This roundtable invites participants to think with and through suspense as a heuristic which bridges the embodied and the political, the local and the transnational, the mediated and the “authentic.” We examine how musical performance “within the slash” of Asian/America (Palumbo-Liu 1999) complicates and enriches the very ideas of “Asian” and “American” upon which it rests, suspending preconceived notions of the boundaries between nations and academic disciplines. Drawing from conversations in Global Asias (Chen and Eubanks 2025) and music and performance studies (Huang 2022, Wong 2004), suspense allows us to put sonic practice into conversation with geopolitical and disciplinary critique. Rooted in the diasporic spaces and politics of Southern California, panelists draw from their ethnographic research on 1) Asian/American listeners’ affective responses to EDM at “Asian/American” music festivals; 2) live concert spaces within globalized Kpop performances as “pan-Asian”; 3) Taiwanese/American musical practices in Taiwan; 4) Taiwanese American music as a form of participation in global politics; and 5) queer panethnic Asian/American nightlife. Each of the speakers invite the wider SEM community to join in on this exploration and to contend with how Asian/American ethnomusicologists as well as others can hold in suspense the field of ethnomusicology through the blurring of taken-for-granted boundaries of nation/state.