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The Whitewash
by

Siang Lu’s searing debut is a black comedy about the whitewashing of the Asian film industry, told in the form of an oral documentary.

A$32.99
(Paperback)
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Overview

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.

Details
Siang Lu
Photo by Andreas Weiss

Siang Lu

Siang Lu is the Miles Franklin-shortlisted author of Ghost Cities and The Whitewash, the co-creator of The Beige Index and the creator of @sillybookstagram. Ghost Cities has been shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, the ALS Gold Medal, the Russell Prize for Humour Writing, the VPLA John Clarke Humour Award, the Readings New Australian Fiction Prize and the University of Queensland Fiction Book Award and The Courier-Mail People's Choice Queensland Book of the Year at the Queensland Literary Awards.

The Whitewash won the ABIA Audiobook of the Year in 2023.

In 2023 Siang was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 Asian-Australians at the Asian Australian Leadership Awards.

He is based in Brisbane, Australia, and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

www.siang-lu.com

www.thebeigeindex.com