Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

From the publisher: Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.

Charles Yu’s debut novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, was an intricate, inventive deconstruction of science fiction’s most recognizable time travel tropes, equally clever and comic. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that his latest work, Interior Chinatown, occupies a similar intersection of intelligence and humor, but here his witty aim is set on the tragicomedy of Asian representation in American culture and consciousness.

The novel follows Willis Wu, a bit actor who aspires to achieve the iconic status of such kung fu luminaries as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan. Yu constructs his novel as a screenplay – included are location cues, stage directions, and scene headings – and in doing so, filters the details of Willis’s real life through the artifice of Hollywood, a structural conceit that both condemns the shallowness of minority representation in America (the creation of art works as illustrative microcosm) and highlights its ubiquity. At times, Willis and his on-screen persona blur and reality becomes muddled, a brilliant emphasis placed on the performance of living and the conflicting identities we feel compelled to don like so many coats.

The limiting factor of screenplays, which in television and film are enriched through performance and visual art, makes for a narrative that perhaps feels a bit slight, almost fast-forwarded through. But it also allows for a handful of affecting monologues, largely waxing wise on the nature of identity and prejudice, particularly that of Asian Americans always dually situated within two competing contexts: that of a minority alternately marginalized, romanticized, and exoticized in America; and that of a minority who never had to suffer American’s sin of slavery and how knowledge of that specific relativism is internalized.

Interior Chinatown is more clever than profound, but injects its gimmick with moments of palpable emotion and tragedy and proves genuinely unique among modern novels. It’s sketched out style allows for plenty of reflection and conversation for readers looking for a glimpse at underrepresented cultures or interested in atypical narratives.

The Galesburg Public Library owns Interior Chinatown as a print copy and an ebook.