Interior Chinatown.

Interior Chinatown is one of the most inventive, unusual, and funny books I’ve read in the last several years. It’s as if Percival Everett wrote a book about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, while satirizing Hollywood’s special sort of pigeonholing discrimination for people of east Asian descent along the way.

Charles Yu writes Interior Chinatown as if it’s a film treatment – all of the daily occurrences in our protagonist Willis Wu’s life come through the lens of a police procedural called Black and White, starring a Black male cop and a white female cop who have the usual not-witty banter and unaddressed sexual tension. (It reminded me of those abysmal Bacardi commercials about a pair of spies or whatever they were named … Bacardi and Cola. I’ll let you guess which was the Black guy.) Willis is a Generic Asian Male who usually plays Background Oriental Male, but hopes to work his way up to Kung Fu Guy some day, a status achieved by his father, who is now a sad, drunken Old Asian Man. The lives of Willis and his neighbors in Chinatown are split between the way they act when they’re on screen, falling into accented English and stereotypical behaviors, and when they’re off it, both of which constrain their futures, seen through Willis’s parents. The one exception is Willis’s Older Brother, who was on his way to becoming Kung Fu Guy but left Chinatown to go to law school, disappearing from the scene literally and figuratively. Willis eventually reaches a breaking point with this life and demands a bigger role, which he gets, but when he’s killed on the show he has to take 45 days off before he can work again – which puts a damper on his budding romance with another character on the show, Karen Lee.

The whole endeavor is gloriously absurd and Yu never breaks with the conceit. Everything is theater, and written as such, right down to the font choice and the equivalent of chapter and section breaks. The dialogue from the show is spot-on with the nonsense we see on copaganda network shows, and even the Black actor/character points out that he’s pigeonholed in his own way. (Yu could have kept going – south Asian characters, Muslim or Arab characters, and so on, each placed in their own little buckets by oh-so-progressive Hollywood.) It’s quite a trick to make racism and discrimination funny; Everett has done it, Paul Beatty did it beautifully in The Sellout, but very few have pulled it off like Yu does here.

Yu uses the device of the TV show as a metaphor for the immigrant experience, and there’s a layer here I know I can’t fully appreciate as someone who’s not Asian and whose parents were born and raised in the U.S. The idea of parents giving up something of themselves to try to make their kids’ lives better, and the kids striving to do better than their parents did in a system that doesn’t want to let them do so, come through in the depiction of the TV show that won’t even consider Asian-Americans as anything but background players.

There’s also a hazard in finding a credible way to conclude any story this inventive, something Everett hasn’t always done (The Trees comes to mind), but Yu pulls it off by both talking fast and switching venues for the big finish. The whole novel moves quickly, as Yu’s prose is light and there’s a lot of white space on the pages anyway, but once we get to the last two sections things start flying even with more exposition from Willis and Older Brother. I bought it, at least, and could see how Yu might map what happens in the book to some of the more positive stories of second-generation immigrants here. I can certainly see why this won the National Book Award in 2020 – it’s a tremendous book and one that says something important and new about American life.

(I haven’t seen the TV series adaptation, which premiered on Hulu a few months ago.)

Next up: Speaking of Percival Everett, I just finished his 2017 novel So Much Blue and am now on Cho Nam-Joo’s Saha.