Film and television have made narrative hijinks so common that it’s a wonder so few novelists avail themselves of these techniques. How about a story told backward (Memento)? Or a past that’s erased upon request (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind)? What about a narrator who is actually dead (too many to count)? Or a family who are trapped in a multiverse (Everything Everywhere All at Once)? The models are all there.
In film, from the beginning, even the hallowed position of the viewer has been turned on its head. Actors have been breaking the fourth wall since 1920, addressing the audience directly. “The key to faking out the parents is the clammy hands,” Ferris Bueller told us 70 years after Mary MacLane turned to the camera in Men Who Have Made Love to Me and said: “A lot of people will tell you that a good phony fever is a deadlock, but, uh, you get a nervous mother, you could wind up in a doctor’s office. That’s worse than school.”
This device works for one primary reason. We’re all stuck in roles, some more than others, many of us playing ourselves. Almost 20 years ago, when he was still a lawyer, no doubt playing a role to some degree, Charles Yu published a short story that pounced on this feeling called “My Last Days as Me.” In it, a 22-year-old man acts his 16-year-old self in an ongoing reality drama in a kind of filmic purgatory, like an endless Groundhog Day:
That last season was the best in the history of the program. Me and My Mother averaged nearly fourteen Tender Interactions a week. Ratings for Family were at an all-time high. My Mother cried Pitifully almost every episode. She had Large Problems. It was beautiful to watch her Suffer. A true professional.
It’s a brilliant gag, and yet there are depths to be explored. Acknowledging what is expected of the mother as an Asian American woman, the story gestured toward an entire field of roles that are hard to break out of because culture reinforces them. Interior Chinatown, Yu’s 2020 National Book Award–winning novel, finally takes this opportunity and runs with it.
Set in a fictional Chinatown, in which a family plays a set trope of characters, it expands the world of Yu’s earlier story into a deep satire of America’s idea of race, as well as of film itself, of the roles Asian American characters are given by both and the way those tropes are internalized, making some absolutely hilarious jokes along the way. It is one of the saddest and funniest books you will ever read and an astounding breakthrough in how Asianness is talked about in the American novel.
The story begins with a simple statement—one that is repeated throughout the book, gaining new, different meanings each time: “Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.” Told in the second person, set in a restaurant, and laid out on the page in the format of a screenplay, the book immediately thrusts us into a paradoxical place: intimate estrangement. The second-person voice forces us to become the character, and the setting demands us to play a role.
You, the reader soon learns, is Willis Wu, an actor growing up in a Chinatown SRO (single room occupancy) hotel whose residents are also actors. There is Old Asian Man, Older Brother, Delivery Guy, and Emperor, among many others, living in small apartments above a Chinese restaurant. Willis has spent a life learning from his father, once a virile kung fu master, now Old Asian Guy. Willis struggles to accept the fact of his father’s aging.
To take his mind off what is staring him in the face, he works. He has been trying to rise as an actor, but the names of his recent roles capture his predicament: Disgraced Son, Silent Henchmen, Guy Who Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face. And Generic Asian Man. There have been others who have briefly transcended these roles—Older Brother, his own father—but in a series of dazzling montages, the novel reveals how little of themselves were captured by even the best roles they got. It is one of the most dexterous feats of narrative in the past 20 years of American fiction. Looping through the scene, Yu manages to simultaneously indict a storytelling system and find spaces in its cracks to tell a meaningful tale. In many of these moments, the “you” he writes toward becomes a plural you.
“Poor is relative, of course,” he writes in one such moment. “None of you were rich or had any dreams of being rich or even knew anyone rich. But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. Crossing that gap can happen in a hundred ways, almost all by accident. Bad day at work and/or kid has a fever and/or miss the bus and consequently ten minutes late to the audition which equals you don’t get to play the part of Background Oriental with Downtrodden Face. Which equals, stretch the dollar that week, boil chicken bones twice for a watery soup, make the bottom of the bag of rice last another dinner or three.”
As the action opens, Willis is stuck in a police procedural called Black and White, in which a white woman and a Black man enter a crime season to find an “Asian Man” (played by Willis) already dead. Interior Chinatown, as the title suggests, is both an interior world and a world’s interior viewed from outside—as by a camera’s eye. Or an outsider’s eye. Either way, as the novel begins, Willis is both figuratively and metaphorically dead. Reduced to a body with a few identifiable qualities. In this sense, Interior Chinatown is the story of his resurrection.
One of the book’s many brilliant aspects is how quickly it moves from one posture into another. Black and White is an example—what begins in earnest noir-like tones soon devolves into a kind of sketch comedy of the form, riffing on all the ways that crime shows like to set up a tale, play their actors off one another, and slot the audience into type based on which character appears largest in the ads in your neighborhood. The confidence with which Yu accordions out of the straitjacket of the form produces a feeling closer to what it feels like to encounter story. That giddy sense of familiarity and collusion and resistance. It feels like a person both telling a story and looking over his shoulder at the ways it matches up with what is supposed to be told.
Keeping this all straight on the page is not as hard as it might sound. It quickly becomes clear that when narration enters the screenplay form on the page, people are playing a role, either in Black and White, the story of which runs the course of the entire book, or within their personal lives, which occasionally fall into dialogic pattern. In this way, Yu neatly shows how projections of being—Asianness, for example—quickly become internalized. They can create scenery. They can decorate a room. “The idea was you came here,” he writes at one point about Willis, living in the SRO surrounded by people who have worn masks long enough to become their masks, “your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.”
When the book falls out of the screenplay form into something that more closely approximates narrative prose, we have then entered true interiority. A world in which Willis’s role is his to be designed, even if he has imported forms of self-loathing or limitation. As Black and White morphs and becomes a romance, a western, a crime caper, even a courtroom drama, the prose sections go ever inward. There are touches of lyricism and poetry. The gap between who Willis plays and who he is expands. He meets a woman, falls in love, and is reminded that to be in love means to stop playing a role. He becomes a father and then faces a choice—whether to keep living in the world where he accepts the space given to him.
Interior Chinatown resembles some great books. It wrestles with representation with the daring fury of Paul Beatty. It argues with itself like the work of Dostoyevsky, but in so many ways, it is utterly its own creation. What else could be simultaneously this silly and orchestrally controlled? Is there a novel that manages to describe so well the way fantasy becomes reality? And yet, the novel is not here to come to conclusions: it moves with a unique and restless desire to interrupt even its own interruptions of culture memes. In the final courtroom drama, Older Brother describes Willis as being “guilty of wanting to be part of something that never wanted him.” Defending him, Older Brother quips, “I’ve never defended someone for self-imprisonment before.”
In one of Yu’s previous books, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, the author plays a version of himself, a kind of narrative technician, entering and sapping stories so that people can safely go back in time again. Though not autobiographical, Interior Chinatown feels like a sister project of intensely relevant design. It applies the actual Yu’s prodigious gifts to spotlight a narrative danger that can change lives, can even end them. How not to be trapped in reflections and distortions of the past. It is a book of extraordinary power.•
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.
