FICTION
The Whitewash
Siang Lu
UQP, $32.99
Testing! Is this thing on? Testing! Yeah, name’s JK Jr, up-and-coming Hong Kong movie icon. So you wanna know about Siang Lu? OK, lemme tell you about him. Grew up in Brisbane. And he wasn’t white, so he knew a thing or two about race from the get-go. Can’t buy that kind of experience at writing school, now, can you?
Anyway, you’re probably wondering: what’s the deal with The Whitewash? Bro, what isn’t it dealing with? Written Talking Heads-style – no, mockumentary style, not those Talking Heads. This author I’ve been talking with about my film, Declan Fry, he always makes Talking Heads references, do not get me started!
It’s a behind-the-scenes look at how Brood Empire, my big Hollywood break, got whitewashed. We’re talking Scarlett Johansson in Ghost in the Shell, Emma Stone playing a woman of Hawaiian and Asian heritage named Allison Ng. You’ll hear from producers, actors, personal trainers, hangers-on – the whole cast.
Siang Lu’s award-winning novel is a fictional oral account of how Hong Kong film maker JR jnr’s film was whitewashed by Hollywood.Credit:Yuan Pan
And the whole caste, too, the economy Hollywood runs on, with its white actors playing Asians, and its Asians, the men at least, playing sexless Charlie Chans or Fu Manchus. I mean, things have changed, but we’ve still got a lot of the same problems, you know?
Lu’s trying to draw parallels between the past and present: the racism, the opportunism, the craven … what? Webcasting? Yeah, sure. Angela Mu, my on-again, off-again, she was into that for a while. Who can blame her? Amazon, streaming services – they fund films now. Maybe Public Enemy had a point. Hollywood is burning, just not in the way we hoped. White man migrated. Colonised new platforms. Now you can be an influencer, a regular side-hustler: TikTok, OnlyFans, Bilibili … but do you get paid?
Or are you more like Adele Lim, co-writer of Crazy Rich Asians, offered nothing compared with her older, white, male, arguably less experienced screenwriting partner to work on the film’s sequel? Are you like Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park, getting less than Hawaii Five-0’s white leads?
Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a woman of Hawaiian and Asian heritage, in Aloha.Credit:
Look, here’s the point: representation matters. Those old-school Marxists, all class this and materiality that, are missing the main event. The real mode of production has to include the unreal: the word, the image, the representation. Gramsci got it! Edward Said understood! What we write, what we create – it’s never innocent or apolitical, even when we intend for it to be. Especially when we intend for it to be.