David L. Ulin: Good evening everybody, and welcome to the California Book Club. We will be discussing Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown this evening. But before we do that, I've got a few program notes. I'm David L Ulin, Alta's books editor, and I want to welcome you my on behalf of California Book Club and Alta Journal. And everyone here, we're really excited about tonight's book club event. As I said, tonight's tonight's guest is Charles Yu. He'll be in conversation with California Book Club host, John Freeman and our special guest, Bonnie Tsui about his novel, the National Book Award-winning novel, Interior Chinatown. For those of you who are new to California Book Club, this is a monthly book discussion that we've been doing now for almost three years.
The goal is to kind of focus on the California cannon and California as the literary center, the American literary center or the literary center of the United States that it has become. We feature these conversations, and we also feature continuous content leading up to each book club meeting, and they are always free and available on the web. If you haven't had a chance to read the material about Charlie's book or any of the other books that we've featured on the book club, you will want to. Don't miss essays from numerous contributors' reflections on tonight's work, an excerpt of Interior Chinatown, and more. All of this is included in our weekly California book Club newsletter, also free, so please sign up for that. Before we begin the event, I want to go over some of the ways that you might be able to help support the work that we're doing, bringing in depth articles, essays, and interviews with authors and poets to you.
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Watch tomorrow's thank you email for a link to all of the deals we talked about and for an invitation to the issue party we'll be hosting in Culver City on June 22nd. We've begun to do issue parties in the Bay Area and in southern California. So if you are in Southern California, please come out to that next Thursday. And now, it's a thrill to welcome Charles Yu tonight. So I'm going to turn it over to my colleague, John Freeman, and let him take it away. John, all yours.
John Freeman: Thank you, David. Hello everybody. Hello, Columbia, Paraguay, Playa del Rey, Sacramento, New York City, and places Beyond. So nice to be here with all of you to be talking about Charles Yu's absolutely phenomenal book, Interior Chinatown. If any of you have read it yet or have read a book like it, you know those types of books that you read and 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. And this is a great place to begin with a writer who's been experimenting with genre and form since the very beginning of his career with a short story collection, Third Class Superhero, which has all kinds of stories in it, including one which is in the form, which I'll ask him about later, of a screenplay, sort of, about a guy who's playing himself in a show called "Family."
But Charles Yu is a slippery writer in that he's never exactly giving you reality back to you. He's showing you the matrix beyond reality. He's showing you the ways that we agree to see reality, and showing you those distortions. Amazingly, he grew up in Southern California and escaped with a mind full of literature, stories. He went to Berkeley where he studied pre-med and went on to Columbia Law. And somewhere along the ways, he was writing. And when I talked to him very shortly, we'll be asking about this journey, because one of the things that comes to mind when you read Interior Chinatown, which is a novel about a man named Louis Wu, who is an actor of sorts, who always plays generic Asian man or sometimes dead Asian man and stories and films, TV shows, and he wants to enter the story as it's being told, not just about the world, but in the sitcom that he's in, which is kind of a crime show called "Black and White," but he wants to find himself a role in the world.
And the book is a story of him searching for that role. And it's told in screenplay fashion in and around a place in Chinatown, an apartment building, an SRO above a Chinese restaurant. You get to meet several other people who are also struggling with the roles that they're bracketed into and sometimes have had to play themselves as actors. And one of the really genius things about this book is it never simply pins itself to that building and to these people as actors. It moves and shifts back and forth between whether they're in fact actors, or whether they're in fact people who are treated as actors. And once you read this book, which is hilarious and moving and strange and lyrical and angry making and exquisitely paced... Did I mentioned very, very funny? And the way that it constantly reframes the stories that are being told about its characters, about people who are described as Asian American, you cannot help but see the world through its eyes.
And so as I was preparing for tonight, I thought, do I introduce the growing up montage of Charlie Yu? Do I introduce the career montage of Charlie Yu? I think the best thing to do is just to bring Charlie Yu on to talk to us about what it was like to grow up as Charlie Yu to write these books and what he's thinking about. Please join me in welcoming him.
Charles Yu: Hi, everyone. Thank you, John. Thank you so much.
Freeman: Yeah, it's a pleasure.
Yu: Yeah, thrilled to be here. A bit nervous. This is exciting. This is back to early Zoom days. It's a little out of practice, so I...
Freeman: Yeah, it is strange to wait for the laugh.
Yu: You're right. Right. I'll just assume everyone's laughing at me.
Freeman: They're rolling. Yeah.
I want to jump right in because this is such... I think this might be one of the most inventive books I've read in the last 25 years. It just blew fiction open for me. And I know there's a story that I mentioned in your first book. What was the genesis of the idea of Interior Chinatown. And maybe in the briefest of ways, could you describe where it got going, where it stopped, and when it sort of unlocked for you?
