Cherrie’s Thoughts On [Interior Chinatown]

Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

I finished Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu a few weeks ago. This was the 1st book of my (unofficially) Asian American culture-focused book club with my friends. It’s one of those books that I kept thinking about over and over after I finished reading (and after several lengthy discussions with my friends still). 

English is not my first language, and I am partially writing this to get better at English writing. Pardon any grammatical errors. Besides, I have been trying to get into reading novels in English, which is something I’ve found difficult growing up. This book’s screenplay format was bold, refreshing, and effective in storytelling (especially this story). 

Willis Wu, the son of a Hollywood Kong Fu Actor, follows his father’s footsteps as an aspiring actor. By day, he goes on set to the Gold Palace Restaurant in Chinatown, playing a part in a detective show called Black and White, featuring a white female cop and a black male cop as main characters. Willis and other Asian American characters are meant to come and go in the show, playing side characters with accents even though the actors themselves speak perfect English as they were born in this country - however, an Asian person without an accent on screen is just too confusing for the American audience. By night, Willis goes back to his tiny room in the same Chinatown’s SRO building he grew up in. His parents and everyone around him seem to be trapped in a dated vision of the old country without a way to get out. 

He meets Karen, a mixed-race Asian American actress and they fall in love, they get married and they have a baby girl called Phoebe. Karen wants to move out of Chinatown, into the suburbs, and start a new life. However, Willis stays exactly where he is. He wants to prove himself by becoming a Kung Fu Guy - the top prize of an Asian American actor that is. He prioritizes his goal of becoming this Kung Fu Guy over Karen and Phoebe until he can’t keep it up anymore and he escapes his life by stealing a car from the set. Then everything comes to a point - his actions and inactions, his crime, his victimhood, his image of himself, and his place in this America all get put on trial.

I won’t give the ending away so you should read the book!! But I will tell you that I felt a blend of warmness, sadness, and hopefulness when I finished the book. 

Willis Wu is an Asian American man finding his place in this American society. I, a Chinese-born woman who now calls America her home, have found that parts of my identity overlap with his. Then there’s the other parts that don’t overlap, the parts that brought me discomfort as I followed along with his story. His actions (sometimes inactions) as a male character,  the contrast drawn between him and his female counterpart (Karen), his self-doubt and self-hatred that we all experience sometimes (though I think toxic masculinity has taught men to hate themselves a whole lot more as reflected in Willis’ story). As I progressed with the plot, I experienced discomfort and at times it was easier to put down the book. 

But then again, is a book worth reading if it doesn’t make you uncomfortable just a little? 

I didn’t feel this way because I disagreed with where the story was going or what the book seemed to tell me. But rather, because the story was going the way it had to go and it was the only way that made sense. It was the only way that we could all dig in ourselves deep and find what the truth means to us. After working through the discomfort, a sense of warmth and silent understanding were lying in between the lines and that’s where I let out a heavy breath that I have been holding. 

One detail (amongst many others) portrayed so precisely in this book is this..thing that Chinese elders dislike being on the receiving end of gratitude. A lot of them seem to think words and gestures of “thank you” or “I appreciate you” or “I love you” are a sign of alienation and distance. You don’t need to thank someone if you are family. It’s almost like an insult. You don’t express your feelings, sometimes, it’s a sea of silences that lies between our families and us. I have experienced this first hand growing up and I still feel conflicted about this. Reading it in Charles Yu’s words had made me feel…less lonely in this fact.  

Thank you my friend Lauren, who introduced me to this book and inspired the idea of a friends’ book club. Thank you Tevin and Josh for being part of our little unofficially Asian American culture-focused book club. Reading this book as a shared experience with some of my closest friends during a pandemic was quite rewarding and I am grateful for it. 

Some choice quotes: 

…because the idea was you came here, 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, supposed, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country. 

This is a key point in the story.

The next word, and whatever you say after that, will determine a great many things about it, will either open up the story, like a key in a lock in a door to a palace with however many rooms, too many to count, and hallways and stairways and false walls and secret passages, or the next word could be a wall itself, two walls, closing in, it could be limits on where the story could go.

The error in your reasoning is built right into the premise - using the Black experience as the model for the Asian immigrant is necessarily going to lead to this. It’s based on an analogy, on a comparison, on something quantitative. But the experience of Asians in America isn’t just a scaled-back or dialed-down version of the Black experience. Instead of co-opting someone else’s experience or consciousness, he must define his own.

Kung Fu Guy is just another form of Generic Asian Man.