'In Gunk Baby, we join Leen just as she opens an ear-cleaning and massage salon at the Topic Heights Shopping Complex. Soon she starts to notice increasingly odd behaviour around her, and also it seems that managers of other stores are being killed off. In nonstop prose, Gunk Baby takes aim at orientalism and the Zen movement, violence, fashion, and middle-class boredom.'
Source: Publisher's catalogue.
Epigraph :
One who knows does not speak;
one who speaks does not know.
Block the openings;
Shut the doors.
Blunt the sharpness;
Untangle the knots;
Soften the glare;
Let your wheels move only along old ruts.
This is known as a mysterious sameness.
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching (Book Two, LVI)
'Jamie Marina Lau’s “Gunk Baby” sets a workers’ revolution in a cheesy shopping mall.'
'After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of the morning. Leen lives in the fictional outer suburb of Par Mars, a typical sprawl of shopping centres, housing estates, and units fronted by flat open lawns. Yet just beneath all the grass and concrete runs an undertow of surveillance and violence that feels both strange and strangely familiar.' (Introduction)
'A “non-place”, as Marc Augé describes in his 1995 essay-turned-book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, is a venue whose uniformity of design makes it indistinguishable from another, regardless of where you are in the world. One can think of shopping centres, supermarkets and airports as non-places, although more recently we can also include cafes, Airbnbs and social media profiles. In Augé’s view, a non-place is a “supermodernism” that has emerged out of globalisation, resulting in “places of memory” that are unbroken chains. These places become so familiar they eventually become socially estranging.' (Introduction)
'A “non-place”, as Marc Augé describes in his 1995 essay-turned-book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, is a venue whose uniformity of design makes it indistinguishable from another, regardless of where you are in the world. One can think of shopping centres, supermarkets and airports as non-places, although more recently we can also include cafes, Airbnbs and social media profiles. In Augé’s view, a non-place is a “supermodernism” that has emerged out of globalisation, resulting in “places of memory” that are unbroken chains. These places become so familiar they eventually become socially estranging.' (Introduction)
'After the deliquescent dream of Pink Mountain on Locust Island, Jamie Marina Lau’s Gunk Baby is a wake-up call from a silent number in the small hours of the morning. Leen lives in the fictional outer suburb of Par Mars, a typical sprawl of shopping centres, housing estates, and units fronted by flat open lawns. Yet just beneath all the grass and concrete runs an undertow of surveillance and violence that feels both strange and strangely familiar.' (Introduction)
'Jamie Marina Lau’s “Gunk Baby” sets a workers’ revolution in a cheesy shopping mall.'
