Charles Yu’s moving and funny metafiction Interior Chinatown takes bold risks by using the screenplay format to balance formal innovation with tender storytelling. Willis Wu lives in a Chinatown single-room-occupancy apartment; he and his family members play roles in fictional Hollywood shows. Yu depicts how our society’s mistreatment of Asian Americans is normalized by the stereotypes broadcast by the entertainment industry. Willis’s character on a procedural cop show called, pointedly, Black and White, about the Impossible Crimes Unit of a police department, is a minor one: Generic Asian Man. Willis’s hero is Older Brother, who plays Kung Fu Guy; when Older Brother disappears, the unofficial reason is “Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.”
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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This is a brilliant allegory for Asian American life in California that manages to be wildly entertaining and sympathetic but also distinctively intelligent at the level of metaphor. The emotional pain of constantly ignoring one’s own stories, or having one’s stories ignored, of being used for labor but passed over for creative roles, leadership roles, hero roles, is played here to sharp satirical effect, but the book also asks bigger philosophical questions about consciousness and free will. Groundbreaking in 2020, this astounding work of literature is part of larger movements of inventive and original Asian American authors who are simultaneously telling stories and theorizing about their experiences.•
Anita Felicelli is Alta Journal ’s books editor and the author of How We Know Our Time Travelers, Chimerica, and Love Songs for a Lost Continent.
