“Dayung Sampan” Resignified: Network Traces of the Tune's Circulation in East and Southeast Asia

This article traces the circulation of “Dayung Sampan” across East and Southeast Asia and examines the tune's adaptations into different musical genres along the way. Initially performed and recorded in the Indonesian kroncong style, it gained wider regional appeal when adapted as the Mandarin pop “Tian Mimi” (甜蜜蜜) in 1979. I explore how these “network traces” inform Singaporean composer Kahchun Wong's 2016 concert band march Sunny Island, which reinterprets the tune within Singapore's multicultural context. This hybridization underscores the complex circulation of musical and cultural ideas, challenging essentialist frameworks that rigidly associate genres with fixed ethnic identities. Sunny Island also exemplifies how the concert band can serve as a medium of semantic layering—where accumulated network traces are signified through individual subjectivity to reimagine national identity and cultural memory.