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August 11, 2020
Matthew Salesses's Playlist for His Novel "Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Matthew Salesses' novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear deftly moves between the surreal and the humdrum with dark humor and pointed observations about race in America.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
"The use of surrealism to interrogate the erasure of Asian American bodies and the trauma of being disappeared by whiteness is heightened by angled takes on recent history…Salesses’s tale on the nature of existence triumphs with literary trickery."
In his own words, here is Matthew Salesses' Book Notes music playlist for his novel Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear:
While I was writing Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear, my wife was dying of stomach cancer. When she was diagnosed, she wanted to go to Korea for treatment. Stomach cancer is much more common there. She had just given birth to our second child, and she took the baby with her, since her family could look after him and raise him to be Korean. On our own, my daughter and I listened to music we could be sad to, music that made us long for reunion. When we finally did reunite, in Korea, my wife and I spent a lot of time in the cancer ward, which was in Gangnam in Seoul and looked out upon Lotte Tower, a symbol of the lives people were striving for, while surrounded by women who were striving to live at all. I listened to the same sad songs, because I was still sad and still wanted a kind of reunion with the selves we wanted to be. My wife slept as much as she could, to get through the pain, and I sat beside her on an uncomfortable cot and wrote about living under the immediate threat of disappearance. I wrote more than I had written in a long time—I wrote to assert that we were alive. Then she died, and I couldn’t write anymore. I listened to the same sad songs, because they brought me back to when I was sad but could still be reunited.
Zion.T – “Yanghwa Bridge”
Some of these songs are Korean and some not. The lyrics of this song say, “Let’s be happy. Don’t be in pain.” I barely know enough Korean to translate this, so imagine this meaning but more beautiful, sung in a longing voice full of love for the artist’s family.
Kim Kwang Jin – “The Letter”
One of the few older Korean songs I know, and the saddest. The part that gets me is “more strange is that we can’t see each other anymore.” It does seem strange that the person you used to see all the time you can’t see anymore. You expect to see your beloved when you round the corner, when you get home from work, when you wake in the morning.
Crush – “Beautiful”
Ailee – “I Will Go to You Like the First Snow”
These songs are from my favorite kdrama of all time, Goblin (The Lonely, Shining Goblin is, I think, the official English title). It was one of the last shows my wife and I watched together. Listening to the soundtracks of kdramas is like time travel for me. This drama features reincarnation and a grim reaper and fate and so forth, all things that kind of appear in my novel and that I was thinking about as I wrote it. How can you not think about these things when you’re thinking about doppelgangers?
Kim Sejeong – “Flower Way”
Overly sentimental in a way I really needed. I can’t listen to this one anymore, but thank you for your service.
Han Dong Geun – “Crazy”
This is a song to scream to by one of the best ballad singers in Korea. I can imagine my protagonist listening to this one, between Phil Collins songs. The novel has a lot of Phil Collins jokes, more than I ever expected to write in a lifetime.
BTS, feat. Steve Aoki – “The Truth Untold”
No list is complete without a BTS song, I suppose. This one has some really good covers.
Mitski – “Nobody”
This song may have come out around the time my wife died. It was a late addition to this playlist, but it perfectly captures a mood. Nobody is also a doppelgänger joke waiting to happen, especially a disappearing doppelgänger joke. I like the way her repetition of “nobody” suggests its opposite, which is a craft move if ever there was one. Mitski would be a good fiction writer. She knows how to play on expectations.
Jeff Buckley – “Hallelujah”
The ultimate sad song? Sadder somehow than the original, which is probably a better song for its simplicity. I always hear a disappearance in this song. I never listen to this song unless I listen to it over and over. This one only comes out when the sadness is echoing. It’s a kind of embarrassing song to listen to when you are not that sad.
Matthew Salesses is the author of The Hundred-Year Flood, an Amazon bestseller and Best Book of September, an Adoptive Families best book of 2015; a Millions Most Anticipated of 2015; and a best book of the season at BuzzFeed, Refinery29, and Gawker, among others. He is also the author of I'm Not Saying, I'm Just Saying and the nonfiction work Different Racisms: On Stereotypes, the Individual, and Asian American Masculinity. Adopted from Korea at age two, Matthew was named by BuzzFeed in 2015 as one of "32 Essential Asian American Writers."
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