Latinxua Sin Wenz Kala OK (LSWK for short) is a web project that brings together karaoke and romanization from a Sinophone (Chinese–speaking) diasporic perspective. LSWK deals with themes of translation, pronunciation, nostalgia, amnesia, and ideology through two companion websites.

The first, “Duologue,” stages a dialogue between two characters of my invention, one of whom is fixated on karaoke as a nostalgic form of language in which sound is divorced from meaning. The other character is a historian of sorts, studying Latinxua Sin Wenz, a long-obsolete romanization system for Chinese that preceded the current reigning system of Hanyu Pinyin. She is fascinated by Latinxua Sin Wenz for its metaphorical associations with the Sinophone diasporic experience — sound divorced from its referent, the person estranged from their “origin.”

The second website, LSWK “proper,” invites users to sing karaoke songs whose lyrics have been romanized using Latinxua Sinwenz. Twinkling in the background are different texts that I’ve collected on the topic of immigration, displacement, and nostalgia. One example is an excerpt from the book The Writer as Migrant by Ha Jin, a Chinese writer who immigrated to the US and only writes in English. Another draws from a podcast run by a group of Chinese women in New York, in which they described themselves as planets having drifted far away from, yet nonetheless still orbit around, the gravitational center of China.

Major features of the project include: animated karaoke lyrics, music videos that visually respond to singer volume via Web Audio API.