Brian Castro's After China tells the story of a Chinese architect, You Bok Mun, who escaped from the oppression of the Cultural Revolution to Australia. The book's main plot, such as it is, revolves around his interactions with a female writer who, as it turns out, is terminally ill. The story itself is told in retrospective, after her death, as You interweaves memories of his own life, tales from Chinese history, and even stories from the writer's childhood into the narrative. The impetus for these reflections is the architect's habit of using stories (personal, historical) to distract the writer from her illness.

The book opens, for instance, with a tale about Lao Tzu and his quest for sexual and philosophical purity. Other stories and memories punctuate the main story, including:

- a memory from You's boyhood in Shanghai, in which his father urges him to jump from a balcony, telling him that he will be okay; the fall ends with the boy injured and in bed for a lengthy period, where he spends his time reading; in an allusion to Kafka's "Metamorphosis," he claims that he is turning into a cockroach

- a brief retelling of Walter Benjamin's story "The Warning," in which a man puts up a sign to deter lovers from committing suicide off a cliff near his restaurant

- a memory from when he was 16, about his interactions with a girl from upstairs while he was studying for his university entrance exams; a fire had suddenly swept through the building, and he was forced once more to jump from the balcony; the girl died in the fire, and he failed to take the exams, despite his academic promise

- the story of You Bao, nicknamed "Fishcake," who in 1909 is summoned by his aunt after noticing, from his bed sheets, that he has had a wet dream; she warns him that moderation is the only way to survive the sudden outbreak of modernity in China; Fishcake turns out to be the architect's father

- the architect's memory of leaving Shanghai to study architecture in France during the 1960s; he leaves behind his wife, who goes by the name Felicity (an allusion to Kafka), and their eerily-silent daughter, Long Tsing; the architect writes wild letters about his wife, but returns to China without passing his exams upon the death of his daughter

- the writer then tells a story about her childhood, about how she was discovered on a rubbish heap, abandoned by her parents

- the writer also tells how, while a teenager, she encountered a much older writer, a neighbor, who tells her he is trying to finish his masterpiece despite struggling with alcoholism; he explains the Chinese principle of creating a weak frame and then building a strong structure, from which the frame is then removed; her experiences with the writer became the basis for her first book

- in the year 850, the courtesan Yü Hsüan-chi falls in love with the poet Wen T’ing-yün; this foolish love ruins her poetic abilities, and when they meet again he scorns her; rejected, Hsüan-chi hires a girl to seduce the poet, then murders the girl and tries to frame him for it; however, Hsüan-chi is caught and executed; the fall-out is that Hsüan-chi's poetry becomes famous, and T’ing-yün is forgotten

- the architect remembers being questioned by the Chinese state as a subversive; he tries desperately to confess in order to escape; in prison, he builds a grand hotel, which is mistaken for a railway station, and he is transferred to a prisoner's job working on the railways; while there, Crazy Wen, a fellow prisoner, absentmindedly uncouples a train, causing an accident that kills Wen and injures the architect, leaving him "unable to have children"; after the accident, he is pardoned and sent south to design buildings

- in 1578, Tang Yin writes about sex (his wet dreams, erotic puns), but is rejected sexually by his wife, Lin Lin; this leads him to create a double-folding fan, with an innocent picture when folded in one direction, an erotic scene when folded in the other; his paintings are appreciated by an Imperial concubine, who takes him under her protection; he is executed in 1579 for stealing one of the Imperial plums, although whether this is literal or symbolic is ambiguous

- a brief retelling of how Joseph Paxton came to build the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, a fusion of art and engineering

- the architect's memory of how he met Me Liao, an enzyme specialist; while trying to escape from China, they tell each other stories in order to stay alive as they swim to Macau; Me Liau dies two months later in Hong Kong

- in the fourteenth century, Lü Ta-ching is a chemist famous for his poisons and aphrodisiacs; he also designed a pontoon bridge, made by tying together many boats; Lü Ta-ching decides to experiment with a new black powder, which he rubs on his penis while having sex with his lover, A-Ma; the sex is so powerful that his boat gets detached and floats out to sea, where A-Ma is rescued by a pirate; thereafter the bay is named A-Ma Gau, the bay of A-Ma, which evolves in the name Macau

- in the seventh century, the Emperor T’ai-tsung decides to have several women accompany him to the bathroom, a pleasure that is multiplied when his concubine, Lady Wu, installs mirrors in there; Lady Wu seduces the teenage Crown Prince, has a daughter by him, then murders the child and accuses the Empress; the Empress is imprisoned and Lady Wu rises in power; the Empress is eventually executed, the Crown Prince commits suicide, and Lady Wu becomes an Immortal, the Jade Empress; however, unable to bear an heir, the Emperor declares that she die by poison, and goes back to his narcissistic pleasures

- a brief retelling of Chuang-Tzu's dream of being a butterfly

Amidst all these stories is the main narrative of the interactions between the architect and the writer, which take place on the east coast of Australia, at a strange, postmodern hotel that he has built. The writer notes that he is an architect who is afraid of structures. As he did with Me Liao, the architect tells these stories to distract the writer from the pain of her illness, although he does not realize until toward the end of the book how serious her condition really was. In the last chapter, he picks up the author's final book and reads its ambiguous inscription: "To You." Of course, we cannot know if this is "you" (second person) or "You" (the architect's name).

Castro's novel is a brilliantly rendered and moving story that weaves together Australian, European, and Chinese influences into a powerful story. Kafka is the key figure here - in particular, his story "The Great Wall of China" stands as a metaphor of a grand vision that is impossible to achieve in real life. The only thing working against Castro is the originality of his experimental style. Uncertainties about speaking voice (the novel jumps between first and third person, for instance) can sometimes make reading this book an alienating experience. Yet this book would be a bland failure if it didn't force the reader to experience precisely this feeling: namely, that alienation and exile are the modern condition, and that facing up to this reality, rather than retreating into a nostalgia of a lost perfection, is the task of humanity today. ( )