Mike Fu’s novel Masquerade is a mesmerizing debut, a coming-of-age story as moving as it is vividly told.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“An eerie and rewarding story of a queer Chinese American grappling with his sense of self. …. This funhouse of a novel is worth seeking out.”
In his own words, here is Mike Fu’s Book Notes music playlist for his debut novel Masquerade:
Music sets the mood. It adds texture to a social space or harmonizes with your solitude. Every song is a portal into the past, a chance to connect with countless mundane moments from before: where you were, what you felt, who you were with when you happened to be listening to the same thing.
My debut novel Masquerade takes place primarily in New York across a period of ten years, with a small but significant secondary narrative in Shanghai. I started working on the novel when my departure from New York was already imminent. Like many writers, I reached into the repository of memory for the raw material to construct a fictional framework. And as I labored over this story, I couldn’t help but imagine what music would lend itself to specific scenes. In some cases, I ended up incorporating a passing reference or two.
Certain musicians recalled people I knew, shades of my former self. Other artists conjured up particular places, or fleeting moments from the twelve years I lived in the city—a lonesome season, a weekend reverie. All of these songs reverberated in me as I completed a draft of the novel and settled down in Tokyo, my home for the past four years.
I eventually compiled an extensive playlist that captures the full sweep of registers that I’ve attempted to express in my novel. From that playlist, I’ve chosen eight songs and written vignettes about what they mean to me. I hope these notes might pique your interest in the story I’m telling about New York and finding a home in friends and lovers.
“You Give Good Love” by Whitney Houston
I was with a friend in the East Village the night Whitney Houston died. We’d just ordered whiskeys and sat down by the windows in an empty dive bar on Second Avenue. Snow began to swirl in the orange-black world outside as we took tentative sips. And then Whitney’s voice came on the speakers. We looked across the table at each other, the silken desolation of that moment sweeping over us. I discovered Whitney’s early work for the first time that year. The opening track of her first album remains among my favorites. Even though she’s singing about the joy and comfort that a lover offers, her voice is tinged with a kind of preemptive melancholy. As if she knows that a love so sublime is too good to truly last.
“催眠” by Faye Wong
Faye Wong is not only a pop idol, but an avatar for legions of Chinese millennials who gravitated to her music during a period of wholesale reinvention—of the nation, as much as the individual. Though I’ve been merely on the sidelines of this narrative, that hasn’t stopped her music from infiltrating my world. Westerners might recognize Faye from Wong Kar-wai’s Chungking Express, in her role as the whimsical deli store employee bobbing along to “California Dreamin’” between sporadic incursions into Tony Leung’s apartment. She offers a beautiful cover of “Dreams” by the Cranberries that rounds out the film’s musical stylings. But there could be no better fit for my novel than this melancholy track (the title means “hypnosis” or “soporific”), which reminds me of moody karaoke nights in Midtown and unspoken yearnings—familiar terrain for every New Yorker.
“Take a Bow” by Madonna
The pentatonic melody that ties together this wistful song from Bedtime Stories sonically recalls the imagined Orient, and might raise the eyebrow of the first-time listener. Madonna manages to make it into a heartfelt elegy for a dying relationship, with a lyrical narrative centered on how every relationship entails performance, whether for ourselves or for the sake of others. One easily forgets nowadays that Madonna, with decades of pop star status under her belt, began her career as a professional dancer. Before she became world-famous, she eked out a living on the gritty streets of Manhattan in late ’70s. Compared to the high-energy radio hits that defined her early albums, “Take a Bow” is all the more poignant for its soft contemplation of a soon-to-be-bygone lover.
“Love Come Down” by Barry Biggs
There are a number of reggae and soul singers that I associate almost exclusively with Brooklyn summer, hot asphalt and cold drinks, a breeze rustling through the treetops. This early ’80s cover by Barry Biggs captures the delicious indolence of the early stages of infatuation. It’s the kind of song that makes you want to saunter through the streets with a stupid smile on your face, nodding along to the rhythm, confident in the knowledge that everything’s coming up roses.
“美酒加咖啡” by Teresa Teng
This is an underappreciated track by the iconic songstress Teresa Teng, who was wildly popular across Asia in the 1970s and ’80s. She was a Taiwanese pop star whose songs in Mandarin and Cantonese fomented a sense of solidarity across the Chinese-speaking world at the height of the Cold War. She sang versions of many of her songs in Japanese, and for that reason is also a beloved icon of Japan’s Showa era, associated with the poofy hair and glittering excesses of the bubble economy. In this tune, Teresa brightly sings of adding coffee to her liquor, and inadvertently drinking glass after glass as her mind drifts to the past. It’s not that I’m not drunk, she insists. It’s just that my heart has been shattered. Honey, we’ve all been there.
“Eyes Without a Face” by Billy Idol
Billy Idol’s ode to the loneliness and moral turpitude of New York of another era sounds fresh as ever today. Few cities in the world offer hedonism and heartache in equal measure the way that New York can. As a cinephile, I appreciate the throwback to the 1960s French horror film in the title of this song. Nowadays we have even more opportunities to look and be looked at, to conceal our faces from our gaze. In the internet’s hall of mirrors, the anonymous intimacy once associated with the urban condition has become all but inescapable.
“Moondog Monologue” by Moondog
I forget how we chanced upon the blind artist known as Moondog, but there was a time after college when my friends and I would gleefully relinquish ourselves, stoned and rapturous, to the weird, ostentatious journeys of his music. Louis Thomas Hardin was a polymath and savant who spent decades busking on Manhattan street corners in the mid-twentieth century, developing a distinctive look over time with his long beard, flowing robes, and Viking helmet. I love the unabashed performativity of his persona almost as much as the eclecticism and flair of his music. “Moondog Monologue” is one of Hardin’s quieter pieces wherein his poetic prowess really shines through. And its reflexivity, at once playful and philosophical, long ago wriggled into my subconscious, influencing the way that I’ve thought about the stakes of storytelling.
“You Gotta Be” by Des’ree
In all earnestness, I think “You Gotta Be” is just a beautiful anthem of affirmation. A light, almost contemplative motif segues into a poppy rhythm and irresistible hook. The ambience evokes an afternoon of faltering sunlight, an unhurried road trip, fin-de-siècle optimism: the perfect song to play over the end credits of a film.
Mike Fu is a writer, translator, and editor based in Japan. He has studied in Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Suzhou, and Tokyo. His Chinese-English translation of Stories of the Sahara by the late Taiwanese cultural icon Sanmao was named a Favorite Book of the Year by The Paris Review and shortlisted for the National Translation Award in Prose. He is a cofounder and former translation editor of The Shanghai Literary Review, and currently a PhD candidate at Waseda University.