants to display and focus on other niches of Asian American history.
For decades, Wang said he had been waiting for someone to come out with a book about Asian Americans in car culture, but sadly that book never came.
So, he took it upon himself to write that book.
However, during his time doing research and interviewing a litany of individuals and groups for his book, Wang recounts an experience where he was approached by an opportunity that would transform his plan for the book into something else completely.
In 2019, the Japanese American National Museum approached Wang with the idea of curating a museum exhibit on Japanese American car culture in collaboration with movie director Justin Lin of the Fast and the Furious franchise.
Luckily for the JANM, Wang believed that a museum exhibit would be the format to display his research more thoroughly.
With that, Wang created his exhibit, “Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community.” However, Wang wanted to separate his exhibit from most car exhibits in Southern California.
“I didn’t want it to just be an exhibit about Japanese manufactured cars,” Wang said. “I wanted it to be about Japanese Americans and their entire history and impact around cars and trucks.”
The exhibit will display photos, videos, stories and also some notable vehicles from the history of Japanese Americans in Southern California car culture.
Some notable stories that will be included are The Atomettes, an all-women car club in the 1950’s, and Tatsumi “Tats” Gotanda and the arguable first Lowrider Chevrolet Impala, ‘The Buddha Buggy”.
The exhibit will also features stories about community vehicles like the community fish trucks driven by Japanese Americans across the entire city of Los Angeles, providing communities with fresh foods.
“We wanted to make the exhibit as broad as possible so that we could capture the entire history of the culture since it goes back, at minimum, more than 100 years,” Wang said.
Most other exhibits would focus on the impact of certain cars on certain communities while Wang seeks to display how one community made an impact on all of car culture, differing his approach from other car exhibits in Los Angeles.
“Japanese manufactures would have made an impact in the United States, but it was Japanese Americans that led to the wide adoption across the U.S.,” Wang said.
After years of research, interviews, preparation and, not to mention, a two year delay due to a global pandemic, Crusing J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community will finally be open to the public on July 31 through Nov. 12 at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.
