Gunk Baby

October 3, 2022
In Australian writer Lau’s imaginative if underpowered sophomore effort (after Pink Mountain on Locust Island), a young woman opens a business in a sinister shopping mall. New business owner Leen, 24, originally from Hong Kong, attempts to attract Westerners to the traditional Chinese art of ear cleaning with Lotus Fusion Studio, which she operates out of a shopping complex called Topic Heights. As Leen struggles to attract customers, she meets Jean Paul, a smarmy pharmacist who invites her to a community group advocating for better treatment of retail employees, and becomes the reluctant getaway driver (Jean Paul doesn’t have a car) for the group’s “Resisting Acts,” a series of increasingly malevolent pranks on stores in Topic Heights. Then, Leen’s roommates ask her to move out so that they can focus on their new business manufacturing synthetic human urine to help people beat drug tests, and she becomes romantically involved with Luis, the manager of a successful franchise of a large Chinese lifestyle brand. Lau makes some good points about consumerism and ably captures the mood of disenchanted youth, but the slow pacing and underdeveloped supporting characters make this feel aimless. Lau has plenty of talent, but while this starts strong, it falls apart at the end.

March 31, 2021
Leen has opened up a massage and ear cleaning studio in the suburban wastelands of Par Mars. Her shop is housed in the second-best shopping mall in the district—Topic Heights. The story is dreamlike, almost feverish from the outset. By the time we meet her, Leen is already somewhat of a passenger in her own life—she sleeps on a trundle bed in the living room of a friend who survives off lottery money. She hasn’t settled on a name for her store. So, when a somewhat repulsive yet confident acquaintance demands that she start driving him to a mysterious series of meetings, she goes along with it. Gunk Baby is author Jamie Marina Lau’s second novel and it is confident, assured and excitingly unique, exploring the idea of consumerism, of the risk of prioritising things over people, by never taking the expected stance. The story takes surreal, dark and sometimes violent turns as Leen is slowly consumed by not just the mall, but by a group that purports to be fighting against all the things the mall stands for. While the ideas are firmly drawn from the real world, Lau deftly uses the dreamy yet tense atmosphere she has created to underscore the horror of the everyday. Readers who enjoyed Ottessa Moshfegh’s Homesick for Another World or Yōko Ogawa’s The Memory Police will find much to appreciate in Gunk Baby. Elizabeth Flux is a freelance writer and editor.