Yu: Yeah that's a big statement. I know you read probably more widely than, well, certainly more widely than I do, but probably more widely than almost every once in a while. And to draw a connection between the story in my first book and this is really interesting, I actually think you are the first person, at least in public, but I think even my editor and other people didn't draw that connection to that story, which is my last days as me, which is written in the form of a screenplay, is mostly between a character named Me, capital M, and Ma, his mom. And like you said, there's a sort of show that they're on called Family. And that book was published in 2006. I think I wrote that story in either '03 or '04. So I guess in some ways, I already had an idea that you could draw. The DNA was probably in that idea already of performance of self, basically. A whole bunch of other ingredients had to get thrown into the stew before Interior Chinatown, but yeah, there was something there already.
Freeman: It's thrilling to read that story against this book, and to read your other stories against this book because each one of your stories and in the collection, Sorry Please Thank You and Third Class Superhero, which we just mentioned, has this incredible high concept idea that you could imagine creating an entire novel. And it reminds me so much of amazing stories of comic books, of certain types of science fiction that I watched and read as a kid. And it made me wonder. Sidebar, you have a brother named Kevin who is also works in television as you do on the side, on side from winning national book awards. What was your narrative childhood? What were the kind of things falling out of the sky that you were ingesting or hearing in front of you from family members? And did those two realms of storytelling, media, and what is produced and shown to you or read and family or friends and what is told to you orally, did that ever overlap when you were a kid, or do you think separate?
Yu: Well, I guess I had a steady diet of comic books, sitcoms, cartoons, and books. I was encouraged to read really young. Both of my parents would buy me any book. Mostly I just carried books around in this little bag. It was more about having the book and thinking someday I will read this. And I've continued that into adulthood where mostly I just buy books that I aspire to read someday. But yeah, I think the diet was... It felt random and almost sort of, what could possibly come of this mix of stuff? I loved the Guinness Book of World Records. I loved what felt extremes or people that had tried really hard to get a record. I remember thinking, oh, that person clearly wanted to have a record. I don't know, something about that mixed with comic books being, I would say, and cartoons being probably where you learn first about meta fiction before what the word is, but the idea of stories that can then have something self-referential or a frame around them. I'm being a kind of weird kid. I think I gravitated to the breaking or the suggestion of a fourth wall.
And I also just really liked words. I loved memorizing vocabulary words, and I was good at spelling, I was good at handwriting, at cursive, the shapes of words, the sounds of words. And so I grew up in a household... And I think to answer your question, where it intersected, is my parents were both immigrants from Taiwan, and so my brother and I... They spoke Taiwanese to each other at home and we weren't very good at it. It was our sort of baby language. But quickly as I entered school, it English became the only language I wanted to speak. So it was a dual language household, but I was sort of locked out of my parents' communication in a sense, which led to a lot of observation of them. There was already a kind of formal distance between us, but then if you add language into it, it probably did something to me to have my parents speaking in code around me all the time and having to intuit or just guess at what they were feeling or saying to each other or about me.
So I don't know. That was a grab bag of different answers, but I think all of that's in the middle.
Freeman: No, you've worked towards something I really wanted to ask you about, which is a big question, but it also maybe a small one in that... I'm just curious what your experience of reality was growing up as a kid. Did you think of it as something that was plastic and you could fashion, or did you feel like it was something you had to catch up with and adapt to, or something else?
Yu: That's really interesting. I think probably from a pretty young age, I was probably an annoying kid. I know I was annoying, if I am honest myself, but I did probably think that it was... Even now, but even back then, I guess I can remember stepping out, the of unreality. And I don't know how that maps onto the idea of, is it plastic or is it something, but a sense in which like you could manipulate things a bit. For instance, my brother and I, Kevin and I, we played a game where we were the two, not a game, I guess. We had this kind of invented universe where we were the two most powerful beings in the universe. I was first because out of the older brother. That was self designated. He was second. So yeah, it was like, that's a good consolation prize, but it probably says something about the dynamic right there.
And I had to constantly save the universe from destruction. I forget. I think there was basically no limit to my powers. I think I was basically a, God. I can't remember what his specific powers were, but that's pretty... I'm not in therapy, but that's a pretty grandiose. I don't know if that says something about me, but maybe it was just feeling somewhat, not just like a kid, but I guess a sense in which from a early age, I wanted to, yeah, bend things to the imagination a bit. I don't know.
