Interior Chinatown (Charles Yu)

Interior Chinatown
Charles Yu
Pantheon
Fiction, Humor/Literary Fiction
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: Being Asian in America often feels alienating. Perhaps that's why Willis Yu sees life as an endless movie where he and all his neighbors are playing roles in modern Chinatown. As Generic Asian Guy, playing bit parts in the background of everyone else's plotline, he aspires to someday be Kung Fu Guy like his father once was (though more recently he's faded to merely Old Asian Man), the closest Willis feels he can ever come to a starring role in his own life. But when the spotlight finally finds him, he discovers that it's not as easy or as wonderful as he always dreamed... and sometimes the things one wants the most are far, far away from the things one really needs.

REVIEW: From the outset, Interior Chinatown - a novel largely in screenplay format - establishes a surreal meta-reality where life both is and isn't a series of movies or TV episodes... none of which, at least in America, seem to have room for an Asian lead. The son of immigrants, Willis absorbed culture as much through TV reruns and their stereotypes as through his parents and Chinatown surroundings. Even when a show ostensibly starred an Asian character, as in the old TV series Kung Fu, it's almost invariably a white man in costume. Still, he grew up aspiring to be "Kung Fu Guy", the most powerful role he's seen on screen and in his life; his father was once the neighborhood Kung Fu Guy, but even that was still just a role invented by white people, another box to put Asian people into rather than seeing them as real people, real Americans, with their own dreams and hopes and histories. As Willis works to rise above Generic Asian Guy level three ("delivery boy", working for the same Chinatown restaurant where his parents worked, the one beneath their run-down apartment and the heart of Willis's community), he finds himself part of a detective show featuring a white woman and Black man, yet more boxes checked... even as, more than once, people step out of and around their roles to talk directly to the reader and/or Willis. As the young man unexpectedly finds a chance at genuine happiness, one beyond scripted scenes, he must confront what internalizing stereotypes and archetypes has done, both to his own life and his community (and the country at large). The whole is a complex examination of what it means to be an Asian in America, a country that has, at various times, tried to criminalize, dehumanize, and categorize Asians in various ways that perpetually brand them, in big ways and small, as not "really" American (read: not white American). At times the surreality threatened to swamp the story, and there was more than one time I thought Willis needed a conk on the skull to get some sense through his cranium, but overall it was entertaining and thought-provoking, offering no easy answers or quick fixes. (It also was short enough not to overstay its welcome.)

You Might Also Enjoy:
This Book is Not Yet Rated (Peter Bognanni) - My Review
Jade City (Fonda Lee) - My Review
The Dragon and the Stars (Derwin Mak and Eric Choi, editors) - My Review