Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a pretty amazing book, and it is narratively different than anything I’ve read before. Frequently described as satire or metafiction, much of it is formatted to resemble a screenplay, with scene headings, character cues, and dialogue blocks. Additional narration, which expands beyond what would typically be included in a screenplay, is presented from the rarely-used second person point of view (think “you” pronouns).
Interior Chinatown’s main character, Willis Wu, is a young Chinese-American man who lives in Chinatown. He works as an extra (Background Oriental Male) in various movies and TV shows filmed on location, and he occasionally gets small speaking parts (Generic Asian Man). His aspiration, however, is to work his way up to the top slot in the hierarch: Kung Fu Guy.
Because of how this book is written, it’s often hard to tell whether actions are taking place on set or in real life. Willis and his neighbors, who are also cast in bit parts, share whispered commentary in the midst of scripted dialogue. And more significantly, dialogue between Willis and the stars of Black and White—the TV cop show they are currently filming—sometimes devolves into overt sniping about roles, stereotypes, and complicity with the system.
Text, subtext, and action blur. But the confusion serves a purpose. It opens up space for readers to interrogate the ways cultural tropes affect individuals—limiting how others see them as well as how they see themselves. It reminds us that everything is real life—even cliched cop shows.
This chaos is especially evident in the penultimate chapter: “Act VI: The Case of the Missing Asian.” Written as a courtroom scene, Willis is the defendant accused of “an internalized sense of inferiority.” According to testimony provided by Miles Turner, the Black detective from Black and White, “[Willis] thinks he can’t participate in this race dialogue, because Asians haven’t been persecuted as much as Black people.”
The trial is a wild ride. It provides Willis’s lawyer, Older Brother, whose recent absence from Chinatown is treated as a suspicious plot point in the latest Black and White episode but in reality is a function of his leaving to attend law school, an opportunity to share real case law pertaining to the historical treatment of minorities in the United States. It leads to Willis finally understanding that Kung Fu Guy is just another form of Generic Asian Man. And ironically, despite the main character’s epiphany, it ends in a giant Kung Fu battle—Wu and Older Brother vs. waves of cops—culminating in the freeing death of Kung Fu Guy
While Interior Chinatown’s plot is often bitingly funny, it never treats its subject matter lightly. That’s the brilliance of Yu’s work. It doesn’t offers easy answers, but it provides a crystal clear depiction of the dilemma confronting all of us: how to break free of the limiting roles and racial characterizations we’re steeped in.
Interior Chinatown was awarded the National Book Award in Fiction in 2020. It’s also been turned into a 10-episode miniseries available to stream on Hulu.
Yu, Charles. Interior Chinatown: A Novel. New York: Vintage Books, 2020.
