By Owen Richardson
FICTION
Ghost Cities
Siang Lu, UQP, $32.99
“But what if, after all this, it is just a bad novel,” is the quote from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wife that Siang Lu has used as an epigraph to Ghost Cities. What’s the “it”, though? Life, the whole shebang? Or the novel the reader is holding in their hands? Both, maybe? The line does sounds like a tip-off.
Ghost Cities certainly has its bad aspects, of a kind that can only seem intentional. The shamelessness of the opening gambit, for instance. When we first meet Xiang Li, he is being fired from his job as an interpreter at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney because they have discovered he doesn’t speak Chinese. “The crucial mistake. Interviewed you in English. Forgot to test your Chinese!” the termination email says. Okayeeeeee...
Soon afterwards, courtesy of a complicated ruse involving a lost wallet (a phone call would have done just as well), Xiang finds himself in the orbit of infamous movie director Baby Bao, intent on using Xiang’s newfound internet notoriety for his own ends. (“Let me tell you, I can’t stand it when people say my films are filled with technical faults, as if I overlooked these things.” ) So by the end of the first act, Xiang, Bao, and Bao’s translator, Yuan, who actually knows Chinese – the Highly Qualified Woman to Xiang’s #BadChinese Man – are all in one of the ghost cities of the title.
Ghost cities are one of those things Westerners think they know about China: vast housing projects, devoid of inhabitants and built to keep the economic stats healthy and because of the valorisation of real estate wealth and also because aren’t the Chinese just so strange, really? The phenomenon, it seems, has been much exaggerated, and the excesses as much in the gaze of the Western beholder.
In any case, Lu’s ghost city doesn’t lack for inhabitants because it is Baby Bao’s ghost city, a huge film set where everyone is both a citizen going about their business and an actor. (Yuan gets a job with the Department of Verisimilitude, making sure no-one leaves their scripts around or is seen practising lines.)
Although this may possibly not be the most original idea, it has been given new currency somewhat by the ubiquity of CCTV and smartphone cameras and the word “performative”, not to mention the thing fake news. Now more than ever life is imitating The Truman Show more than anyone, apart from the wrong kinds of people, really wants. And there is another spin to it. One theme of Ghost Cities, as it was of Lu’s first book, The Whitewash, a satire on Asian representation in Hollywood, is race and performance, race as performance. “Not only is he not #BadChinese, he is a bad actor!” cries a character at one climactic moment.
Author Siang Lu.Credit: Yuan Pan
Some readers may also think of the real-life fakery of Ilya Khrzhanovskiy’s DAU Project, a huge film set / installation / anthropological experiment where the participants all lived as if in Stalinist Russia and were liable to be filmed at any time. Like Khrzhanovskiy, or indeed any number of more illustrious names, Bao is the film director as megalomaniac.
The synopsis for one of his movies reads “But wait! Here comes a subplot set in ancient China! But wait again! These two competing storylines appear to have nothing in common but their own poetic resonance, ah, but you the avid filmgoer, the understander of tropes, have been primed to anticipate their neat intersection ...”
So too, the novel in which Bao plays his part. Running alongside the contemporary satirical plot about this movie director as little emperor, mirroring and parodying it, is a fabulous tale of an ancient full-size – XXL, rather – emperor, his concubines and eunuchs and attempts to escape assassination. Here, too, are works of art that contain deliberate imperfections, proliferating simulacra – banquets where the duck and pork and everything else all turn out to be tofu, a farm where all the vegetables are made of stone, buildings designed a la Speer’s Berlin, with one eye on their future ruins. There are twins and labyrinths and emperor impersonators, an underground prison – six circles of hell, depicted in a chapter told entirely in verse – that mimics the world above.
Still, the modern day comic-dystopia plot, witty though it can be – Lu’s prose is free of technical faults, deliberate or otherwise – does come to seem rather thin and sketchy compared to the Borges/Calvino trappings of the emperor and his doubles, which by contrast are luxuriant and always diverting. Could this also be intentional? Another labyrinth, for the reader.
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