The album Five Years in Exile by Mai Khôi and the Dissidents opens with a suggestive bass riff topped by a cheeky high hat, before ripping open into 12 tracks of experimental jazz—blasts of horns, offbeat rhythms, out-there melodies, and above all, Khôi’s voice—big, percussive, melodic, angelic, freaky, and scalding.
“ I started to make this kind of music since 2016. Before that, I didn't know anything about experimental music,” she says from her studio in Pittsburgh. Once a nationally-celebrated pop star in Vietnam, the artist and activist became known internationally for rejecting state sponsorship and running for Vietnam’s National Assembly on a pro-democracy platform. After facing sustained government pressure, Khôi was forced to leave her home country, and has lived in exile in the United States since 2019. At the University of Pittsburg, Khôi met her collaborator and now husband Mark Micchelli, who produced the album and leads the band of local musicians who make up the Dissidents.
“The political awareness happened in 2016, and because I have music to express myself, I discovered that my voice, instead of singing a normal melody, I could make a more dynamic voice, and it touches very different nerves when you hear it. Every single sound that I make for my music, especially in this album, has the meaning behind that sound.”
For example, she explains with a cheeky laugh, in the song “Burn,” which swings with a jaunty melody while she raps in Vietnamese about climate change and the activists being arrested for speaking out against it, she wanted to “create the atmosphere of everyone getting burned to death.” While on “Innocent Deer,” her pop star prowess shows in the melancholic voice lamenting the state of the world before it graduates to broken wails. “People are falling/into the pit of hatred/the deer are dumbfounded/at the sad news,” she sings.
The album is a sort of chronicle of Khôi’s experience of living in exile, expressing the feelings of anger, frustration, and homesickness alongside the sustaining hope that finding new love can bring. Five Years In Exile contains peaks and troughs where her voice and a fiery horn section bring the rage, to be soothed by the balm of piano and woodwind, only to twist with the floaty timbre of her voice. It’s jazz that knows the rules but gets weird with them.
Growing up in an impoverished family in Vietnam, Khôi decided at age six that she wanted to be a pop star. Her father was her first music teacher and at school she studied songwriting, guitar, and keyboard. After high school, she moved to an opera school in Saigon and began her career as a lounge singer, sometimes performing up to seven gigs a night. Khôi raised enough money to record a few albums, which had some hits, but it wasn’t until she won Vietnam Television’s Song and Album of the Year awards in 2010, the most prestigious award in the country, that her career took off.
“Pop stars in Vietnam are very different from pop stars here. We don't have artists’ freedom, and there is a censorship system that controls everything,” she says of her career. “We always have to submit our artwork to the government to ask for permission before we could perform in public, or release a new album, or a book, or an exhibition. I couldn't feel free to create. And I was very sad about being a pop star. I got a lot of attention, but I couldn't feel free to write my own songs. I got a little bit angrier every time I was censored, so I decided to make a change.”
She drew ire from the government for advocating for women’s and LGBTQ rights, and for her boundary pushing costumes and music. It all came to a head one day during a rehearsal for a performance when one of the government censors promised her she would never perform in the country again if she didn’t change her outfit. “At that moment, I decided this is enough. I won't let them censor me anymore.”
Khôi stopped submitting her work to the government censors, and became an underground artist and activist, organizing exhibitions with other artists who were defying the government and creating without permission.
The result was 24-hour surveillance; she was banned from appearing in any national media, she was detained and isolated from community, friends and family were harassed, and her recording sessions and concerts were raided. “I was not scared. I would always think that the music, the art, and what we believe in is the right thing. And that will protect us. That will protect me.”
Eventually, in 2019, Khôi was told she would be thrown in jail if she stayed in the country and she knew it was a threat to be taken seriously because she had been detained before. She landed in New York, where she created a one-woman show titled “Bad Activist,” and ended up in Pittsburgh on a fellowship, where she found a true partner in music and life in Mark Micchelli.
“In the songs that Mark and I wrote together, I could talk about Vietnam, talk about climate change and the way they put off the climate activists in jail. And I talk about the death penalty and that they kill innocent people that way,” she says. Her new life has also unfolded into both the sweetness of being in love and bewilderment at the turn her host country has taken. “In the past five years living in Pittsburgh, I found love. My life is changing and I have to build my life from the beginning. And I also see the political system in the US now turning toward dictatorship, just like what I experienced in my country. I was living in a very scary time in Vietnam, but here, it is another kind of scary.”
Still, Khôi grounds herself in her resolve about the role of music and artists, to serve as both a keeper of record of the time we’re living in, and to express what the people are feeling in these times. Activism is an act of deep love, a love for the people and places around you that makes you willing to lose everything in order for them to be free. For Khôi, it’s an undeniable part of her identity as an artist.
“I think that is the most important mission of the artist,” she says. “To create things that express what you've seen, what you’ve heard, what you feel.”
Listen to Five Years in Exile by Mai Khôi & the Dissidents here.
