Review: Ghost Cities by Siang Lu

This labyrinthine novel begins somewhere and somewhen in a city in medieval China. A new emperor, Lu Huang Du, has come to power after his father choked to death on a chicken bone (possibly not by accident). As befits a paranoid despot who is perhaps covering his tracks, Huang Du’s “second act was to order the deaths of the chickens”. Later, he imprisons his brother and takes his wife as his imperial courtesan, imprisoning her in a seemingly mutable labyrinth beneath the city.

But before that we are transported to contemporary Sydney, where Xiang Lu has scammed his way into a job as a translator at the consulate, despite being terrible at speaking Chinese. Unsurprisingly, he is promptly fired. But this may not be the disaster it seems; it may in fact be by design, when Xiang meets the film director Baby Bao, known for making bad films: “just because something is indistinguishable from bad art does not mean it is bad art”. Trading on his newfound meme fame as #BadChinese, Xiang is whisked away to Port Man Tou, a ghost city in China that Bao is managing as a gigantic film set. It is a fully functional city where all the workers are also actors.

Directors, dictators; these are people who have the power to control meaning itself. Over the course of Ghost Cities the two narrative strands bend ever closer to each other in a game of truth and fiction. “Maybe, somehow,” Xiang speculates, “Every city is the same. So when you go from one place to another, it’s simply an illusion of flight”. This is a palimpsest, a simulation, indeed a portmanteau, a welding of ideas. It’s a simulacrum, endlessly self-referential. It is an impressive feat of imagination, but is so stuffed with ideas and architectural hijinks that it threatens to overwhelm.

The stakes that poke through though are intriguing and pointed. “It’s hard to know, anymore, if we are still playing with words, or if we are saying real things,” Xiang confesses, voicing the anxieties of the modern age, and perhaps particularly those living where information is controlled (which, to varying degrees, is all of us). Siang Lu pokes fun at the exoticism of China, the “Western obsession” with the rapidly built, yet-to-be inhabited cities. “No one really cares,” he writes bluntly. A canton in Port Man Tou is named Western Facade; it’s made up like 1930s Shanghai. But Xiang is also alienated. On visiting his ancestral village, he writes that “I felt … like an anachronism”. He poignantly talks of “an imagined China … an empty book, waiting for my words to fill it”. Later his #badchinese becomes a source of rebellion. “We’re never going to know what’s real if we don’t stray off the path,” he says. Freedom, then, is perhaps found in the glitches, the poor copies and translations.

Gay rating: not gay, except for a passing mention to Bao’s latest film, “about the plight of gay farmers”.