Freeman: It's what Interior Chinatown, among many other things, does so beautifully, that you begin, and Willis wants to be kung fu... For as long as he can remember, he wanted to be kung fu hero. And the statement repeats throughout the book, and we follow him into a kind of scene in which he is, what you would call on a film set an extra almost, except he's dead or he's just barely in the scene. And the show is called "Black and White." It's a binary sort of racialized TV cop drama type show. And using that as the entry point, we follow him into this world where he goes into an out of real states, the unreal or irreal cop drama, and then into the world in which he is trying to care for his aging father in which he has memories, in which he grew up under the shadow of an older brother who wasn't technically his older brother. And I want to ask you, before you read from the book, just how did you figure out how to accordion in and out of those set pieces so that the reader knew, okay, now we're in the TV show, which runs throughout the course of the book, in which the characters also stop the TV show and say like, "Hey, are you trying to show me a look?" it's almost like actors pausing the middle of the scene and then redoing a take.
That goes on throughout the course of the book, and then we tumble out and we're into interior states and memories of Willis' life. And was there a kind of switch that clicked where you thought, ah, this is how I get in between those two?
Yu: Yeah, that's such a great question. I feel like there was an initial switch, and then there was a long period of pain and trial and error with my editor and agent who had to help me kind of navigate, "Okay, you seem to have set up two worlds here. You seem to also be breaking your own rules constantly. Maybe to be fair to the reader or just to have a sense of cohesion, you might want to be more logical." And then as we worked through that process, I think I realized, and then had to learn how to articulate to them and defend it, that there's a fluidity to this. There's an inherent kind of ambiguity to the line between the two worlds that I didn't want to go past that point, meaning there's sort of an irreducible weirdness or blurriness at some point.
And that was kind of the point, that... So to back up the initial trigger was, or the initial excitement when I kind of hit on this structure of the book, of the script was, oh, I can sort of depict the consciousness of Willis as performing a version of himself that he thinks will be more successful, and then he can slip back and forth in and out of his role, and we can be with him, the reader can be with him as he jumps in and out of the narrative, the script. And that's what was so exciting. So in theory, that's exciting. Then in practice, it gets confusing. And then as I sort of fast forward through working it out, it was like, Okay, here's the intentional confusion, hopefully that's left.
And then the unintentional confusion, we've gotten rid of that, so that what's left hopefully is the idea of somebody who actually, in Willis's case, has internalized racism, has internalized stereotypes about himself, has created a version where he doesn't know where he ends, the guy behind the mask, and where his portrayal of himself begins. And so that's what was kind of both exciting and the biggest challenge in working it out.
Freeman: And it's not just him who we're watching going through these changes in revolutions and interior and exterior states. It's the states of Chinatown, the states within the restaurant, and then the apartment building. We're watching everyone sort of code switch, and you're giving us these sudden inside outside shifts.
And it reminds me, to some degree, of Kevin Young's The Gray Album, which is a kind of unified field theory of storying and black culture. And among the many brilliant things said in that book was... One thing he said that really sticks with me is he said, "Well, what would black characters look like if no one was watching?" And I feel like throughout Interior Chinatown, you give us these moments, like when the restaurant is closing and the tables are cleared and the kitchen is dark, and suddenly they start doing karaoke with each other. I wonder if you can read that scene.
Yu: I should set it up a little bit in case you haven't read it. This book is written in second person. Among the many things I've asked of the reader, I've asked to indulge a novel written in second person. So the you here is that. Okay.
It's karaoke time at the Golden Palace Chinese restaurant. Old Asian man is on the mic. Everything goes silent while he adjusts his glasses, wipes his forehead, takes a sip of water. "For my friend Fong," he says, and begins singing John Denver. If you didn't know it already, now you do. Old dudes from rural Taiwan are comfortable with the karaoke. And when they do karaoke, for some reason, they love no one like they love John Denver.
Maybe it's the dream of the open highway, the romantic myth of the West, a reminder that these funny little Orientals have actually been Americans longer than you have know something about this country that you haven't figured out. If you don't believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour when the drunk frat boys and waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys, and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouge on Crown or Japanese logger. And when he steps up and starts singing country roads, try not to laugh or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to West Virginia Mountain Mama, you're going to be singing along. And by the time he's done, you might understand why a 77 year old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who's been in a foreign country for two thirds of his life can nail a song note perfect about wanting to go home.
Freeman: Oh, I wish you could hear us clap because someone else in the audience just said that that is also his favorite section. June Langhoff says, "It brings the tears." Kristy [inaudible] says, "My father and ex-husband, both first generation American, wanted to disappear into the popular American culture and carried in an embarrassment of their parents' culture, language, food, et cetera. That changed as they got older, and then they were embarrassed about their embarrassment, of the rich culture that home held for them. This seems universal in many immigrant families." One of the things I love is the book is constantly trusting you to hold somewhat contradictory and different things in your mind at the same time. And so the book is resisting a monolithic representation of Asian Americanness, and it's bringing up things that are Taiwanese, as your family is, but it is constantly moving back to having to somewhat reconstitute representation in a world of monoliths. And I think you manage that fluidity very brilliantly. You bring up things like cultural shame, but you don't allow it to totally define your characters.
