I came across Charles Yu’s books by way of his short stories. One of my favorites, which my spouse read to me in the waiting room shortly before I gave birth to our twins, was “Standard Loneliness Package.” It first appeared in the science fiction magazine Lightspeed, though we read it in Ben Marcus’s phenomenal literary anthology, New American Stories, which I’d bought from Kepler’s bookstore. The narrator of “Standard Loneliness Package” works in the emotional-engineering industry. What does that mean? The worker feels—experiences—other people’s pain for money, and as the company’s tech support guy says, when it comes to emotions, there is no “upper bound on weirdness.”
The metaphor at work in “Standard Loneliness Package” is of a piece with a larger theme in Yu’s body of work: that, while living together in a society, we influence one another’s consciousnesses, for better or worse. Embedded in the symbolism of this particular story is also an undertow of awareness that some of us are routinely required to carry the burden of other people’s feelings, even at the expense of our own experiences. Anyone who has been forced to play supporting roles to other people, and neglect their own needs, all their life knows this.
Yu served as the story editor for the first season of HBO’s futuristic western, Westworld, and the subtext of that season is infused with the questions of what consciousness is and whether robots can have it. Visitors to the immersive western theme park depicted in the show are able to indulge in their fantasies of raw violence at the expense of the android characters in the park who have been, at least initially, programmed to not fight back, to simply submit. The visitors brutally mistreat the androids, as if they were simply emotional hosts for the visitors’ own elaborate dramas; of course, the park visitors think, they’re androids, so they don’t know this is happening and this doesn’t matter. Or do they?
The gloriously metafictive June California Book Club selection, Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, pushes this emotionally rich and true, but also profoundly bananas, concept—perhaps it will be perceived as less bananas now that people realize that some of the building blocks for a future like this one have already been erected—even further.
Written as a screenplay, both funny and sad, in which our Taiwanese American hero, Willis Wu, has a minor role, the novel is an allegory for the ways in which Asian Americans’ racial identity is constructed as a flattened bit player on the stage of America’s Black-white racial binary—and for the damage done to our psyches and emotional well-being when we’re routinely forced to ignore our own stories in favor of a larger show that includes nothing born from our own experience of living. This concept was seeded, to a lesser degree, in “Standard Loneliness Package.” The workers in that story are trapped in the pain of others who pay them money, rather than free to attend to their own.
I use “Asian Americans” in the broad political sense that Karen Tei Yamashita wrote about in a prior CBC book, I Hotel, a group made up of more than six million of us in California, not in any sort of cultural sense. In what easily could be a statement about how Asian Americans are treated in the broad society as well, the narrator of Yu’s short story tells us, “In the end, we’re all brains for hire. All I know is they seem to have gotten it down to a science. How much a human being can take in a given twelve-hour shift. Grief, embarrassment, humiliation, all different, of course, so they calibrate our schedules, mix it up, the timing and the order, and the end result is you leave work every day right about at your exact breaking point.”
And poet Cathy Park Hong describes a feeling similar to the one Willis experiences in her acclaimed book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning: “I stop trusting what I see, what I hear. My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”
While the androids in the first season of Westworld do develop sentience and violently resist the repellent game into which they’ve been conscripted, the movement is different, more supple, and more heartfelt in Interior Chinatown. For Willis veers from the path on which the show would like to put him because of family and love. I pressed the book on all my friends in 2020, when I first read it—my Bay Area friends created their own informal book clubs to chat about this one—and now you have a chance to read it, too, if you haven’t already.
This is a vital, moving work that speaks to the difficult public conversations about consciousness, work, and race that have been underway in this country since artificial intelligence debates were mainstreamed. The Hulu series adaptation of Interior Chinatown, directed by Taika Waititi (Reservation Dogs), has almost finished production, but read the book first. Of course, it was a California novelist who was at the cutting edge of how he broached some of the most salient questions of our time. We would all be living in a better society if this book were not so original, so timely, so astute in conceptualizing the real-life morass in which we find ourselves—but such is literature.
Join us on June 15 at 5 p.m., when Yu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Interior Chinatown. Please visit the Alta Clubhouse to discuss the book with your fellow California Book Club members. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
ON-SCREEN PLAY
For the CBC’s first essay about the featured book this month, genre-bending author Lincoln Michel (The Body Scout) explores the subversion of form and genre in Interior Chinatown. —Alta
Q&A
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin talks to Yu about his choice to write Interior Chinatown as a screenplay and his process of world-building. —Alta
DEEP ROOTS IN HISTORY
Ulin reviews Luis Alberto Urrea’s book Good Night, Irene, a World War II novel told in multiple registers that was inspired by the experience of the author’s mother. —Alta
NEW STORYTELLING ERA
Oregon-raised memoirist Nicole Chung (A Living Remedy) writes about the new Disney+ series adaptation of Gene Luen Yang’s classic graphic novel American Born Chinese, which premiered on May 24. —Time
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