Too often, epigraphs are skimmed or skipped over. Sometimes readers glance over the wispy passage, not understanding why the epigraph, which can seem random at first, decontextualized from the work to which it belongs, might be a key to interpreting the pages that follow.
Other readers look to the epigraph for insight into how to approach a novel or collection: many playful literary authors are also obscurantists. They hide one of the gleaming keys to the entire shebang in an esoteric quote that few readers will be able to identify and decipher—for those readers, an author’s puzzle-making sensibility is part of the pleasure of reading.
However, the brazen obscurity of an epigraph might leave a reader who hasn’t read the same literature wholly unable to follow the breadcrumb trail into comprehension of the author’s intentions. Still other authors provide a clearer route into a novel by using a transparent quotation of another work that clearly and immediately relates to their own. That choice can make difficult ideas more accessible and may signal an author’s foremost desire—to be understood.
The epigraph of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, the June California Book Club selection, fits into this last class of epigraph. It is a quote from Bonnie Tsui’s American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, which won the 2009–2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature in the nonfiction category. The quote reads, “If a film needed an exotic backdrop…Chinatown could be made to represent itself or any other Chinatown in the world. Even today, it stands in for the ambiguous Asian anywhere.”
Yu tinkers with the idea of an ambiguously exotic Asian America and the construction of identity in the book and expands upon it, dramatically, within the first “Act” or section. We are delighted to announce that Tsui, an Alta Journal contributor and our first-ever Alta Live guest, will join Yu and host John Freeman for this month’s conversation on June 15. Tsui is a consultant for the Hulu television series adaptation of Yu’s Interior Chinatown.
In addition to the book that Yu quotes from for his epigraph, Tsui has authored Why We Swim, which appeared on Time magazine’s 100 Must-Read Books of 2020, and the children’s book Sarah and the Big Wave: The True Story of the First Woman to Surf Mavericks. She received a 2019 National Press Foundation Fellowship, a Gold Lowell Thomas Award for travel journalism, the 2017 Karola Saekel Craib Excellence in Food Journalism Fellowship, and the 2021 Pamela Krasney Moral Courage Fellowship.
Tsui has also contributed to numerous live storytelling events, including Pop-Up Magazine, and she appeared as a talking head in the outstanding 2014 documentary The Search for General Tso, about a dish popular at Chinese restaurants in America. Tsui also helped launch F&B: Voices from the Kitchen, a La Cocina storytelling project about underrepresented stories from cooks and kitchens.
We hope you’ll join us for this must-watch event about Interior Chinatown, featuring three remarkable authors. This is a conversation that is sure to sharpen and shift our collective literary understanding of storytelling, as well as Asian American experience and history in California.
Join us on June 15 at 5 p.m., when Yu will appear in conversation with Freeman and Tsui to discuss Interior Chinatown. Register for the Zoom conversation here.•
LIFE’S ILLUSIONS
Author Lillian Howan meditates on the parallels and divergences of Yu’s Interior Chinatown and Cao Xueqin’s The Dream of the Red Chamber, which has been dubbed one of the Four Great Classical Novels of Chinese Literature. —Alta
PROFOUND WISDOM
Writer Chris Daley praises author Henry Hoke’s latest, Open Throat. It is narrated by “a big cat living in the Hollywood hills.” —Alta
“EUROPA CLIPPER”
U.S. poet laureate Ada Limón’s poem “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa” will be engraved onto the spacecraft journeying to explore the moon Europa in Jupiter’s orbit. You can add your name to be taken along. —Literary Hub
SOLIDARITY
For the 80th anniversary of the Zoot Suit Riots, Alta Journal contributing editor Gustavo Arellano (Orange County: A Personal History) writes about a mural that features the untold story of Charlotta Bass, publisher of the Black-owned California Eagle. —Los Angeles Times
READERS AND PUBS UNITE
Here are 20 great trivia nights at eating and drinking spots around the San Francisco Peninsula, to help bars and eateries recover after the pandemic. —TheSixFifty.com
UNKNOWN DIAGNOSIS
Texas author Greg Marshall’s Leg: The Story of a Limb and the Boy Who Grew From It tells the moving and important story of Marshall’s discovery, at nearly 30 years old, that he had lived with cerebral palsy for his whole life. —Brooklyn Rail
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