And in scenes this, there's these sun breakthroughs where you allow a deep and rich complexity. And I think one of the things that works on your behalf is the fact that you're in a Chinatown, which is placed but not totally. It's kind of universal, but it also feels like a universal set, a bit like that episode of "Law and Order" which was set in Chinatown. And the book is spangled with quotes by Erving Goffman's, from The Preservation of Self in Everyday Life, and some of his other acting quotes, but also from the writer Bonnie Tsui, who wrote American Chinatown, as well as Why We Swim. And we're enormously lucky to have with us, Bonnie Tsui, who has some questions for you and would like to talk to you. And I thought it would be really great, at this point, to kind of pass it over to you, Bonnie, to ask some questions of Charlie.
Tsui: Thanks, John. Hey, Charlie. Hey, everyone.
Yu: Hey, Bonnie.
Tsui: We're about to get meta. I feel like we always can almost punch through the fourth wall to all of you because.
Yu: Right. Right. Just [inaudible]. Yeah, sure.
Tsui: Whenever Charlie and I get to have a conversation, I think that's always really exciting for me, especially because I've just really enjoyed being able to have this ongoing conversation with you, Charlie, as a writer. And then starting from our books talking to each other. And thank you for inviting me into that conversation. I just really feel very lucky that happened. And for those audience who don't know, Charlie opens this book with an epigraph from American Chinatown. And I remember when I first saw that, being just totally flummoxed because that's something that I wrote from and wrote about... My family history is through New York and San Francisco Chinatowns. And finding out, writing a book about New York, San Francisco, LA, Honolulu, Las Vegas, and finding out that in Los Angeles, that there was this Chinatown was the stand-in for all of the Chinatowns or for any Asian place in film through this particular period in the 20th century in film, in filmmaking. That just kind of flummoxed me.
And I just wrote this whole chapter about that because I thought it is a way to talk about representation and how we in this country have a tendency to flatten identity and flatten characters. And so when you raised that up, you know, took that flattening, and then made it a stage for such an original, and just wonderfully complex, as John was saying, complex, multi-layered book about the Chinese American experience, and also but it's about America. It's so specific about Chinatowns, but it's about America. It's about how people are allowed to or not allowed to become Americans, I think, in many ways, and I've just really enjoyed that so much. And many people here probably know that you have this dual identity as a television writer and as a fiction writer. And I want to congratulate you for... I was laughing earlier when you were talking about playing God as a kid or being this super, had all the powers of a God, and I wanted to congratulate you for manifesting your reality on us.
Yu: Yikes.
Tsui: You really have. And especially now that this book has become a television show, this book about a television show set in a fake Chinatown has become a real television show about the... It's going to bake your noodle. I can't even keep it straight in my head, but I think that one of my questions, because you are such an original, your career is as original as your work, I think. Your two storytelling lives have finally collided in this way that I thought is a really interesting, and people might want to hear about what that has been like for you as a writer and a creator, I guess.
Yu: Yeah. Well first, good to see you. Always good to see you. If people don't know, I don't know why you would know, but Bonnie's book... Well, you could know this part, but the other part you might not know. Bonnie's book was the fuel, the Intellectual Fuel that made Interior Chinatown something that I was able to write. I was kind of looking for, basically looking for someone to steal ideas from. So I was like, oh, perfect, this is great. No, Bonnie's book, the whole thing is fascinating, but specifically the section on Los Angeles and its multiple Chinatowns actually in the history of... It had a couple. But Bonnie's book provided both historical context and concepts of the idea of Chinatown having been the stand-in, as you mentioned, for all of either Asian America or Asia itself. And also someone having done the research and work made me feel both excited but also justified.
Not justified exactly, but a lot of the things that you talked about in your book, Bonnie, gave vocabulary to things that I had been trying to get ahold of that I didn't know how to talk about and feel. And it was about the sense in which there's a duality. There's a performance of Chinatown. It's always a kind of presentational space. It's for tourists, right? And the history behind why they had to do that, for either self preservation, economic or political, or literal self preservation in terms of violence against early Chinese Americans. So all of that was so vital to the writing of the book. And so then fast forward several years after the book was finished, we're feeling a need to have a cultural consultant on the show that, and that we're making for Hulu, and I was like, who better than Bonnie Tsui? And so Bonnie, now I'm like, this is baking your noodle.
