Siang Lu’s writing is the work of a curious mind at play. His labyrinthine novels take the reader on wild rides as disparate threads collide in surprising, sometimes unhinged ways. When I imagine him writing them, I picture the meme of Charlie Day, maniacally connecting thoughts together with strings on a board.
“The meme is accurate,” Lu says, deadpan.
Lu stands out in the often staid Australian literary world for his work’s originality and its audacity, using absurdist humour to explore race and racism. There are his two novels – 2022’s award-winning The Whitewash, a satirical oral history of a Hollywood blockbuster gone wrong; and the upcoming Ghost Cities, a dual narrative set in an abandoned Chinese megacity. There is also The Beige Index, an online project in which Lu and fellow writer Jonathan O’Brien watched every one of IMDb’s top 250 films and created visual charts of the actors’ ethnicities. And there is what Lu calls Silly Bookstagram, where he Photoshops his name on to Australian book covers.
“I think a lot about ontological whiteness – where you default a character, if not otherwise specified, as white. I was guilty of it for a really long time in my reading and my writing,” Lu says.
“I’ve got a dumb, goofy sense of humour … It’s 99% ridiculous, but there is 1% of it that is incredibly serious. It makes you think about how overwhelmingly white the publishing industry is, when I’m inserting myself as the sole Asian element in a book … That goofy energy is the same thing that drives The Beige Index, The Whitewash and Ghost Cities.”
These works are Lu’s way of filling in the gaps. Born in Malaysia and raised in Brisbane, he was an “emotional latchkey kid”. “My parents were very attentive to what they thought I needed: a good education, excelling in musical instruments, going to church,” he says. “It was left to me to figure out who the fuck I was in terms of culture. Movies, TV shows, books, music – the stuff you fill your head with to figure out who you are.”
Like many people of colour growing up in the 90s, Lu didn’t see himself in any of that – but in a time before discussions about representation were common, it was difficult to articulate the issue. “It’s really hard to identify the thing that’s missing,” he says. “It takes a really long time, unless the culture is tuned to it, to even notice that something’s off. Instead of realising that there was a lack of representation, I desired to be what I saw on the screen. That really impacted who I was and who I wanted to be.”
The world has increasingly embraced diversity, but with that, another challenge has appeared: for creatives of colour, this supposed freedom can be limiting. “It’s a Pandora’s box, because there is good, but there’s a ton of bad that comes along with it,” Lu says. “It’s another box to put the ethnic writer in … I’ve spoken with Asian writers who feel boxed in by this pressure to write Asian stories.”
Lu’s looping narratives feel like a middle finger to that expectation. Voices clash and crash over one another; narrators are unreliable; fact and fiction are often indistinguishable. “I’m attracted to subversion,” he says. “It’s like a mountain – you see the mountain and you realise that nobody’s tried to climb that particular mountain. Maybe that’s because it’s an extremely esoteric, shitty mountain that nobody’s ever thought about. I see the summit from here, and nobody’s claimed that, and that really excites me.”
Ghost Cities is one such mountain. The novel combines two timelines: one in the present where a young man, Xiang Lu, is fired from his job at Sydney’s Chinese consulate when it is discovered that he can’t speak Chinese and has been using Google Translate for his work. The other is in the ancient past, told through fable-like chapters. The threads collide when Xiang and his interpreter (and love interest) Yuan are whisked across the world by Baby Bao, a director who is making a film based on Chinese myth in the abandoned city of Port Man Tou, which has been turned into a film set.
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The seeds for the book were sown when Lu and his wife, Yuan, visited an abandoned theme park on the outskirts of Beijing – an “eerie, beautiful, desolate place” with a strange history. Around the same time, Lu was reading John Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost, which mentions two different names for ancient Beijing. “It led to this idea of two Chinas – a real one and a mythical one,” he says. “What might that mythical China be like, and who might be the right person – or in my case, uniquely the wrong person – to tell that story?”
Ghost Cities is a sprawling, twisty novel that takes the reader down mazelike paths with no obvious beginnings or endings. English and Chinese text stand side by side – Lu is monolingual, so relied on Yuan’s help for the latter. The novel also contains secrets only the author knows; as a “private, shy and anxious” person, he is not interested in writing a memoir, but coded his family history into parts of Ghost Cities.
“It was a challenge to myself … Is there a way for me to write something that’s incredibly personal and to be more visible and exposed, but also have my cake and eat it too, by having it on the page and no one recognising it?” he says. “Artists are so fucking weird. It doesn’t bother me that nobody might get it – it’s only important to me that it’s in the pages.”
Lu’s work is intellectually stimulating while also being utterly bonkers – and that’s the point. He shares some memorable feedback a friend gave after reading The Whitewash: “She said the most wonderful thing – ‘Having read your book, I feel like I’ve become smarter, but it’s also entirely possible that I’ve become dumber,’” he says. “That’s the best compliment anyone could give my writing.”
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu is published in Australia by UQP on Tuesday