Siang Lu’s writing is a work of curiosity. His labyrinthine novels take readers on wild rides, with disparate threads colliding in surprising and sometimes confusing ways. Imagine him writing, charlie day memeconnect your thoughts maniacally with the strings on the board.
“The meme is accurate,” Lou deadpans.
Lou has used absurdist humor to explore race and racism, and the originality and boldness of his work has made him stand out in the often staid Australian literary world. He has two novels. The 2022 award-winning film The Whitewash is a satirical oral history of failed Hollywood blockbusters. And the upcoming Ghost Cities is a dual story set in an abandoned Chinese megacity.There is also beige indexFor this online project, Lu and fellow writer Jonathan O’Brien watched all of IMDb’s top 250 films and created a visual chart of actors’ ethnicities.And then there’s what Lou calls stupid bookstagramwhere he photoshopped his name onto the cover of an Australian book.
“I think a lot about ontological whiteness, or having characters be white by default unless specified otherwise. I was guilty of that in my reading and writing for a really long time.” Lou says.
“I have a silly, goofy sense of humor…It’s 99% ridiculous, but 1% incredibly serious. When you insert yourself as the only Asian element in a book, the publication It makes me think about how overwhelmingly white the industry is…that goofy energy is the same that drives Beige Index, Whitewashing, and Ghost City.”
These works are Lu’s way of filling in the gaps. Born in Malaysia and raised in Brisbane, he was an “emotional latchkey kid”. “His parents were very attentive to what they thought I needed: a good education, a good musical instrument, and going to church,” he says. “It was left to me to figure out who the hell I was in terms of culture. Movies, TV shows, books, music – I filled my head with stuff to figure out who I was. thing.”
Like many people of color who grew up in the ’90s, Lou didn’t think of herself as such, but in a time before discussions about representation were commonplace, the issue It was difficult to explain clearly. “It’s really hard to pinpoint what’s missing,” he says. “Unless the culture adapts to it, it takes a very long time to realize that something is wrong. Instead of realizing that there is a lack of representation, I want to be what I see on the screen.” It had a huge impact on who I am and who I want to be.”
The world is increasingly embracing diversity, but with that comes other challenges. For creatives of color, what is supposed to be freedom can be restricted. “It’s a Pandora’s box, because there’s some good, but there’s a ton of bad that comes with it,” Lu says. “This is another box to put ethnic writers in…I’ve talked to Asian writers who feel trapped in a box by the pressure to write Asian stories.”
Lou’s looping narrative feels like a middle finger to that expectation. Voices collide and collide. The narrator is unreliable. Fact and fiction are often indistinguishable. “I’m drawn to subversive activities,” he says. “It’s like a mountain. When you look at a mountain, you realize that no one has ever tried to climb that mountain. Maybe it’s because it’s an extremely esoteric, shitty mountain that no one has ever thought about. Here. I can see the summit from here and no one has claimed it, so I’m really excited.”
Ghost Cities is one such mountain. This novel combines his two timelines. One is now a young man, Xiang Lu, who is fired from his job at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney after it is discovered that he does not speak Chinese and uses his Google Translate in his work. Another of his is the ancient past, told through fable-like chapters. Strings collide when Shang and his interpreter (and lover) Yuan are taken around the world by director Baby Bao, who is making a film about the ruined city of Port Mantu based on Chinese mythology. set.
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The seeds for the book were planted when Lu and his wife, Yuan, visited an abandoned theme park on the outskirts of Beijing. It was a “spooky, beautiful, and 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. “That led to his idea of two Chinas: the real China and the mythical China,” he says. “What is that mythical China like? And who is the right person to tell that story, or in my case, the completely unsuitable person?”
Ghost Cities is a vast, winding novel that takes the reader down a labyrinthine path with no clear beginning or end. English and Chinese texts are side by side. Since Lu is monolingual, she relied on Yuan’s help with the latter. This novel also contains secrets that only the author knows. A “private, shy and anxious” person, he had no interest in writing his memoirs and encoded his family’s history into part of Ghost City.
“This was a challenge to myself… to write something incredibly personal and make it more visible and get more exposure, but also write something that’s incredibly personal so that no one would recognize it if you put it on the page. “Is there a way to have your cake and eat it too?” he says. “Being an artist is really weird. It doesn’t bother me that no one might get it – all that matters to me is that it’s on the page.”
Lou’s work is both intellectually stimulating and downright insane, and that’s important. He shares some memorable feedback his friends gave him after reading Whitewash. “She said something really great: ‘I feel like reading your book has made me smarter, but it also could very well have made me stupid,'” he says. Masu. “This is the highest compliment I can receive for my writing.”
