Chinese-American singer-songwriter Tiffany Day on her self-funded tour that spawned an award-winning documentary, and why ‘it’s OK to feel different’

“But if I’m gonna do this tour, I’m gonna do it right,” she adds.

Henry Thong, a Malaysian-Australian documentary filmmaker, met Day in 2021 through working with her on a web series.

“When I’d heard that Tiffany had this self-funded mission, I knew this was gonna be a great story to tell,” he says of the documentary of her tour.

Much as Day did with her tour, Thong ended up self-funding and producing the documentary, which screened in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vancouver, where it won the People’s Choice Award for Overall Short Film at this year’s Vancouver Asian Film Festival.

The short film captures the ups and downs of Day’s project, which ended on a high note.

Born in Toronto, Canada, to Chinese parents who moved her to the United States when she was one, Day has come a long way since the days of being a self-conscious Asian child growing up in Wichita, Kansas, where she spent her childhood around mostly Caucasian faces.

“Because I grew up around so many people that didn’t look like me – there was only one other Asian girl in my grade that I can think of – as a young girl, I was very quiet and afraid of people judging me. I was already different, why should I be even more different? That’s terrifying for a 14-year-old girl to think about.”

However, she adds, “I think ‘different’ and ‘special’ are two words that dance closely to one another. I never wanted to be different in terms of blending in with the people in my school, but I wanted to be special.”

Day was put into classical music training by her mother at a young age and later taught herself how to play the guitar. In middle school, she wrote her first song after watching the US teen sitcom series Hannah Montana.

She tells the Post: “Maybe part of me relied on music as a crutch to help me be cooler than just ‘that Asian girl’. And as time progressed, music became what makes me feel like me.”

She moved to Los Angeles for university at age 18 and was finally exposed to Asian-American communities, which “felt like freedom”, as the culturally diverse perspectives she encountered taught her “it’s OK to feel different” and enabled her to evolve into a bolder version of herself, Day says.

It was at this time that she came to terms with her identity as an Asian-American artist. It was also around this time that she took songwriting more seriously.

“I don’t know why I had this idea that I was going to be able to be an artist without writing music,” she says, laughing. “But my parents have a family friend who said to me, ‘Anybody can sing, but not anybody can write. You will stand out and have more of a chance of having a music career if you write your own music.’

“I thought, ‘Well, I guess it’s time to just force myself to write.’”

Day says she listens to “a lot of EDM, pop and rap”, and it has an undeniable influence on her upbeat melodies, which oscillate between dance and bedroom pop.

Her lyrics, on the other hand, mostly come from her personal experiences; she likes to “write in a literal, detailed and romantic way” that balances “being lyrical and thoughtful”.

Her most recent EPs, released between 2021 and 2023, The Recovery Project, The Dependency Project, The Renewal Project and The Gratitude Project, were each inspired by a year of her university life.

Through honing her craft in recording studios and releasing her music online, Day can now call herself an independent singer-songwriter and has garnered a sizeable fan base on social media.

The month-long North American tour of seven cities for 15 shows last year proved the dedication of her fans, who bought enough merchandise to cover her credit card debt and even a couple of months’ rent.

Most of all, the personal project proved that the singer had people who truly believed in her.