Siang Lu’s Ghost Cities is the winner of this year’s Miles Franklin Award, which is Australia’s most prestigious literary award. It had also been sitting on my reader long before it got nominated. Reading about Lu’s win was the kick in the pants I needed to pick the book up and give it read through. And I’m really quite ashamed that I hadn’t done it sooner.
Ghost Cities is an imaginative and bonkers novel weaving together two tangentially related plots. The first unfolds in a fable-like version of ancient China, where the egotistical Emperor, Lu Huang Du, rules through dictatorial edicts. After ascending to the throne following his father’s rather inelegant death by chicken bone, Lu Huang Du launches an obsessive anti-chicken vendetta. And then, despite all advice, he fires the Imperial taster and replaces him with a literal baby. This is Lu Huang Du only getting started, by the way. This is a man dying to build a mythology around himself, but he’s also his own worst enemy. It will get worse.
The second plot unfolds little closer to home. Xiang Lu has just been caught out. He has been sacked from his job as a translator for the Consulate-General for the People’s Republic of China in Sydney for not being able to speak Chinese. He had been coasting by for six months with what he thought was a strategic deployment of Google Translate*. But his employers clocked him in the end. And they went to some extraordinary lengths to do so.
This was where the book really won me over. I was only two chapters in, but the email from the Consulate-General, and the mad scenario outlined within, absolutely killed me. This is obviously something written towards members of diaspora groups who struggle to maintain their family’s original language and connection to culture, but it also really plays off the fears of anyone who has ever experienced imposter syndrome. This is the nightmare scenario that we know will never happen—but we still fear it will. The email is ruthless, and this little line at the end just really twists the knife further:
By the way, we snooped your hard drive. Found some poetry. For a joke, we copy and paste it into the auto translate website. It is bad. It is a bad poetry. And you are a bad Chinese person.
No use to swipe up. Your card is deactivated. If you try, security will embrace you.
Humiliating enough as this is, things get even worse for Xiang when the tag #BadChinese starts trending on social media.
After cutting back to Lu Huang Du’s megalomaniacal antics, Xiang meets an egoist of his own. #BadChinese has caught the attention of film director Baby Bao. Baby Bao is a little like a Chinese Tommy Wiseau, but with a a smattering more self awareness and a lot more power at his disposal. Xiang meets him after attending a screening of Death of a Pagoda; a Brokeback Mountain ripoff featuring gay farmers that flicks back and forth to an almost unrelated subplot based in ancient China. Sometimes the boom mic is still visible. Sometimes the focus shifts to the plane overhead with little regard as to what’s going on on-set. Baby Bao does not care. For his next project, Baby Bao wants to direct a 27 hour long epic about Lu Huang Du, filmed in the ghost city of Port Man Tou.
And he wants to take #BadChinese with him.
So on one hand, we have a myth-loving, egotistical dictator with increasingly few restraints on his power. And on the other, we have a myth-loving, egotistical director with increasingly few restraints on his power. From here everything gets a little postmodern—just how well can you construct an overreaching or objective ‘truth’ when men like the Emperor or the Director are at the helm? Things get a little self referential as well—it took me a few chapters in to realize that the main characters share their names with the author. Sometimes, I felt it got a little overstuffed, especially when following the antics of Lu Huang Du—it was all too easy to get lost in the thicket. Or the labyrinth. But maybe that was the point?
Despite this, Ghost Cities still manages to stay sharply funny throughout. And Siang Lu is not afraid to mix a pinch of silliness in with his satire either: watch out for the family who named their child after the director. Or the names of the cantons in Port Man Tou. (Which is a silly and unsubtle name for a city in and of itself—but I still laughed.)
While not perfect, Ghost Cities was a wild, ambitious book, and it’s probably something I’ll have to re-read at some point after letting it digest for a while. There is a lot going on here.
For cbr17bingo, this is Diaspora.