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, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
May-Lee Chai’s essay collection My Hungry Ghosts is an ever-smart exploration of generational trauma and racism.
Megan Giddings wrote of the book:
“My Hungry Ghosts is a stunning collection that weaves together memoir, history, prayer, and intuition. May-lee Chai has a poet’s control of line and image and the essayist’s ability to take complex people and situations and make it possible for readers to comfortably sit in nuance. A lovely, thoughtful book!”
In her own words, here is May-Lee Chai’s Book Notes music playlist for her essay collection My Hungry Ghosts:
My musical tastes were quite eclectic as I was writing the essays in My Hungry Ghosts. I listened to some Chinese composers who were directly riffing on themes of ghosts and folk traditions in their music, but I also found inspiration in works by musicians and singers from around the world.
I first experienced the traditional Chinese Buddhist and Daoist “Ghost Month” (鬼月) and “Ghost Festival”（鬼節）when I was a teenager traveling with my father to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1980s. I was fascinated by the way everyone would set up altars on sidewalks and burn “ghost money” and offer incense and plates of food to feed not just one’s ancestors but also the wandering ghosts who might not have descendants or who might have been forgotten. The idea is that this act of good karma will help the ghosts, paying off their karmic debts so that they can be freed of their suffering and be reborn or transformed.
Remembering Ghost Festivals past, I worked on organizing my essay collection. I chose twelve essays that I had written, for each month of the year, representing a different kind of “hungry ghost.” These essays span the globe and the decades, exploring the things that have haunted me: from my father’s migrations and experience of war during his childhood in China to inherited trauma from my mother’s childhood abuse in the U.S. to current events like climate change, rising authoritarianism, racism, and misogyny. I also created a “word altar” for these ghosts, as a way to feed them on the page and thus stop them from haunting me.
In putting together my playlist, I wanted to give a sample of some of my favorite ghostly music. We all have our hauntings, and I appreciated the way this theme was explored by so many different kinds of music whether through vocalization—by a whisper or a stretched note or a wail—or evoked sonically through drum beats, percussive instruments, and even full orchestras.
My Hungry Ghosts Playlist:
1) “Bitter Love: Against Time of Desire” (Track 1), Ying Huang, Steven Osgood, Tan Dun…
Long before his Oscar-winning soundtrack for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, composer Tan Dun wrote the score for an avant-garde production of the 16th century Chinese play, Peony Pavillion by Tang Xianzu, about a young scholar who falls in love with a ghost. Tan Dun mixes jazz, rock-and-roll, kunqu opera, Chinese folk music, and Western monks chanting in this ethereal love song between man and ghost.
2) “I Am Stretched on Your Grave” Sinéad O’Connor
This song gives me chills every time I hear it.
3) “Wuthering Heights” Kate Bush
Nothing is quite as haunting (or romantic) as Kate Bush’s high soprano as she portrays the ghost of Cathy calling out to her would-be lover, Heathcliff.
4) “O Death” Ralph Stanley (O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack)
A deeply moving track from the other Odyssey movie.
5) “The Here and After” Jun Miyake, Lisa Papineau
Hypnotic. I can listen to this track in a loop, over and over and over.
6) “Drown” Karen O and Danger Mouse
Not technically about a ghost but it could be, as Karen O’s expressive voice sings of a longing akin to drowning.
7) “Ghost” Beyoncé
“All these people on the planet working nine to five just to stay alive,” Beyoncé sings in a critique of a life lived just to survive but without joy. The song builds to an echoing chorus: “what goes up, ghost around…” The punning lyrics pack a punch.
8) “Hades,” The Odyssey soundtrack, Ludwig Göransson
I didn’t hear this piece until this summer, but it immediately resonated with me. WOW! It’s layered, gorgeous, eerie, haunting, everything you’d want for a scene in which the portal opens and the dead come to convene and tell their tales to the living.
9) “Heart Sutra” Faye Wong
Faye Wong at the peak of her talent singing the heart sutra is perfection. May she chant us all the way to nirvana.
also at Largehearted Boy:
May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Tomorrow in Shanghai
May-lee Chai’s playlist for her story collection Useful Phrases for Immigrants
May-lee Chai’s playlist for her novel Dragon Chica
May-lee Chai is the author of twelve books of fiction, nonfiction, and translation including the 2022 short story collection, Tomorrow in Shanghai & Other Stories, which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and was longlisted for The Story Prize; and Useful Phrases for Immigrants: Stories, which won a 2019 American Book Award; and her original translation from Chinese to English of the 1934 Autobiography of Ba Jin. She has been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, Gulf Coast Prize in Nonfiction, Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book, and received an honorable mention from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights Book Awards.She is a professor of creative writing at San Francisco State University and a Board Member of the National Book Critics Circle.