It is difficult to describe Siang Lu’s Miles Franklin-winning novel Ghost Cities. 

The book follows two parallel narratives. In one, a Chinese-Australian man is relocated to a city-wide film set in China after being fired from his job as a translator for not speaking a word of Chinese. In the other, a tyrannical Emperor rules over an ancient imperial city. The narratives never cross over, yet are inseparable. 

Satirical, symbolic, and full of simulations, the book resists any singular interpretation, forcing the reader to jump through hoops to find meaning within its pages. What is real in a world of imitations? How do Chinese-Australians navigate their identity without ever knowing the real China? And, who does this author think he is, making me work this hard on my off day?

In a way, it’s difficult to describe Ghost Cities because it’s a book that is completed only after you (yes, you!) read it; a book that’s alive in all the best ways. And therein lies the beauty. 

Read on as I talk with Siang Lu about the infinite and strange possibilities that make up Ghost Cities.

Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. It's really an honour to interview you about your book, Ghost Cities. Having read it, I can honestly say I've never felt so personally connected to a book before. I'm half Chinese, but living up in Australia without speaking the language, I've also always felt disconnected from the culture and my family history.

Cool. Yeah, you're #BadChinese as well! 

Yeah, that's right. And actually, I recently started learning Mandarin, and your book really pushed me to start. 

Oh, wow, that means a lot. 

In Ghost Cities, it always feels as though we are viewing China from a distance, mediated by simulations, imitations, mythology, stories, art, and translations. Do you think it's possible for us to truly know the “real” China, particularly when viewing it from the outside? 

That's a really good question. No one's really asked me that before. I don't think it's possible for someone like me to really know China, which is a bit of a weird paradox because, you know, through circumstances, I have now almost, by default, through the literary industry, become a mouthpiece for that or some version of cultural representation. 

What inspired you to write about this idea?

I remember reading John Milton's Paradise Lost and sort of bouncing off it on my 1st attempt because it felt like homework. Why should I get caught up with this great work? Is it merely because other people say it's great? And then not really finding the joy in it. But for one reason or another, I found myself years later reading the same book. And this coincided with a trip to China I took with my partner. And there were two major revelations that I had. The first was that I was enjoying the book a lot more after realising it was meant to be read aloud, like oration, feeling the rhythm of the prose. And second, that I was finally clicking into the greatness of the book, and I realised, at least to me, that over time, you want a great book to be great in all the ways. You're sort of cheering the author on like they're a god. And when you see an error, there's a thought that it doesn't compute, you know? At least for me, you try to find ways to avoid the error being an error. 

And so I was really flummoxed by this one passage in Paradise Lost, where the Devil takes the second Adam, Jesus Christ, up to the top of Mount Sinai, and surveys all of the lands below and says, if you come with me, all of this will be yours. So it goes through all the lists you see in these texts, surveying all the lands and kingdoms, and Milton actually counts China twice. Once, Cathay was the ancient name for China. And once, as Paquin, which is the ancient name for Peking, which is the ancient name for Beijing, and there was a part of my brain that wanted him to be right. 

His Eye might there command wherever stood
City of old or modern Fame, the Seat
Of mightiest Empire, from the destined Walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can
And Samarchand by Oxus, Timers Throne,
To Paquin of Sinaean Kings.
- John Milton, Paradise Lost

Milton was a noted geographer, and it just didn't make sense to me that he was wrong. And so caught in this sort of logic trap, I thought, well, what might it be if there was a second China? And who might be the right person or completely the wrong person, in my case, to write about that other China?

“What if the second Adam did see two Chinas? Which Chinas might they have been? A real China and a mythical China, side by side?” - Ghost Cities (p. 253)

That’s really interesting, particularly what you say about books that are designed to be orated. In the middle of Ghost Cities, I remember a chapter, “The Six Levels of Hell,” that reminds me of that epic oratorical structure. I haven’t read Paradise Lost, but I’ve read a translation of The Odyssey, which follows a similar structure. 

Right, yeah, was that Emily Wilson’s?

