Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
Rating: ★★★★★★★★★☆ 9/10
I finished A Promised Land before Interior Chinatown, but I’m writing the reviews in the opposite order because Obama is …uhh.. kinda loquacious (but he also talks about a LOT, which is why it’s taking me a while to write this review). These two books could not be more different. Obama’s memoir is prosaic, matter-of-fact, and pragmatic; Charles Yu’s work is artistic, subtle, and idealistic. It’s a shame that I have to rate both of these books on the same scale, because to me it’s sort of like rating a gymnastics routine and a swimming race on a quarterback rating scale. But I enjoyed both books a lot, and that’s why both are 9/10.
Interior Chinatown is about an actor(?) named Willis Wu, who plays Asian Male, or Oriental Background Male or aspiring Kung Fu Master or Asian Dad, in a TV show called “Black and White”. (When I said subtle, I was referring to certain parts of the book; other parts, like the title of the show, and some paragraphs where he explicitly summarizes the plight of Asian Americans in America, are not as subtle). At it’s core, the show is a metaphor for the Asian American experience in a world that doesn’t seem to have a spot for us. Willis Wu is you and me and every other Asian who play some role in society that is created for us; some play roles at different levels of the hierarchy within the show, but at the end of the day, there is a ceiling to the roles allotted to us, and that’s just a fact of life.
While I don’t completely agree with all of Yu’s social commentary, I cannot help but admire the way he presents his arguments. Reading this book, written mostly as a script for a show, was an entirely new experience for me. It felt like I was drifting in and out of reality as the lines between acting and real life blurred. Willis’s lines that were on script or off script weren’t always marked, another metaphor for the Asian American experience.
Reading this book reminded me of the model minority argument, the idea that while it seems like Asians own their own little plot of land in the world of America’s socioeconomic/cultural sphere, it’s actually just granted to us generously by white people for the purpose of stifling, short-changing, diminishing other minorities. Yu doesn’t explicitly mention this argument, but some variation of it manifests in Yu’s declaration that Asians are in this racial purgatory (see my review of Minor Feelings): “[Asians] have not been and can never be fully assimilated into mainstream, i.e., White America…And on the other hand neither…feel fully justified in claiming solidarity with other historically and currently oppressed groups,” because “the wrongs committed against [Asian] ancestors are incommensurate in magnitude with those committed against Black people in America” (pg 232-233).
Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Do I think it should have won the National Book Award for Fiction? Errr, maybe. It was definitely well-written. But at the same time, I think it won because white people were just the right amount discomfited by the ideas put forth by this story formatted in a digestible way (disclaimer: I don’t actually know which authors were on the 5 person panel that decided the award, but this theory sounds good in my head). But as a piece of art, I loved it.
So: content wise, maybe not a 9/10. But overall, 9/10 it is.
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