The books were in conversation. We have been in literal conversations, and now hopefully the show will be another step in that conversation. And yeah, it's been a crazy weird, long journey that, as John pointed out, actually started in my... One of my very first short stories had this concept of performance of self, but that idea didn't fully mature until when I started writing Interior Chinatown and wanted to talk about some of, wanted to have a place to put all of these stories that my parents had told me growing up about them wanting to be Americans. And I just didn't know what to do with all of this, all these feelings and all of this yearning, and the aspiration and the hopes, most of which had been frustrated. Most of my parents' ambitions, as successful as they were in so many ways, a lot of it has to do with disappointment or...
But of course when I step back, it's also, we were an incredibly happy and lucky family, privileged in so many ways. So it's an American dream, and yet there's a kind of tinged with sadness about all of it. And I'm like, what do I do with all of this stuff? And the place it ended up going was into this book. So it feels like, in terms of the path of the career, it feels random to me. It only makes any sense in retrospect. There's no real... All I was doing was trying to follow what felt intuitively right. Same with John's last question before this about how did I work out the kind of ways in which Willis slips between worlds, and it ultimately always comes down to, it has to feel right on some emotional level. And I think that's the subconscious kind of slowly working out, oh, right, this is actually what it's like. This is what it's like for...
Honestly, for me as... This is a weird broad statement to make. 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, or do I pretend that none of that exists? And it's like 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: Right. And then you can foreground and background those selves, depending on what the world is asking of you, right? I think that's where using this not just the metaphor, but it's actually the space of this, the imaginative space of a set...
Yu: Right.
Tsui: ... it makes the room for you to be able to do that in a way that you could step off the set, like John was talking about. And then you're having the conversation behind the scenes, and that reveals another layer of self, but no one's seeing that, but it's happening. And I think everyone feels that way sometimes, but you make it so tangible, I think, because of the setting, and I think that's just something that everyone responds to, not only on this level of story, which is just so funny and inventive, but also really painful, but that we can all identify with because we're all putting on the characters and changing the costumes, depending on what the world is asking of us, right?
Yu: Oh yeah, go ahead.
Tsui: No, go ahead.
Yu: Oh, I was just going to say the thing... As you were talking, Bonnie, when you said imaginative set, it really... I think that's such a perceptive way into what is interesting to me, both universally, hopefully about the book, and then specifically about my experience and maybe about a kind of Asian American experience, which is... I think as you were saying, on some level, probably everyone can feel what it's like to not be at the center of things, to have a dream of being the main character in something, right? That's, I think, somewhat relatable, or to feel like you're invisible on some level, the flip side of that. And that's not specific, I think, to any racial or cultural experience necessarily, or gender or any other experience, but I think that's a human thing. But I think specifically as... Part of why I think this is such a weird book and why so many of the things that I've written are so weird... I'm trying to excuse my own weirdness, obviously.
Tsui: We love the weirdness.
Yu: I might also just be a really weird person, and that's fine, I think. But is that... I think growing up, and this kind of goes back to a couple of John's questions, I feel like I had to bend reality or almost create reality because I saw so few models for my own reality. 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 eighties and nineties where somehow it magically filters out all the Asians that were 5% of the US, and a much higher percentage at universities, in hospitals, in certain... Certain contexts, there should be way more Asians. Somehow they magically don't exist in those contexts until about 10 years ago. Then Asians start making it through. But what that does, I think, is distorts.
And what that does to someone like me, and maybe others that look like me, I don't want to speak for anyone else, is it distorts your own perception of yourself, and it makes you go, oh, how do I make sense of this? I know when I walk outside, I'm part of this country. I know my parents immigrated here. I know that there are Asians that exist, but they don't exist in on the screen, and so that jumped, I guess, between the two realities is sort of what gave rise to me wanting to invent these bizarre narratives where...
Tsui: Yeah.
Yu: I don't know if that makes any sense, but...
Tsui: Well, I think this is a great sentiment to close on, and I'm going to hand him back to John, but I think that you should know that you have opened up this new world of story and representation in a way, I think that has really enriched, I think the audience, whoever the audience is, and not just this audience, but on a global scale, just who we're allowed to be, I guess. And so I just really... I think that you should feel that you've done something pretty amazing here with this book.
Yu: Thanks. Thank you.
Tsui: It's always great talking to you, Charlie.
Yu: Always.
Freeman: Wow, Bonnie, that was the best stuck landing of a handover that we've had in the California Book Club. Thank you so much. It's really thrilling to have you here because using the quotes from your book and from Erving Goffman it's very... The book, it's showing its influences, but it's also immediately sort of opening up new possibilities because of them. And I think one of the hardest things I experienced preparing for this interview was, don't ask Charlie Yu about his 9 million influences, and yet that is exactly kind of what one wants to do upon meeting you, because the book celebrates what made it. It doesn't sort of hide it. It's this [inaudible] sort of approach to fictional creation. And one of the listeners, Eugene [inaudible], asks, "Was Chickencoop Chinaman by Frank Chin and influence?"
