mui zyu Uses the Absurd to Come Back to Herself in Debut Album ‘Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century’
HER MOST-PLAYED VIDEO GAME IS — The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and it shows. Eva Liu, better known as mui zyu, invites listeners into an immersive RPG-like experience with her debut album, Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century, creating a storyline that is absurd and fantastical yet grounded in a bittersweet reality.
While this is her first full-length solo album, Liu is somewhat of a veteran in the music world. She released her first EP, a wonderful thing vomits, in 2021; the artist is also lead vocalist of London-based project Dama Scout and has even (fittingly) written songs for the indie video game Life is Strange.
Written primarily during the COVID-19 lockdown, Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century is a haunting interplay of myth, mundanity, and darkness. There are witches and sorcerers, but also emails, Cantonese comfort foods, and hotel mini soap.
“Talk to death, ask them what is best,” Liu sings on one track.
But the pandemic isn’t the only struggle driving much of the album; Liu faced other harsh realities: her parents leaving London to move back to Hong Kong, and a rise in violence against East and Southeast Asians. Like many across the Asian diaspora, Liu grew up with a tenuous relationship with her Chinese heritage, but these incidents pushed her to pore over and excavate her identity in a way she hadn’t before.
“I didn't intend for it to be such a personal album,” Liu said. “It all just sort of happened.”
The second track, “Ghost with a Peach Skin,” captures her mass of emotions. Liu worked with friend Yijia Tu to “bruise” the upbeat song with the guzheng’s melancholy twangs.
“I love manipulating sounds and doing things to them that I wouldn't normally hear,” Liu explained. “I did want something a bit stretched and bruised — like a peach — in a way, because I liked how it sat with the rest of the song.”
Photo by Holly Whittaker
For the song’s music video, Liu worked with creative house Clump Collective on a whimsical storyline featuring a peach-shaped plastic dog named Pickle.
“I loved working with them because we were all on the same page with everything,” she said. “I totally trusted them. It was Ben from Clump who suggested the peach dog.”
With a pastel set reminiscent of Blue’s Clues and theatrical facial expressions from Liu, the visual adds nostalgic depth to the song.
Throughout the album, this melancholy sentiment resounds. “I wanted it to be a reference to Chinese culture with the century egg and bun, but it’s rotten — it’s not the way it was meant to turn out,” Liu said of the album's title.
But within the moody world Liu creates, a tender hope prevails. “Ho Bao Daan (Interlude)” features a voice note from Liu’s dad, and her project name, mui zyu, is her childhood pet name, which means “little pig” in Cantonese.
As a result of her identity exploration, Liu is re-immersing herself in the Cantopop joy of her childhood with artists such as Anita Mui and Leslie Cheung and coming into herself as a queer Chinese-British woman.
When Luna spoke with Liu a few days ahead of her album’s release, she had just gone out to an event held by ESEA Sisters, a space “for East and South East Asian women, trans, non-binary, and genderqueer folk to share joy and resistance.” It’s communities like these in which Liu has found a space to share the burden and grief of her experiences, but she has also found joy and lightness through mahjong and music meetups.
When asked about her wishes for the album, Liu simply said she hopes “people are taken on a journey, and adapt it in a way that relates to them.”
Ultimately, the tension between darkness and joy is what Rotten Bun for an Eggless Century renders so well. It serves as a guide to navigate the bittersweetness of the world, holding space for both the rotten and fresh, the bruised and healed.
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