5 Questions with Siang Lu
Siang Lu is the award-winning author of The Whitewash (UQP), and the co-creator of The Beige Index.
Siang's fiction and literary reviews have appeared in Southerly and Westerly. He holds a Master of Letters from the University of Sydney. He has written for television on Malaysia's Astro network.
He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
No.1
The Whitewash is such an interesting and experimental novel that uses satire to explore racial dynamics. How did you first come to the idea of writing it, and what resulted you structuring the book as a screenplay of sorts?
It all started with this nightmarish vision I had of a Hollywood remake of Bruce Lee's Enter The Dragon, only except cast with a lead actor—and this was very important—whose actual name was Bruce L-E-I-G-H.
I started laughing and I just knew I had to write it.
That story ended up being a relatively small part of the book, but by then I knew that the book would be called The Whitewash. And that was really a gift to me, because despite my primary concern being that the book be good and funny, I was also hyper-aware that a book bearing that title better be informed about the actual history of whitewashing in Western cinema in a comprehensive way.
With all those things in mind, the oral history format just seemed like a way for me to have my cake and eat it too. I could have a multitude of voices. Some voices could recount the history of whitewashing and Asian representation over the decades, and some voices could primarily advance the narrative. [Which was] so much the better once I figured I could integrate themes I was seeing in the former to influence character developments in the latter.
I also just love reading oral histories online about Mad Men or The Wire or The Sopranos in [magazines like] Vanity Fair or whatever, and I figured that readers would be familiar enough with the form to accept it in fiction.
No.2
You are based between Brisbane and Kuala Lumpur. Can you tell us if living between two very different locations has influenced your writing in any way? How do you write in a way that you feel honours your cultural identities?
The truth is there's an element of not-completely-belonging here or there. I'm not sure The Whitewash could have been written by someone who didn't feel that sense of sometimes being outside of things, or maybe caught between two or more cultures for a significant portion of their lives.
It's certainly helped me think more expansively about who I am. I was born in Malaysia, and grew up in Australia. Since 2015 or so, COVID-permitting, I spend a couple of months a year in Kuala Lumpur. I remember years ago ordering a coffee in Malaysia. Anyone who's got a halfway hard to pronounce name by Western standards probably has given the barista a fake name at least once, just to avoid the hassle. In that moment, by accident, I gave my real name, they wrote it down without asking the spelling, and when my order was ready they pronounced my name correctly. My mind has been blown ever since.
When I was younger, I couldn't imagine writing a book that had Asian leads, and I think that was partly because my diet of literature then reflected Western tastes. I wasn't reading about characters like me, and I wasn't seeing much of them on the screen. There are a number of boring caveats to this but now that I'm older, I can't imagine writing works that don't have that sense of identity at heart.
No.3
In The Whitewash, there is an undercurrent in the plot where the protagonist, JK Jr., surveys the state of racism in Hollywood through a withering assessment that not only looks at whitewashing, but also the double standards many Asian actors have to deal with in the industry. This speaks to your project (with Jonathan O’Brien) ‘The Beige Index’: what you call ‘a Bechdel test for race’, and which ‘explores ethnic representation in IMDb's Top 250 films’. I imagine they inform each other, or was made to inform each other. How do you think this stands next to contemporary offerings in Hollywood?
There's no doubt that things are getting better and more inclusive. You can see that in recent additions to the Top 250 like Top Gun Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once, with much more diverse casts than we would have seen in the past. But the fact remains that there's a long way to go when it comes to representation in film. It wasn't that long ago when Sony execs had detailed notes about which ethnicity was [considered] most acceptable to play the romantic lead opposite Will Smith in Hitch. Cast a Black actress and the movie's unmarketable. Cast a white actress and racists—an all-important demographic—lose their minds. So they cast Eva Mendes, a Latino actress, which is sort of its own can of worms. And, okay I just checked, Hitch was released in 2005, so it was that long ago, but you know what I mean.
‘The Beige Index’ was conceived partly as a companion piece to The Whitewash, and partly as its own entity with its own dumb energy. On one hand we tried to be as scientifically rigorous as possible. On the other, there's just no way to get these things perfectly right without pissing some people off, especially with scores like CREAMY, BEIGE FEVER, MIDDLEBEIGE, DOWN TO BROWN and the ever-elusive WELCOME TO BEIGEWATCH. Our main goal was to get people laughing and thinking and talking to each other about representation in popular films.
No.4
When I was reading the novel, I was reminded of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020). I wonder if Yu’s novel played a part in shaping or influencing The Whitewash in any way? And if not, who were you inspired by during the writing process?
I'd finished writing the first draft of The Whitewash by the time Interior Chinatown was published, but I remember hearing about the book then, and a year or two later being stoked that Yu had won the National Book Award, partly because Interior Chinatown is a great and funny book, and partly because, selfishly, it might provide a pathway for The Whitewash's acceptance with publishers.
The works I was most inspired by during the writing of The Whitewash were George Saunders' Lincoln in the Bardo and Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer.
No.5
How do you go about satirising something that already feels like satire in the real world? Do you think satire is one of the more effective ways to write about so-called ‘serious’ subjects?
I think there are any number of ways to approach 'serious' subjects, and they are all valid and have their own merits. Satire's more what I'm drawn to because I love comedy, but yeah it can all get a bit much if you think too much about how similar the fiction is to real life.
I remember hearing about Scarlett Johansson being cast in the Ghost in the Shell movie, and thinking, hang on, how is this still happening?
I admit, it is far-fetched to imagine a scenario, as in The Whitewash, where a triple-A blockbuster spy film starring the first Asian male in a lead role ends up re-casting a white guy as the lead instead. But it's not that far-fetched. I think the key to satire is to sort of harness that fucked up real-life energy, and just live in it.
Find out more
It sounded like a good idea at the time: A Hollywood spy thriller, starring, for the first time in history, an Asian male lead. With an estimated $350 million production budget and up-and-coming Hong Kong actor JK Jr, who, let’s be honest, is not the sharpest tool in the shed, but probably the hottest, Brood Empire was basically a sure thing. Until it wasn’t.
So how did it all fall apart? There were smart guys involved. So smart, so woke. So woke it hurts. There was top-notch talent across the board and the financial backing of a heavyweight Chinese studio. And yet, Brood Empire is remembered now not as a historical landmark of Asian representation that smashed the bamboo ceiling in Hollywood, but rather as a fiasco of seismic proportions.
The Whitewash is the definitive oral history of the whole sordid mess. Unofficial. Unasked for. Only intermittently fact-checked, and featuring a fool’s gallery of actors, producers, directors, film historians and scummy click-bait journalists, to answer the question of how it all went so horribly, horribly wrong.
Get it from UQP here, or at all good bookstores.