Yu: That's really funny. I won't reach for it, but there's a copy of it right there. And my father-in-law, [inaudible] actually gave me that copy. So I won't lie, it wasn't during the writing of it, but he certainly was, after the fact, was like, "You were probably..." I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think it was in influential indirectly. And then since then, and in making of the show, I've obviously read it. But I think going to Berkeley in the nineties, there was definitely a fair amount of... There obviously were Asian American writers, but also I was active in the kind of literary magazine scene there as an undergrad. And so I think I was absorbing a lot of what was being taught and written there. And so yeah, undoubtedly, I absorbed a fair amount from Bay Area writers specifically.
Freeman: And you took poetry classes at Berkeley. You didn't take prose classes?
Yu: I didn't get into the fiction workshop that I applied to, but I was more interested in poetry anyway. I took poetry classes with Ishmael Reed and Tom Gunn and Bob Hass and so many others, Susan Schweik. And it was like it was my lifeline because I was actually a biochem major who was not very good at biochem. So the place I went, my happy place was poetry.
Freeman: The idea of the author of Mumbo Jumbo teaching you early fiction techniques through poetry is a real head exploder, only because I think that kind of radical hilarity and deep commitment to the sometimes aggressive sides of satire from Reed is what, to some degree, must have produced Paul Beatty, whose own work was an influence on yours. And I want to go back to something you said about science fiction in that conversation you just had with Bonnie because it's hard not to notice right now that some of the most exciting and thrilling storytellers alive now are using science fictional techniques, as you call them, in the science fictional universe to tell stories towards what you were talking about. And I would include Ted Chang in this, and Rachel Kong, writers who are having their short stories adapted into film. And I wonder if you can talk a little bit about being at that nexus.
You have a lot of opportunity, but you also have one life, and you must be sometimes slightly overwhelmed by the possibilities of what can be updated in Hollywood and the immensity of its impact. How do you choose projects? How do you choose what to work on when it comes to things like that?
Yu: That's a really good question. The short answer is what can you imagine spending multiple years of your life on? And that's a pretty high bar. And it has to really feel like, I have to do this because it speaks... There's a compulsion element to it almost of like I know this is something that I will stay passionate about in the heart, and then also, I have to think I can bring something to that that's interesting. And that takes some level of, I don't know, unearned confidence. I think I have something to say about this. That's only been a very... I'll be honest, that's only been a incredibly recent problem I've had. Most of the time, it's like, I'll take the job if someone wants to give me a job. That's been my experience. But if you're going back a bit further in terms of what stories do I want to write, or what I think about as a book, yeah, that is something I get to choose because there's no one waiting for most of my books.
Maybe now, someone's waiting for my next book, but up until basically five minutes ago, I was writing in the dark for myself and maybe three other people, my family and my editor and agent, and a small number of readers that I very much appreciate who have been reading me. But honestly, it's been a kind of weird journey to just be a lawyer for a long time who was writing very weird metafictional experimental stuff for a pretty niche audience, honestly. And so what excited me was anything that I felt like was at the intersection between technology and how that infringes or touches on being alive, having feelings. Technology and feelings, that's the venn diagram of what gets me excited probably still is, basically. That doesn't necessarily describe Interior Chinatown, but that's still probably the thing that most excites me.
Freeman: You've talked before about how film is a visual medium, and writing is interior, among other things, and they're different. And sometimes Interior Chinatown feels like an argument with film. It's like, no, I'll show you that. I can go deeper in with the novel, and this is how. But you're also adapting the book right now, and there must be some things you have to let go of in order to make it work in film. And one of the questions from the audience has to do with that, which is, what are you looking to keep, if you can talk about this? And what are the must haves for Interior Chinatown to be valid as a film and a book? And what are you maybe going to have to let go of?
Yu: Yeah, that's a great question. A fair amount, to be honest. It's obviously a visual medium versus pros, which has no constraints on budget or tangibility or physics, logic. You can do things in prose that you literally can't do in... I guess you could do them in other media, but not in film. And so you can have literal contradictions in prose. So one thing I have to let go of is the idea of what you said earlier, John, of holding two things in your mind at once. That's pretty hard to pull off. In a visual medium, you sort of have to pick a lane and tell a story in a certain way, and hope that you can get ambiguity or interiority in other ways. And you certainly can. There's things that pictures can do, pictures and music and sound can do that obviously can be transcendent or can transport you in other ways.
So I think it can be just as emotional, just as visceral, but I would say the main thing is it has to... The things that I have let go of are the idea that you can really... Yeah, I think it's what I said about a second ago. It's the idea of holding two literal up opposing ideas at once. You can't do that on TV, unfortunately. So yeah, I guess that's my answer.
