The Whitewash

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

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 topnotch 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.

About the Author

Siang Lu was born to Chinese parents in Malaysia, and grew up in Australia from the age of four. He is an Australian citizen. He studied a Master of Letters at the University of Sydney and has published literary reviews and short fiction in Southerly and Westerly. He has written for television with Malaysia's Astro network. In 2021, Siang won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer for The Whitewash. He has previously been the winner of the Australian Society of Authors Mentorship Award. He lives with his wife and two children in Brisbane.