Yeah, that’s right!

Yeah, I find all this stuff really fascinating because the original Greek text of the Odyssey is not in Miltonian prose. It's not iambic pentameter. But Emily Wilson's translation is, and that's because she thought it would roll off the English speaker's tongue a little better. Paradise Lost is absolutely supposed to be read aloud. You get the magic of it when you read it or hear it read aloud. And yes, you're right, that weird chapter in the middle of Ghost Cities is just a massive tip of the hat to Paradise Lost. 

On that note, how is oral storytelling different from the written? Why is it valuable?

It suddenly brings the epic right within arm's reach. And weirdly, the oral tradition has never really gone out of favour. In fact, it is probably more in favour now than ever. So many of us listen to audiobooks and podcasts. They've had a real resurgence.

But also, the way we, as kids, get family lore about how we came to be from all the weird uncles and aunts and grandfathers and things like that is through oral history. We're not sitting there reading a book of our family history. We're told it by our parents and elders. And so there's a real tradition to it, even if we're not fully conscious of it. I think all of those things start to get closer; they start to become more in reach if you tap into that kind of energy. 

Ghost Cities explores the idea of art itself deeply as something alive, where meaning is co-created by the reader. What is the role of art in constructing our identities and understanding of reality?

I really get off on art that inspires art, if that makes sense. And, even that sort of thinking leads you down a particular rabbit hole of echoes of echoes, right? It's such a big question, and I could talk about this at length, but I’ll just touch on one particular aspect that the book is principally concerned with, which is this idea of the living art. And that is Shufa in Chinese traditional landscape painting. But not only the painting, but also the poems and stamps that accompany it. 

It probably won't surprise you to hear that many of the conversations captured in the book were ones I had in real life with people who cared about these things. I'm friends with a Confucian scholar, one of the foremost Confucian scholars in China. He gave me a real eye-opening perspective about art, Chinese art and Western art. He made me realise I was bringing a Western perspective to the way I viewed art, which was a real gift. 

This idea is about the ways these primarily traditional landscape paintings are collected by private collectors and then have their seals added to the landscape. And those seals themselves belong to the collectors. They're not the artist seals, but they're the collector seals. And those seals, too, have a tremendous amount of artistry to them as well. The art that we see and view in one year might, in fact, progress and become a different work of art years later. And I think in a really weird and hokey way, it sort of speaks to life itself generally. 

“If you are living a life aligned towards art — the making of it, the receiving of it — then the patterns you leave in your wake, whether you are aware of them or not, whether you intend them to be or not, will be indistinguishable from the art itself.” - Ghost Cities (p. 251)

I’ve even found this, humbly, from seeing reprints of Ghost Cities that have come out. And I say that with a lot of privilege, because most authors don't get to have reprints or very many reprints of their books. And yet, because Ghost Cities was lucky enough to be shortlisted in a number of awards, and then extremely lucky to have won the Miles Franklin. There are 5 or 6 different versions of the book that look different. I can tell them apart by their covers. Whereas I'm friends with fellow authors who have something similar, but they can't tell if a book is a reprint unless they go to page 104 and find that one error that was there in one version but not in the other. And it's a gift to me to have these different versions of my book. They are, in a way, an expression of the living art, right? Those seals. And so, it's sort of life imitating art, which is again something I'm really obsessed with. 

No, yeah, me too. This is a side note, but I really love annotating books. I feel like it’s a similar idea to those red seals in creating a living piece of art.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. 

I wanted to talk a bit about Yuan's character in the book. As an interpreter and translator, she plays a very important role as a mediator between cultures. But I’m also aware that Yuan is your partner's name in real life, so I’m curious how this might connect to your personal experiences.

I was really taken by an interview with David Foster Wallace in which he explained that, to his mind, the true ending of Infinite Jest was 20 pages after the final page. And that was very confusing for me when I first heard it, but it made more and more sense as I kept stewing on it. He was essentially saying: how can I get the reader to continue thinking about the book long after the book's final page? And that's really the magic trick. 

