In his opening remarks about Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, the June California Book Club selection, host John Freeman commented that it is the type of book that, as you read it, “infiltrates and automatically begins operating on your sense of reality. And so you begin seeing the book as the world and the world as the book.” He said that it is one of the most inventive books he’s read in the past 25 years. Freeman asked Yu what the genesis of the idea of Interior Chinatown was and drew a connection between the book and an early story of Yu’s, “My Last Days as Me,” also written in the form of a screenplay. Yu responded that the story was written in 2003 or ’04, so the DNA for Interior Chinatown—about the performance of self—was in that story.
Freeman said that Yu’s short stories remind him of the series Amazing Stories and the types of science fiction he had watched and read as a kid. He asked what Yu’s narrative childhood was like: “What were the kind of things falling out of the sky that you were ingesting or hearing in front of you from family members?” He wondered whether the two realms of storytelling—media and family stories—had overlapped when Yu was a kid or whether they’d been separate.
Yu commented that he’d had “a steady diet of comic books, sitcoms, cartoons, and books” while growing up. He’d been encouraged to read young, and his parents would buy him any book. He loved the Guinness Book of Records. He also noted that comic books and cartoons are where you learn first about metafiction—even though you have no idea that that’s what the genre is called or that the stories are intentionally self-referential or have a sort of frame around them. As a weird kid, he gravitated toward the breaking of a fourth wall.
Freeman commented that Interior Chinatown is constantly trusting you to hold somewhat contradictory things and also resists a monolithic representation of Asian America. He brought on Alta Journal contributor and author Bonnie Tsui. Upon joining, she noted that the CBC event itself felt meta—a show to talk about a book about a show. She also said that she was “totally flummoxed” initially to see that Yu had opened Interior Chinatown with an epigraph from her book American Chinatown. She went on to remark that Yu’s career is as original as his work is and that, with Interior Chinatown, his storytelling lives have collided. She asked, “What has that been like for you as a writer and a creator?”
Yu explained that Tsui’s book was the “intellectual fuel” that made Interior Chinatown something he was able to write. Tsui’s book had provided the historical context of Los Angeles’s multiple Chinatowns and the way films have had it stand in for Asian America or Asia itself. Yu explained that his stories need to feel right on an emotional level. Often things are being worked out subconsciously. He said, “For me as an Asian dude in America, it’s this constant toggling between extreme self-consciousness and then wanting to turn that off for a second. It’s like, Do I look at self-view or do I hide self-view? Do I remember who I am or what my parents’ experiences [were]? Or do I pretend that none of that exists? It’s obviously neither, but that toggling itself is kind of what the book is about. It’s like constantly jumping across this boundary or constantly jumping between two sides of myself. Two realities, really.”
Tsui responded that he could “foreground and background those selves depending on what the world is asking of you.… The imaginative space of a set makes the room for you to be able to do that in a way that you could step off the set and then you’re having the conversation behind the scenes.… No one’s seeing that.” She said that everyone feels that way sometimes, but it feels tangible in the book because of the setting.
Yu responded that “on some level, probably everyone can feel what it’s like to not be at the center of things or to have a dream of being the main character in something.” He believes this could be relatable, “to feel like you’re invisible on some level.… That’s not specific to any racial or cultural experience necessarily or gender or any other experience. I think that’s a human thing.”
Yu circled back to Freeman’s questions about reality at the top of the hour. He said that part of the reason Interior Chinatown is such a weird book, as are so many things he’s written, is because, growing up, he felt that he “had to bend reality or almost create reality” because he saw so few models for his own reality. He said, “I had to almost write science fiction because I didn’t feel like Asians were part of the reality in what I was reading and watching. There’s a filter on American TV and film in the ’80s and ’90s where somehow it magically filters out all of the Asians that were 5 percent of the U.S.”
He further commented that he thinks that this lack of representation “distorts your own perception of yourself” and makes you wonder how to make sense of the difference between the two realities.•
Join us on July 20 at 5 p.m., when Hua Hsu will appear in conversation with California Book Club host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Stay True. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
