The synopsis of Ghost Cities, by monolingual Chinese-Australian author Siang Lu, reads like an inside joke. A Chinese-Australian character named Xiang Lu gets fired from his job at the Chinese consulate in Sydney after it’s discovered he doesn’t speak the language, and has been relying on Google Translate for his work. The incident goes viral under the hashtag #BadChinese and attracts the attention of a megalomaniacal film director called Baby Bao, who uses Lu to attract press for his latest film. Bao’s movie is based on an ancient text whose empirical story is to be filmed in one of China’s “ghost cities”: vast developments quickly built for the country’s booming population that stand mostly empty.
The joke remains, but it is artistry that really tells this accomplished story of duality set from Sydney to Port Man Tou, China. The story of Lu is entwined in the story of an ancient Imperial city, of a sentient earth, of symbolism, curses and cures. There is indeed a royal court, though its entertainment is performed by the sharpest of jesters.
This is dense storytelling; there is enough allegory here to fill many books, though somehow it reads sumptuously, like a Neverland feast of iris flowers, persimmons and bags of warm soy milk over a languorous afternoon under a polluted sky. The characters intersect and overlap in a surprising melange of wonder, intelligence and humour from the first pages to the last.
Erasure lingers throughout: the villagers displaced for the construction of useless empty cities, of evidence and truth, of language. There are hundreds of beautiful passages to quote, but a particularly glorious one is a conversation between Lu and his translator Yuan about the pitfalls of the English language. Yuan insists that the opposite of “remember” should be changed from forget to “dismember”; when Xiang points out dismember is already a word, she says she knows: “But when a memory eludes me, like the edges of a dream, where no matter what I try I can’t remember the details – only it was important and now I have lost it maybe forever – then I am dismembered.”
There is an overwhelming thread of love through Ghost Cities – for Yuan on the page, and the author’s wife; for the love of two Chinas, modern and ancient; for the multitude of pasts and futures, of time and its pointless pointedness. It feels like a book to be read aloud. I imagined Lu telling these stories to his family by firelight, each generation branding the novel with the art collectors’ seals that populate the cover. Perhaps we do this – add to our story, take from it, mark it with our collector’s seal, to help us live now, to reckon with our futile impression upon history.
Ghost Cities is as beautiful as it is honest as it is funny as it is silly, absurd and satirical. It also feels true: the Chinese economy is held together by “ghost real estate” – over a fifth of China’s GDP is supported by more than 20m properties that remain empty. The boom of construction in the past two decades has often been a shoddy one; “tofu” bridges connect, and also crumble, from province to province. Ghost Cities may be a biting critique of modern China, but it is a sweeping, populated, devoted and generous story first.
The book has been touted for fans of Haruki Murakami, but that recommendation narrows the audience – it’s a book for everyone. Lu has a brilliant mind for style, language, pace and ideas, and this is a funny and fascinating book that I can’t wait to read again and again.
Ghost Cities by Siang Lu is published in Australia by UQP ($32.99)