Freeman: The roles change for Willis along the course of this book. And one of the things I really love about Interior Chinatown is just how it challenges its own metaphor, because eventually there are roles that Willis cannot play. He cannot play love, and he cannot play being a father. He has to be a father. And it sort of explodes the metaphor as you get towards the end of the book. And Denise Jacques, who's a listener, has a question, which is, how has being a parent affected your perspective? And that's a really broad question, so take it however, which way you go.
Yu: Yeah. Yeah. The book is, in so many ways, about roles in various forms. And so it's about generic Asian man or kung fu guy, or attractive at detective, but it's also about being a son to an aging parent, about learning to switch between being the child, and then being the caretaker, and about playing roles to preserve the somewhat delicate fabric of the relationship. As a parent ages, how can you take care of your parents while still giving them their dignity or while still preserving the structure that that's always been there, that they were the person who raised you. And so as Willis learns and grows, he switches from a young man to a middle aged man, I think. And this book took me so long to write that actually I kind of made that switch myself. I think the first couple books I wrote were definitely kind of like a first novel, a first collection, just young guy writing.
I don't know what that means, but I think it probably makes sense on some level. And then I think this book is probably the first one where it feels like this is someone who's kind of in the middle of it all, between being a parent and a child having a kid. And so the short answer is, I think that in a way, decentralizes, the POV. I think the young man has a narcissism to him. And maybe the middle aged man also is a narcissist, but I think as a parent anyway, or as the son of aging parents, there's necessarily a movement towards empathy that maybe wasn't there when I was 26 and writing stories about 26 year old protagonist, I guess, so if that makes some sense.
Freeman: I love the way bends in this book, and you see Willis sort of reintroduced as generic Asian man, but when he is born again later in the book and described, there's a section where you describe giving birth and becoming a son, becoming a father at the same time. And I want to return to the book before we go, just so we can hear more pages from it. Do you have that section handy?
Yu: Yeah. Yeah, I should. Let's see. Yeah, so this is page 157 if you're reading along.
Generic Asian kid. And then you arrive on the scene, baby Willis, a tiny little kung fu boy. And for a moment, the backstories and fragments and scenes filled with background players and non-speaking parts, it all makes a kind of sense, all of it leading to this, a family. They bring you home from the hospital, at which point everything speeds up. It's a montage of first moments, all of the major and minor milestones, first step, first word, first time sleeping through the night. There are a few years in a family when if everything goes right, the parents aren't alone anymore. They've been raising their own companion, the kid who's going to make them less alone in the world. And for those years, they are less alone.
It's a blur, dense, raucous, exhausting, feelings and thoughts all jumbled together, days and semesters, routines, and first times, rolling along summer nights with all the windows open, lying on the top of the covers, darkening autumn mornings when no one wants to get out of bed, getting ready, getting better at things wins and losses and days when it doesn't go anyone's way at all. And then just as chaos begins to take some kind of shape, present itself not as a random series of emergencies and things you could have done better, the calendar, the months and years and year after year stacked up in a messy pile starts to make sense, the sweetness of it all right at that moment. The first time start turning into last times, as in last first day of school, last time he crawls into bed with us, last time you'll all sleep together like this, the three of you. There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories, and then you spend the next few decades reliving them.
Thank you.
Freeman: Who says he doesn't write poetry? That is such a gloriously beautiful touching. Derek Lou says, "I agree." Linda Lee says, "Thank you for sharing." Beautiful section. I want to bring Bonnie back in. We've got a few more minutes. We'll go a tiny, tiny, tiny bit over. And I wonder if I can ask a question from the audience that applies to Charlie, but I think because, Bonnie, you wrote a book that is about something that many people shared and lived, it would apply to you, which is, how have you dealt with the reception to the book? And how did that either extend the life of the book, change your life, or take you back into parts of it that maybe you weren't aware of?
Yu: Was that a question for me, or...
Freeman: It's for both of you. But starting with Charlie or Bonnie, either one of you, I'm just curious, when you write about a experience, even if it's fiction or nonfiction that's slightly shared, you think maybe you know what you're saying, and then suddenly someone pulls out something that you didn't even realize you were saying. And so the experience of publishing, it must expand what you think you did.
Yu: Yeah. Yeah. I started writing the book in 2012. I finished in 2019. I'll do the math. I'm sorry if anyone's heard this before, but I did the math. If I had written 19 and a half words per day, it would've finished in the same amount of time that it took me. So for anyone out there who's struggling with a novel, just write 19 and a half words per day and you'll write as fast as I did. But I think it's really bizarre and incredible to be talking about in 2023 with John Freeman and Bonnie Tsui and with all of you. It's just the most gratifying possible thing to still be talking, not just about my book, but actually about the experiences that gave rise to it and common experiences or things that I didn't know about. And people have said things to me where I'm like, I wish I had thought of that. They're just like, 'Your book made me feel this or remind me of..."
