This is the second novel by Siang Lu, a young Chinese-Australian author whose innovative and inventive work is attracting high praise. To fully appreciate any novel, you must be willing to suspend disbelief. In Ghost Cities, you are also invited to fully immerse yourself in the mythology of ancient China, a fascinating world rendered here with masterly skill.
The book is composed of multiple narratives as we alternate between places. The fictional ancient Imperial City is where the despotic Emperor is hatching a series of schemes. These involve assassinations, executions and banishments to the Sixth Level of Hell in order to safeguard his grip on the throne.
In modern day Sydney, Xian Lu, a young Chinese- Australian suffering from ‘Taikophobia’ (fear of Chinese people) is working as a translator at the Chinese Consulate. He is is fired when it’s discovered he speaks no Chinese. The mysterious ‘ghost city’ of Port Man Tou in China is inspired by China’s vacant, uninhabited megacities built by the government to artificially boost the GDP.
This fictional Port Man Tou has been taken over by Baby Bao, China’s self-proclaimed ‘number one’ filmmaker, as a giant filmset where all the inhabitants are actors. Xian Lu, assigned the handle #badChinese, becomes an unwilling participant in Baby Bao’s nefarious venture. Lu is co-opted to join the film crew, where amid the chaos he begins a romance with Yuan, Baby Bao’s beautiful Chinese interpreter.
This is not your conventional plot. Rather, it is an ingenious adaptation of Chinese history to reveal the absurdities, contradictions and political follies of modern life. Siang Lu has depicted the parallel worlds of past and present as intricately and expertly as a work of Chinese calligraphy, an art form where, as Yuan tells Xian Lu, ‘each stroke of the brush [is] an interpretation’ that takes on greater meaning over time.
Reviewed by Anne Green
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Siang Lu is the author of Ghost Cities and The Whitewash, and the co-creator of The Beige Index. The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023 for its audio adaptation, which starred a large and diverse cast of fourteen actors. It also won the Glendower Award for an emerging writer in the Queensland Literary Awards and was shortlisted for a NSW Premiers Literary Award.
In 2023 Siang was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian Australian Leadership Awards.
He holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney and has written for film and television for Singapore’s Beach House Pictures and Malaysia’s Astro network.
He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Siang has been forced to deny rumours that he is the secret author of Huxtable Heights, a #MeToo work of underground literature. It mashes up Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and The Cosby Show, by replacing all of Heathcliff’s original dialogue with lines uttered by Heathcliff Huxtable, aka Bill Cosby.
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