In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Claire Jia’s debut novel Wanting is an acute and engaging examination of friendship and life in Beijing.
LitHub wrote of the book:
“A gripping exploration of friendship, envy, desire, wealth, ambition, and contemporary Beijing, Wanting is both juicy and substantial.”
In her own words, here is Claire Jia’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Wanting:
My dad discovered classical music in college in Beijing. The music and arts club set up speakers outside the campus canteen so that students passing by could enjoy the music. Every day on his way to dinner, between five and six pm, my dad would stop and listen. He fell immediately in love. It was the first time he’d ever heard Western music; China had just begun westernizing after the death of Mao in 1976. A few years later, he left Beijing for Chicago to attend a PhD program at the University of Chicago. Classical music accompanied him there, then to the suburbs, where he moved with my mother and a baby me in the nineties. Through every move, his music taste never changed; in our home growing up, I only ever heard my dad’s classical favorites played on a loop: Beethoven, Bach, Chopin. (Though eventually, I introduced my father to a surprising new favorite: Taylor Swift.)
My playlist does not feature any classical music (sorry Baba). I bring his love for classical music up to illustrate that my dad loved it not only because of the way it sounds, but because he discovered it during a particularly important time of his life, when he was on the cusp of leaving home. This is a banal observation; why do I still know every word to Crush by David Archuleta (2008)? It’s not because it’s a perfect song; it’s because I, too, discovered it during an important time of my life: when I developed my first huge, real crush.
The characters in my novel, too, dwell in the glow of their brilliant pasts. My novel follows two childhood best friends, Lian and Wenyu, who are constantly looking backward–at the genesis of their friendship, at the honeymoon times when they were young and full of dreams. The novel begins when Wenyu returns to Beijing after a decade in California, where she’s built a sparkling career as a YouTuber and is now engaged to an American tech millionaire. Lian, who stayed in Beijing, has a comfortable if uneventful life, with a nice boyfriend and a good job, and seeing Wenyu again makes her want to scratch the itch of her unfulfilled desires. They go to karaoke, sing their favorites from their adolescence, get riled up by all that nostalgia. Make some choices because of that nostalgia.
So my playlist, mostly, has to do with nostalgia. Some are songs I played on repeat as I wrote the novel; others are songs I imagine my characters would have listened to and reminisced to; some are both; others simply fill out the landscape of Lian and Wenyu’s Beijing.
The East Wind Breaks by Jay Chow
This is the song that came pre-downloaded on the mp3 player I bought in Beijing’s Zhongguancun district in 2008. Jay Chow was the most popular singer in Asia and before I could figure out how to illegally download music, I listened to this song over and over again, its wistful pipa sounds tickling my eardrums and making me long for the feeling of longing for love.
Yesterday Once More by The Carpenters
This is the peak nostalgia song. It soundtracked the adolescence of a few of my characters that are of a different generation from Lian and Wenyu, but Lian and Wenyu embody the same yearning for a bygone era. All my characters spend large swathes of the book reminiscing about days past, when decisions had yet to be made and life could still be anything. That’s the sexiest thing about the past; you still believed you could have it all. Every sha-la-la-la, every wo-o-o-o… still shines.
Uptown Funk by Mark Ronson ft. Bruno Mars
The scene is 2023, and I’m on Beijing’s seedy Gongti strip with my sister and friend, tottering in heeled boots, trying to recapture our youth. Swarms of waifish club promoters are trying to hustle us, pushing 10,000-RMB tables and doling out their WeChats with abandon. We pass on the tables but take the WeChats, spending the night in the lobby with four of said club promoters, sipping heinous Long Island Iced Teas. They finally let us in for free after 2 am, where we commune with three hundred 21-year-olds absolutely losing their shit to Uptown Funk. To this day, the promoters still text me, inviting me to an unforgettable night in Gongti.
This House by Japanese Breakfast
I learned to play guitar (not well) in 2018 after my first heartbreak so that I could play this song. It’s a song about wondering if love can last the distance, and although it’s decidedly romantic, it captures the uncertainty and hope of Lian and Wenyu’s separation as teenagers, when Wenyu departs for California. “What if one day I don’t know you?” Michelle Zauner warbles, in a voice close to breaking. 2018 was a big year for my novel; during a torrid three months in Beijing, I completed my second round of research, made many friends, had my own little love affair, and “This House” was playing in my headphones the whole time. “What if… all confused desire and time-zone changes change what’s left of you and me?” Yes.
Super Star by S.H.E.
I sang this song at my middle-school talent show with my best friend in 2007. S.H.E. was the hottest band in Taiwan and this song was their most popular song. The bridge goes really high and I remember practicing it for my (usually very affirming!) mother and her going, “You like singing, huh.”
Only Have Feelings For You by Fahrenheit
As with so many childhood loves, it’s hard to pinpoint when I first heard this song. It just existed in my blood. Fahrenheit, Taiwan’s other hottest band in the 2000s, perfectly encapsulated the shaggy bangs/skinny tie-with-vest mood of the era. S.H.E.’s Super Star is “the sky” and “the light”; the object of Fahrenheit’s affection, meanwhile has a “heart like a needle at the bottom of the sea.” (Which means she’s mysterious.) Both of these songs would definitely be karaoke favorites for Lian and Wenyu, and every time I hear them, I feel like I’m dancing around my childhood home in Aeropostale again.
Shut Up and Dance by Walk the Moon
When I was in Beijing in 2018 doing research for my book, I ran into a classmate from Amherst at a party whom I hadn’t seen since he’d graduated, the year before me, in 2014. Four years later, I almost couldn’t place him, this disjointed face smiling at me in the doorway of an apartment in Beijing. He’d been a star student on campus and the object of many girls’ affection. He’d arrived in China right after graduation and started teaching English. He’d fallen in love with the country and stayed, and now he was on his second master’s degree. We talked for a long time that night and then we dated, up until I left to go back to LA. He was a white man and his Chinese was excellent, I hate to admit. He knew Beijing better than I’d ever known it and showed me so much of the city; I hate to admit this even more. He seemed so at ease in the city, tackling the language and the culture with a bravado that I had spent my whole life trying to perfect. I spent many afternoons in his apartment near the Llama Temple, his t-shirts hanging on the clothesline on the balcony as we did our separate work. He’d play music, and all of the songs were hits from 2014, the year he left the U.S. This struck me–four years had passed, but he was blasting Walk the Moon like it was 2014 and he was still playing beer pong in his college suite. I thought about this moment a lot. I thought he must hold on to those songs as a memory of home. It reminded me of my dad, how his music taste froze in the moment he left his hometown. He held on to the songs from that moment just like this man held on to these songs from 2014. It made me feel that despite the confidence with which he navigated this city, he still felt lonely.
This is all projection, of course. He might have just been listening to it because he really likes Walk the Moon.
Hotline Bling by Drake
At one point in the novel I reference a “Drake ditty” playing in a crowded bar and I am imagining this Drake ditty, or maybe “God’s Plan.”
Fairy Tale (Tong Hua), by Michael Wong
This one felt too obvious. Growing up, Tong Hua was the song that every single Asian-American girliepop knew. It has all the elements of a perfect Asian love song: boy meets girl, girl gets cancer, boy writes song for girl that he plays on stage while she listens through a cellphone from her hospital bed. “I will become the angel you love in the fairytales, my hands becoming wings to protect you.” Perfection.
Claire Jia is the author of the debut novel Wanting (Tin House).