Naming the character Yuan, when my partner's name is Yuan, and naming the central character Xiang (pronounced Siang but, as I always say, no relation to me), is all part of a meta narrative—a meta game in a way—to get at that same sort of feeling. Some readers will never make it to the acknowledgements. Some readers might, and not care at all. Some readers might, in fact, fucking hate the book because of it. And another subset of readers might be more taken, I would hope, with the idea that one of the sort of lingering questions that stays in the reader's head is how much of this is real? I don't know that I want to actually put a percentage on it. Only to say that this was a very clear intention behind these narrative choices. 

Adding on to that, what do you see as the value of the relationship between the two characters in the book? 

I mean, we can keep peeling the onion back, right? Keeping in mind the first part of that answer, it almost does not matter how much I'm like that character or how much my partner is like the Yuan on the page. They might almost as well have been given different names. Of course, I say almost because that's not true. But, there was more of a sense that the driving purpose behind these two characters sets aside their identity, who they really are, what sort of real-life stories, anecdotes, and experiences were sort of filtered through them. Which I can say is not zero. But the author's real goal was to capture two characters falling in love in real time. And that is almost a bridge that readers could cross. 

I hazard a guess that you enjoyed both parts of the narrative. But there are a lot of people, I know from negative reviews, who read the book and could not care less about one part of the book. And so there was almost this idea of the couple being a drawstring to get readers across the line. 

You know, it's a weird book. It's structured in a way that, while not unique by any stretch of the imagination, is not typical. And so, the core part of it was: how can I get the reader invested in 2 characters and the will-they-won’t-they of it, while perhaps accepting the expectation that things will be tied up and resolved and everything will connect. And that to me is very true. Everything does connect, and for readers who pay attention, or do the homework, which is more of a pejorative phrase. You know, that is very much there. 

But again, there are many readers for whom even the idea of it is offensive. They think, "Why would you want me to jump through these hoops to make meaning? This isn't what I'm used to, and I don't like this." And that's all okay. 

You know, it's been a really interesting ride: the Miles Franklin, having this spotlight shone on me through the book. In particular, the book, which I can conveniently hide behind, receives a lot of love, but also many readers who have not enjoyed it at all. And I do say that the reader, like the customer, is always right. If it's the worst book you've ever read, you are correct. And if it's a great book in your estimation, you're also correct. And this is an impossibility, almost like Zeno's paradox. But as much as it has to do with me, insofar as I wrote the book, it almost has nothing to do with me and more to do with what the reader is expecting and what sort of baggage they bring to it. 

I wanted to discuss your writing process. In Ghost Cities, there are so many signs, symbols, and images that are incredibly dense with meaning, becoming even more so as they recur throughout the novel. For instance, some images from the book that really stuck with me were the funeral procession followed by a honking taxi and the one thousand simulations of the emperor. 

So I'm curious: as you were writing, were you thinking about all the potential meanings that could be interpreted from these images, or were you simply creating images and letting them take a life of their own? 

There are some that are absolutely constructed in that way. The ones that you mentioned were. There is one that, for whatever reason, I was continually drawn to and so deliberately wanted there to be a repeated image of an object that had a ruined centre. I just felt somehow it would be satisfying to me if no one else.

And so the artwork that the artisan creates for the emperor has that. The labyrinth, arguably, has that as well. Later on in the village, when the villagers found this broken clock, it was broken in exactly the same way. 

I remember thinking that I had almost intended for the entire book to be one of those objects, actually. So to like ruin—probably the wrong word, maybe it's the right word—expectations. Just when you're hoping that the book will start to cohere, and I'm smiling because it's almost perverse, but when you're hoping for things to start connecting, in fact, by the middle of the book, things get weirder and weirder still. For whatever reason, I think a creative is drawn to certain images, signs, and symbols. I've always found that in the repetition of those signs and symbols, that's when you get at something that's truly meaningful.

Finally, a lot of the people reading this will be student writers. Do you have any advice for young writers trying to get into the industry? 

Read every day, write every day. Read widely. And if you want it, give it.