And I'm like, "I should not admit this, but I cannot take credit for that. That's not what I meant, but you were telling me something." And that's the most humbling thing, of like, oh, it's a conversation and the real sense of, I don't know your part of it. I just know my part, and now we get to do this. So
Tsui: Yeah, I completely agree with you. And I'll up you one by saying that American Chinatown came out in 2010, and I'm talking to you about this now. That's crazy to me. And that was what I was getting at in the beginning of our conversation earlier, where I just am astounded by and really humbled by how books can do this for us. Not only are the books in conversation, the ideas are in conversation. And then it's generative. It gives new life and receives new life through the readers, and all of us coming together in this community to talk about this. It's really magical, and I think a lot of people will come away from this, having that feeling of magic that's in there, the texture of that, that words have power, and they also evolve. I think that we all feel really lucky to get to experience that, both as writers and readers.
Freeman: I want to ask you one more question, in that in one of our previous Zooms with Michael Connelly, he had the detective who inspired one of the characters in the new Bosch series on to talk about detecting, and it is kind of so appropriate for this book that one of real life people writing about a real life place who inspired the imaginative set, which makes the home for this book is here talking to us about it. And it seems like also a deeply Californian experience, where the real and the Unreal are kind of smooshed together into this altered state. And since we're in the California Book Club, I want to circle back to that to see, to some degree, if... It's hard to imagine another life always, but do you think you would've been able to write this book? Were you not a Californian? Because it does feel like this is a deeply Hollywood book, too, in a way that it peels back the layers of myth making.
Yu: Yeah. I think that's a deep insight that actually haven't been asked in that specific way, but I think it's right. Growing up in LA, I always felt like, well, it's the thing of I didn't know I was a fish in water, the David Foster Wallace thing of... You're right, just LA as LA. That's where I'm from. But then moving away from LA for a little bit and then coming back, then I really got a sense of like, oh, I am from LA. It wasn't really actually until I moved to New York where people were like, "You are very Californian." I'm like, "What does that mean?" "Well, you walk slow. You are too laid back, and you walk slow." Mostly, it's just about slow walking. But also, I think my worldview is that... I think you're right. It's like growing up in LA, what I didn't realize was a sense of possibility, a sense of maybe a historical in a sense, of everything's pretty new in, but there's a deeper history that's there that I didn't know about until later.
It's like everything feels new because it's all strip malls, but it's not until you go to college and learn about things that you're like, oh, there were people here before that. And so I think that's part of it. And then as you said before, a southern Californian who then went to school in Northern California. So I feel like I get the best of both of those worlds in some sense, of... Yeah, I feel like all of it was formative for me, for sure.
Tsui: As someone who moved from New York to California, I totally see you as very California. Also, this whole conversation is so California because it's about this book that takes place on a film like set, and then goes back to a film set. It actually goes to a film set and becomes real. That's very California. It's like you're manifesting this dream in your head. I think that that's pretty... And then the sense of expansiveness, right?
Freeman: I wish time could expand endlessly and we could sort of be in multiple universes having versions of this conversation, but usually we go for about an hour, and I want to let everyone get off so they can have dinner and things. But Bonnie Tsui and Charlie Yu, this has been truly wonderful, and I'm so grateful. And the comment queue is exploiting with gratitude, and thanks from Cynthia Yee and lots of other people who are grateful for you coming here too. Bonnie's latest book is Sarah and the Big Wave Surfers, which is available now. And Charlie, you will write another book in about 11 to 17 years. He's going to go down to a hard 17 words a month.
Yu: Perfect.
Freeman: But whatever it is, it will be thrilling. It's been great talking to you, and thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to us about this fantastic book.
Yu: Yeah, thank you, John. Thank you, Bonnie. And thanks everyone. Thanks, Alta. This is such an honor. It's so cool.
Freeman: Well, I think David is going to come back on and do our outro.
Ulin: I am here. That was an amazing conversation. Thanks to all of you. I need to find my pages here. So big thanks to Charlie and Bonnie and John. That was a terrific interview, and it was recorded. For those of you who want to revisit it, you'll be able to find it at californiabookclub.com, next month's book, which will be on Thursday, July 20th, we are excited to present Stay True by Hwa Hsu, which for those who don't know, just won the Pulitzer Prize for memoir, a magnificent book that begins as a coming of age story and turns into something much, much more. In the meantime, a reminder that the sale on Alta membership for California Book Club members is available at altaonline.com/join. Or again, the $3 digital membership. Please participate in a two minute survey that will pop up as soon as we end this event. And take care, everybody. Stay safe, and we'll see you all next month. Have a good night.•
