Despite its definition as a non-immigrant nation, China embodies a structural contradiction by becoming the unanticipated destination for Asia’s largest African diaspora. Since the late 1990s, transnational commerce driven by African migrants has transformed Guangzhou’s urban enclaves into a vital Afro-Asian hub (Mathews 2019; Lan 2017). However, a profound dissonance exists between this tangible presence and its inscription in official archives. While state media frames African music as a political symbol or exoticized display, authentic diasporic voices remain muted. Their sonic expressions, rooted in memories of home and global markets, are rendered inaudible within mainstream records. I conceptualize this absence not as a vacuum, but as a blank history. Drawing on Veena Das (2020), I argue these silences are inhabited by everyday struggles and tacit knowledge that homogeneous official archives fail to register yet are haunted by. To access this history, I employ “listening to the text” (Ochoa Gautier 2014) to interrogate gaps in media reports and urban descriptors. Following Xu (2025), I treat these textual silences as active sites where fleeting sounds and embodied practices can be reconstructed. This inquiry gains urgency post-2020, as pandemic-era policies triggered a mass exodus (China Times 2024). As African residents navigate a precarious return, this blank history becomes critical for understanding their resilience. By attending to the friction between their silenced everyday realities and China’s hegemonic narratives, this study renders the diaspora’s invisible history visible, revealing a sonic presence surviving within the texture of the ordinary.