Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
More than a decade after the release of his debut novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (2010), Yu returns with an experimental indictment of Asian-American stereotypes.
In the years intervening between his two novels, Yu has written for such acclaimed television shows as Westworld (2016) and Sorry for Your Loss (2018-2019). This narrative form bleeds heavily into Yu’s newest novel, which follows a Taiwanese-American television actor and takes the form of a teleplay interspersed with second-person commentary that provides both intimacy and immediacy to the events of the story. Willis Wu [7] is “Generic Asian Man,” a series of background characters in the fictive police procedural drama Black and White [43], but he dreams of becoming “Kung Fu Guy” [5]. This television show stars, unsurprisingly, a Black cop and a white cop, with characters of other races briefly and insignificantly playing out stereotypes. In prose that is alternatingly earnest and tongue-in-cheek but always incisive, Yu tells the story not just of Willis’s slow and fraught rise to the position of Kung Fu Guy—the pinnacle of Asian-American success in his Chinatown—but also of Willis’s immigrant parents and the struggling residents of the apartment building they all share. The line between the television script Willis acts out and Willis’s real life becomes increasingly blurred as his life and career unfold. This distinction collapses altogether at the novel’s climax, when Willis openly interrogates not just the stereotypical roles offered to him but his eagerness to accept them. “Kung Fu Guy is just another form of Generic Asian Man,” Willis says to an affirming crowd. “It sucks being Generic Asian Man.” [245] While the dashing of Willis’s hopes might have made for a deflating conclusion, it is ultimately bittersweet at worst and touchingly hopeful at best.
A piercingly funny indictment of Asian-American stereotypes and the American discourse on race, this novel is timely but far more than simply topical.
Megan Swartzfager 