Ho arduously sought to define what constitutes Asian-American jazz: "What makes Chinese American music Chinese American? What would comprise an Asian American musical content and form that could transform American music in general rather than simply be subsumed in one or another American musical genre such as 'jazz'?" He polemicized against "the white assimilationist notion of the petty bourgeois Asian American artist that anything by an Asian American artist makes it Asian American," pointing out that, for instance, "Yo-Yo Ma is a cellist who happens to be Chinese/Asian American, not a Chinese/Asian American musician."