Karaoke was my family’s happy secret. In those early years in America, like many immigrants, my parents struggled with poverty and loneliness, but they also built provisional families, and inside our bubble there was joy, understanding, an intimate language I could never translate — and above all there was song. Out there, we were flat-faced, all-look-the-same nobodies. But in our own homes, I saw how my parents and their friends could be loose, free and loud.

In the middle of seventh grade, we moved to a white suburb on Long Island, and everything changed. Not only was the drive back to Queens long enough to make trips infrequent, but with the high of our newfound class mobility came crushing paranoia that the tentacles of American individualism, recklessness and narcissism were coming for me, and so my parents clamped down even harder. Meanwhile, among my classmates, I no longer flew under the radar; instead, I was singled out, and my ethnicity made me a target for mockery. Faced with ostracization at school and confinement at home, I turned to karaoke. That year, my mother returned to Shanghai and came back with yet another karaoke machine. ‘‘It has English songs,’’ she said, pulling out a LaserDisc that came free with the system. I recognized two of them. I feigned nonchalance, but the next day after school when no one was home, I turned it on and began to learn the words to ‘‘What’s Up’’ by 4 Non Blondes.

Accomplished vocalist I was not, but it felt good to belt out someone else’s words. The rage I didn’t know what to do with — for having to endure racism and bullying from my peers, for the intense isolation my parents put me through — slipped free of my body, and I felt worthwhile, dazzling even. At school, I was reviled; at home, I could shake the walls with my voice until the moon rose in the sky — or at least until my parents came home from work.

The latest in Chinese home karaoke — a portable microphone that connects to your smartphone, with a built-in speaker — has now made solo singing more appealing than ever. Last week, after a surge of renewed anxiety about the world, I ordered a knockoff from eBay, and alone in my cramped New York apartment, I put my new rose gold microphone up to my lips. I felt like the speaker in the William Carlos Williams poem ‘‘Danse Russe,’’ who dances naked in front of the mirror once his wife, baby and nanny have gone to sleep and sings to no one: ‘‘I am lonely, lonely./I was born to be lonely,/I am best so!’’ I cued up a song and suddenly realized that I wasn’t lonely, lonely. No longer that dim creature who lived subterraneously for years, longing to perform while terrified of an audience, I told myself a small New York lie: All my neighbors are at work — surely no one can hear me. And I took a deep breath, and I sang at the top of my lungs, ‘‘What’s going on?’’