Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown contains multitudes: it toggles between screenplay and novel, reality and fantasy, serious and playful. Yu moves between the voices of protagonist Willis Wu, an actor attempting to escape typecasting in Hollywood, and the characters he plays. There are no formal transitions from script to reality, and often, readers—as well as Willis—look around to find themselves not sure how they got there.
Playing with form is nothing new in the movies, and the practice was recently illustrated by the film Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022). But the Oscars’ 2023 Best Picture winner is in good company: these four additional films feature trippy plotlines, unexpected visuals, and big twists. Like Interior Chinatown, the California Book Club’s June selection, they’ll leave your brain feeling a little scrambled—in a good way.
If everything is not what it seems, then what is it? In Don’t Worry Darling (2022), Jack and Alice live a perfect suburban life in Southern California. Breadwinner Jack goes to work on a top-secret project every day, and Alice stays home to clean and spend time in the sun. But after a series of strange events in paradise, Alice’s world begins to crumble. And the truth makes her doubt everything she thought she knew.
The critically acclaimed Parasite (2019) shocks viewers with its mid-movie twist and prompts them to question their understanding of the two families they’ve been watching: the Parks and the Kims. The Parks are a wealthy family in South Korea who hire several members of the Kim family to work in their household—on face value, it’s a mutually beneficial arrangement. However, the Kims’ benevolence toward their employers is really part of a grander scheme. Director Bong Joon-ho thrives in this complicated cinematic universe. In one montage, the Kims’ rehearsal of their deceptive plan is intercut with shots of them enacting it, revealing their careful design.
For something lighter, Palm Springs (2020), starring Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti, throws out the classic love-story script. Like Interior Chinatown, this movie straddles the mundane and the absurd: when Sarah follows Nyles into a cave during a romantic encounter after her sister’s wedding, she gets caught in the same time loop he’s been in for ages, repeating the wedding day over and over, Groundhog Day–style.
The heartbreaking mid-2000s cult classic Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet, uses nonlinear narrative to subvert the rom-com genre. Destroyed by his breakup with Clementine—an early exemplar of the manic pixie dream girl—Joel undergoes a procedure to have all his memories of her erased, wiping their relationship from his mind. The movie intertwines visions of Joel losing his memories with shots of the antics of the medical team working on the procedure. The movie jumps between memory and history, just as Interior Chinatown does between television and true life. The result in both is highly artistic and often surreal.•
Join us on June 15 at 5 p.m., when Yu will appear in conversation with CBC host John Freeman and special guest Bonnie Tsui 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.
ACTING “ASIAN”
Oakland-based writer and community college teacher Karin Spirn discusses racial typecasting in Hollywood, pointing to a study from 2021 that revealed that 30 percent of the top-grossing films of 2018–19 either had no Asian American and Pacific Islander characters or featured such characters delivering five lines or fewer. —Alta
GENRE-BENDING
Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin discusses Yu’s mastery of writing fiction in a screenplay format in Interior Chinatown. —Alta
ALTA IN THE WILD
Read a recap of Alta Journal’s latest issue party, at Green Apple Books on the Park, and find out where we’ll be next. —Alta
JUNE RELEASES
This month, look out for a number of new releases by authors of the West, including Jane Smiley’s The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom, recent CBC author Isabel Allende’s The Wind Knows My Name, Jean Pfaelzer’s California, a Slave State, and Keith Hansen’s Birds of Point Reyes. —Alta
Q&A
Alex Espinoza talks to author Héctor Tobar about the history of the term Latino, as discussed in his new book, Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino.” —Alta
SHORT STORIES PARTY
Angelenos should mark June 10 on their calendars for the Short Stories party cohosted by the Los Angeles Review of Books and clothing brand Everybody.World. Head to the Night Gallery in downtown L.A. for an afternoon of wine, music, readings, and, of course, summer shorts. —Eventbrite
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