Newly opened, the Chinatown–Rose Pak station gleams, completely vacant on a spring evening. Nobody arrives or departs at this Central Subway stop in San Francisco. Two sets of escalators roll down into the depths.

Possible reasons for the emptiness: the lingering effects of three years of the COVID-19 pandemic, a steep downturn in storefront retail business in San Francisco, and fear of continued anti-Asian violence. Outside the station, I wait for the light to change at an empty crosswalk where Washington and Stockton meet. A lone garbage truck rumbles down the street. Four years earlier, I’d observed crowds in the Chinatown restaurants. Tonight, only the Buddha Lounge attracts a few patrons.

Above the street level, the windows of the SROs are lit. As described in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, a single-room-occupancy residence can be a microcosm of a city: “Open a window in the SRO on a summer night and you can hear at least five dialects being spoken, the voices bouncing up and down the interior courtyard.” Willis Wu, the novel’s protagonist, lives on the eighth floor, and as he climbs the stairs to his room, he passes “every floor, each one its own ecosystem, its own set of rules and territories.” Golden Palace restaurant (“formerly Jade Palace, formerly Palace of Good Fortune”) occupies the ground floor, its sounds and smells seeping up through the SRO above so that Willis can “never really leave Golden Palace,” even while he sleeps.

Confinement can be a state of mind, not only a prison of the senses. Yu’s novel probes how limits imposed from outside can be internalized, shaping consciousness. Trapped in a narrow set of roles, among them Disgraced Son, Guy Who Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face, and Generic Asian Man, Willis journeys through the growing realization that he exists in a psychological Chinatown whose boundaries are more difficult to confront than any external restrictions. He admits, “I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins.”

This feeling of being stuck in a false reality parallels the foundational theme of illusion underlying the Chinese classic The Dream of the Red Chamber, written in the 18th century by Cao Xueqin. Yu’s Interior Chinatown takes the form of a screenplay in which the performers struggle to confront and transcend the limited parts they’ve been assigned. Three centuries earlier, Cao wrote:

What bustle and confusion, as one set of actors exits and another enters,
Each taking the illusory for the real.

Actors on the stage of life, only dimly conscious of the hollow roles they play—this describes the members of Cao’s fictional Jia family, whose wealth and aristocratic social prestige will prove fleeting.

In The Dream of the Red Chamber, a mysterious pair, a Buddhist monk and a Taoist, repeatedly appear. They remind us that the world is but an illusion and that the book’s unfolding saga is only the fulfillment of a promise made by the Crimson Pearl Flower to a magical Stone, both reincarnated as characters in an earthly drama. As the novel draws to a close, a father, Jia Zheng, hurries home upon receiving news that his son has disappeared. As it begins to snow, a figure of a young man with “shaven head and bare feet,” in a crimson cape, appears, bowing to him four times. Realizing that he recognizes this monk, a shocked Jia Zheng asks, “Are you not my son?”

Bao-Yu, his son, replies with a look of both joy and sorrow and then leaves in silence with the Buddhist and the Taoist. Only the pair speak: “Come, your earthly karma is complete.”

The labyrinth of oppressive norms in The Dream of the Red Chamber is an illusion within a greater spiritual cosmology. Interior Chinatown focuses on a different maze: political and legal barriers, from local zoning ordinances to a long list of restrictive anti-Chinese federal laws, including the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Standing outside the Chinatown Central Subway station, then, I could be unawakened, deluded in an illusory world according to the Taoist and the Buddhist monk of The Dream of the Red Chamber, but Interior Chinatown would also note that my surroundings have been shaped by violence, racism, and a history of laws attempting to make the unacceptable appear acceptable. Regarding the patchwork creating my experience, Yu quotes historian Philip Choy: “Chinatown, like the phoenix, rose from the ashes with a new facade, dreamed up by an American-born Chinese man, built by white architects, looking like a stage-set China that does not exist.”

Yu’s writing revels in the faux-reality structure. The layout of many Chinese American restaurants (“an aquarium in the front and cloudy tanks of rock crabs and two-pound lobsters crawling over each other in the back”), is a metaphor for a bitter reality (“You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country”). In the novel’s closing acts, Interior Chinatown’s screenplay structure erupts into a raucous courtroom drama in which Willis asks, “I’m on trial for my own disappearance?… Am I the suspect? Or the victim?” Dramatizing these questions, Interior Chinatown explores illusions that can and should be changed on the path to a deeper reality.•

Join us on June 15 at 5 p.m., when Yu will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and special guest Bonnie Tsui to discuss Interior Chinatown. Register for the Zoom conversation here.