Interior Chinatown

I really enjoyed this. It feels like a very personal take on what it means to be an Asian American, yet it is an extremely stylized telling as it's often written in the form of a screenplay AND in second person, which I'm not sure I've ever seen outside of short stories. And it GOES PLACES the further you get into it (which isn't too long, the audiobook was just over four hours). I still need to process my thoughts and do some reading / podcast listening to understand this better.

I have a new favorite book this year and I'm pretty sure it's cresting into my top 10 books of all time: INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu. 
 
The storytelling in INTERIOR CHINATOWN is commanding. I had no idea TV scripts - the scripts themselves, not the acting bringing the scripts to life - could be so arresting. 
 
It's difficult to explain what this book is because it's so many things. It's an exploration of Asian American masculinity interlaced with the model minority myth – all told from the perspective of our protagonist, Willis Wu. It's also a glimpse behind the scenes at pop culture and Hollywood tropes. This book challenges you to center neither white nor Black, but the unique experiences of marginalized people who don't fit into the racial binary. Ugh this is all coming out clunkily - I'm a reader, not a writer - but it's very meta while still being character-driven. 
 
If you're like me, at some points in this book you might be confused. “Are we in the script, or are we out? Are all these people who live in the Chinatown SRO actually actors, or are we in the show when we're not in the show?” Around the 50 page mark, “have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” kept popping into my head. (It's a Westworld quote.) For good reason, I found out; Yu is also an award-winning story editor and writer on Westworld. Stick with it. He makes biting and incisive social commentary that is also really funny. Yu delves into what it means to be a trope in the real world, and what it's like when society has already made up its mind about you. 

Smart, inventive, fun concept, flawless execution, and yet that's mostly what it is, a concept, used to convey a message. Even the small bits of story and character journey feel like the minimum amount required to get the message across. It's still a great work and worth reading, just feels a bit like short story material stretched to tell a big message

Really inventive concept! It was sometimes hard to get my bearings on exactly /what/ was going on, but I think that gave the book more flexibility to play and highlight its message. It got a little preachy near the end but in general I liked it, especially as an Asian woman with complicated feelings about my role in the fight for racial justice. Made me think about ageism a lot too

“To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest.”

4/5. This book is probably best read as only semi-fiction. There really isn't much of a plot, and what plot there is really just functioning as an expansive metaphor for the place that Asian-Americans have in American society today. When taken in this light, this book does have a lot of really sharp and provocative insights into the Asian-American experience, the glass ceilings and the box that society continually puts them in.

“You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.”

Black and White

“Chinatown and indeed being Chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning, a construction, a performance of features, gestures, culture, and exoticism. ... Figuring out the show, finding our place in it, which was the background, as scenery, as nonspeaking players. Figuring out what you're allowed to say. Above all, trying to never, ever offend.”

“The two words: Asian Guy. ... Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here. Who you are. All you are. Your most salient feature, overshadowing any other feature about you, making irrelevant any other characteristic. Both necessary and sufficient for a complete definition of your identity: Asian. Guy.”

”... while your community's experience in the Uniteed States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels... you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent... Your oppression is second-class.”

“Why doesn't this face register as American? Is it because we make the story too complicated? ... If we haven't cracked the code of what it's like to be inside this face, then how can we explain it to anyone else?”

Weird, i decided to give a bunch of the books in the 2020 Best of Goodreads a go. This one was in the Fantasy Category. I cannot fathom why on earth it was there, but who cares, it was a little gem of a book. Short but long enough so the structure works to effect but does not become tiresome. The messaging is on point and given in a light enough satirical voice to not be lecturing.

“He is guilty, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to become a part of something that never wanted him.”

This was a really good book, and my first addition to my 2021 favorites shelf. It's less a story and more a narrative framing device used as social commentary about the Chinese American experience. The book follows Willis Wu, “Generic Asian Man”, as he describes growing up and wanting so bad to become what he thinks is cool – Kung Fu Guy from TV and movies. He grows up, fights hard to become what he thinks the ideal Chinese American should be, then discovers that he didn't want that after all.

What I described is only the framework of the book. The real meat and potatoes comes in the form of social commentary about what it means growing up Asian American, both on a personal level and at a societal level. How the roles one plays as an Asian American on television doesn't seem to end when you leave the set, that you always feel like you're performing for your fellow Americans, because they have a set idea of what an Asian American should be and how they should act.

I really liked the point of view this book exposed me to. I found myself thinking a lot about what was said even when not actively reading it. While the storytelling isn't necessarily straightforward, I think the message is.

Book-club read [UoG]:
I liked this but didn't love it. Perhaps it's just a little bit too clever for its own good (or maybe I'm just slightly stupid). At its core it's a man trying to see who he is and where he fits in the world. Wu, the protagonist, is attempting to progress through the hierarchy of Chinese-American stereotypes.
I found the teleplay format interesting but it prevented me from fully immersing myself in the book. Perhaps the characters themselves were too insubstantial to encourage empathy. Excepting the background stories of Wu's parents, when Yu wants he can paint perfect images with his words.
I recognise that being White I am naive and privileged, the American laws which suppressed Asians and particularly Chinese citizens until quite recently horrified me (I'm also not American, much of their law would probably horrify me if I knew about it). Having read this book I think I will look differently at the ways characters are portrayed on screen, how often (or perhaps seldom) they just get to ‘be'.

Rating: 4.5

I didn't expect the screenplay layout going into this book, but it kind of fits with the message the author is putting across. The main character and other people in INT. CHINATOWN are just playing roles typecast by society which they have then stuck by, not realising that they can be more than that.

Despite almost 200 years since setting foot on America, Asians are still segregated by that phrase - ‘Asian'. It's interesting to consider the truth that when you are asked to describe an American, it is a generalised white person.

A book that everyone should read, despite it's odd format. Understandably, it won't be for everyone but it hit home with me due to my own background and race.

“Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?”

It's a bit of metafiction. Willis Wu dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy, to transcend a life lived on the margins as disgraced son, striving immigrant, delivery guy or generic Asian man. He's living in the world of the cop drama Black and White, more specifically within the walls of the Golden Palace.

Willis is frustrated. He, along with his parents, live a state of perpetually having just arrived, never really arriving. All their striving, all of his hope, and still he can't escape being trapped by his most salient features, to not be seen as anything more than Asian. Guy.

But he's just playing their game by their rules. Is there anything more for him than this trajectory to Kung Fu guy?

Out in the world we're seeing Asian romantic leads, a successful Asian rom-com, Academy award nods, an imminent Asian Marvel hero. It's a far cry from Mickey Rooney in yellow-face and maybe that's progress. But that's just as narrow a world as Interior Chinatown. We're still inhabiting a world that is seeing a sharp uptick in anti-Asian sentiment and sly asides about the Chinese virus and bat-eating Asians. We're still trapped in the world of Black and White.

I get the intent and I think this would make an incredible show or miniseries. It's just the right kind of TV clever - and works within the medium of what has done more to shape American ideas of Asians. There's a lot of visual cues that would be instantly recognizable and would play beautifully onscreen. On the page, I still need some literary fireworks to carry it off.

I put this one off because a couple of reviewers who I usually agree with were not fans. Also, there is something with me and award winners- I usually don't enjoy them. Then again, they are rarely as imaginative as this.
I spent Saturday with Interior Chinatown (audio version, in bits, over the entire day), and I loved it. I think I actually snorted coffee out of my nose at one point. I went through a giant range of emotions. It was when he got to Phoebe that I realized he had tied my heart into a bow and handed it back to me. I cannot believe how much he accomplished in a four hour read.
I have to go find more of his work.