{"id":10669,"date":"2025-03-17T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-17T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10669"},"modified":"2025-03-17T00:39:02","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T04:39:02","slug":"interior-chinatown","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/03\/17\/interior-chinatown\/","title":{"rendered":"Interior Chinatown."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Interior Chinatown<\/a><\/em> is one of the most inventive, unusual, and funny books I\u2019ve read in the last several years. It\u2019s as if Percival Everett wrote a book about the Chinese immigrant experience in America, while satirizing Hollywood\u2019s special sort of pigeonholing discrimination for people of east Asian descent along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charles Yu writes Interior Chinatown<\/em> as if it\u2019s a film treatment \u2013 all of the daily occurrences in our protagonist Willis Wu\u2019s life come through the lens of a police procedural called Black and White<\/em>, 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 \u2026 Bacardi and Cola. I\u2019ll 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\u2019re on screen, falling into accented English and stereotypical behaviors, and when they\u2019re off it, both of which constrain their futures, seen through Willis\u2019s parents. The one exception is Willis\u2019s 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\u2019s killed on the show he has to take 45 days off before he can work again \u2013 which puts a damper on his budding romance with another character on the show, Karen Lee.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s pigeonholed in his own way. (Yu could have kept going \u2013 south Asian characters, Muslim or Arab characters, and so on, each placed in their own little buckets by oh-so-progressive Hollywood.) It\u2019s quite a trick to make racism and discrimination funny; Everett has done it, Paul Beatty did it beautifully in The Sellout<\/a><\/em>, but very few have pulled it off like Yu does here.<\/p>\n\n\n\n