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December 15, 2022
Jamie Marina Lau's Playlist for Her Novel "Gunk Baby"
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.
Jamie Marina Lau's Gunk Baby is one of my favorite novels of the year, a brilliantly quiet post-capitalism satire.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"[Lau's] gift for writing accumulative insanities creates the same dizzying effect as a good cleaning."
In her own words, here is Jamie Marina Lau's Book Notes music playlist for her novel Gunk Baby:
Sun Gong No. 1 — Laaraji
Laaraji is played in Leen’s ear cleaning salon through an aux cord. This 13 minute track is expansive and it reminds me of highway and miscellaneous-vehicle ambience. Like the suburb off the highway in the book. Planes flying overhead, reminding the inhabitants of this suburban landscape: that they are on the ground. Something is always brooding but also not really. At one point it sounds like hisses of cicadas. Another point feels like an orange opening up, like the sunset on an open horizon — the kind you get in the suburbs.
Petit Garcon — Zouzou
A scene where Leen is watching her housemate Doms watching the film, Love in the Afternoon. The scene where the singer of this song is naked in an apartment. Doms then says something indistinguishable in French. Petit Garcon indicates the merriment that it should feel to live in a little condominium unit the way our two characters here do — like a distant dream. The way it should feel walking by all the fresh flowers stemming through the iron gates on this boulevard.
Leslie Cheung — 風繼續吹 (the wind continues to blow)
Leen’s mother has moved back to HK to continue her own healing and ear cleaning studio, leaving Leen in the suburbs. Lai Chi Kok is a borough on the Kowloon side. This song reminds me of Lai Chi Kok Park, which has moon ponds, Chinese-style pavilions, and wooden bridges. I imagine Leen romanticizing her mother’s life there — she sees it as this wistful ’80s Canto-pop music video shot at twilight in Lai Chi Kok Park. She dreams this from her housemate’s couch.
LIT freestyle — Dean Blunt
There are scenes where Leen is sitting in the food court of the shopping mall she works at. Looking at the tile floors. Allowing her eyes to follow along the escalators. She people-watches. There are parents with prams, high school students messing around, vandalizing the tables. Middle-aged men eating sushi, speaking as though conspiring, old men almost asleep with their arms folded by fake plants. It’s the feeling of this song. The slackness, the guitars, blanketed with God-like voice overs from Dean Blunt. Feels like a kind of reckless freedom.
Estate — Joao Gilberto
The lyrics here allude to summer as a sort of hell, a mellow anger. “The sun that welded us every day… Addesos burns only with fury.” Leen marvels at the warm feeling of consistency laced throughout these suburbs. The song is a long, lovely hum, girdled with dreams of coldness. Reminds me of the way the inhabitants of suburban houses keep on air conditioning, but still worship and celebrate the sun. This song indicates to me the anticipation of the apocalypse that begins to take over the second half of the book.
Jamie Marina Lau is a twenty-five-year-old multidisciplinary artist and writer. Her debut novel, Pink Mountain on Locust Island, won the 2018 Melbourne Prize Readings Residency Award and was shortlisted for many others. In 2019, She received the title of Sydney Morning Herald's Best Young Australian Novelist. Her writing can also be found in various publications.
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