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In his most recent novel, Interior Chinatown, Charles Yu brings his signature wit and inventiveness to a narrative that explores Asian identity, specifically through a popular media lens. The novel is set in a fictional universe where the whole world is a series of scripted television programs, and all of the characters are performing certain roles within the program. The protagonist, Willis Wu, is stuck on the set of a buddy cop show called Black and White, where an attractive black man and white woman are the stars on a program that is set in Chinatown. Wu is stuck playing bit characters like, “Generic Asian Man”, “Background Oriental Making a Weird Face”, “Disgraced Son”, “Striving Immigrant”, and “Delivery Guy”, but dreams of one day becoming “Kung Fu Guy” like his father. In this narrative universe, you are out of a job for 45 days if your character dies on screen, and you are forced to wait it out until you start all over again at the bottom tier of background characters. Wu works his way through all of the humiliating background parts that are available to Asian men, striving for the rare opportunity to be “Kung Fu Guy”, the hero of the story instead of the exotic bit player.
The television landscape is not unfamiliar to Yu, he was nominated for a Writer’s Guild Award for his work on the popular HBO show, Westworld, and has written for shows on both AMC and FX. In this novel, Yu blends his literary gifts with his television sensibilities, creating a richly textured fictional universe with excellent pacing and unique narrative conventions that allow him to blend his mediums splendidly.
In this novel, Yu plays with all sorts of stereotypes that are assigned to individuals of Asian descent. The young women are assigned roles like “Hostess/Prostitute” or “Girl with the Almond Eyes”, while the men are “Genreric Asian Man #2” or “Egg Roll Chef”, until they eventually age out into parts like “Old Asian Woman” or “Old Asian Man”. Yu explores what it means to be biracial or fully Asian, to be an Asian female or an Asian male, and the different challenges that arise from these restrictive identity categories. He uses examples of the way that Asian people have been presented on screen, and extends these prejudices to fit the full significance of what it means to be Asian in America. He makes the connection between racism in popular media and the restrictive immigration laws that existed to prevent people from Asian countries from immigrating to America, demonstrating how the act of other-ing a certain group in popular culture creates dangerous shock waves of discrimination and racial violence.
This discussion comes to a head in the final scenes of the novel, where Yu sets up a courtroom drama environment that allows the characters to air out their deepest concerns. In this scene Wu asks, “Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?… After two centuries centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?”. In a brilliant monologue that comments both on the novels central themes and its format, Wu states of his role in the culture, “I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people… Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man, Putting myself into this category…By putting ourselves below everyone, we’re building in a self-defense mechanism.Protecting against real engagement.”
Yu said in a recent interview with NPR, “I think what I was trying to get at with telling the story this way was capturing something about the feeling of what it’s like to be not the center of the action … Chinese Americans and Taiwanese Americans and other Asian American groups have excelled in various fields. And yet, at least from my perspective, there can be still a feeling of, it doesn’t seem to add up.” This novel is an immensely readable and sharp commentary on the Asian experience in America, foregrounding crucial discussions about identity politics and racism that are long overdue. Yu has crafted a brilliant and unique universe, and a truly masterful piece of speculative fiction.