A review by flying_monkey
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

challenging emotional funny informative reflective sad medium-paced

• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

After only 3 or 4 books, Charles Yu has already developed a certain style. His tales tend to be quite simple stories of love and family when all the frills are cut away, and set in very contained settings, pocket universes either literally of figuratively. In this one, he's expanding on his personal personal very much to the political: this is a story about being Asian in America (any kind of Asian - doesn't matter because they all look the same, right?). But rather like How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, the American in which the protagonist lives seems strangely small and circumsribed by almost game-like rules. 

Here it is Interior Chinatown, the state to which every Asian who has failed achieve the American dream is reduced, where despite their hard work, their super-high GPAs, their multiple languages and interests, they are forced to play generic Asian background parts in a stereotyped police procedural, 'Black and White', the names reflecting not only those of the real stars, but also the identities which an Asian can never achieve. Our hero, the book's hero, Willis Wu, is never the hero of 'Black and White', he is almost always Generic Asian Man, or perhaps, if he is lucky, Recurring Asian Character, or Special Guest Star, in which roles he might last more than one episode before being killed, tragically, again... and again. But Willis wants more, he wants to be Kung-Fu Guy, the utlimate Asian role, like his Dad, who although he is just Old Asian Man now, was once Kung-Fu Guy and even Sifu, the wise Asian teacher. Surely there can't be any more than this for an Asian in America? 

Interior Chinatown is very, very clever. It plays this all straight but also manages to tell the 'backstories', something of the real struggles of real Asian people in America, both individually and collectively. Chunks of real history arrive unepectedly, juxtaposed with scripts in progress from Black and White. Erving Goffman's famous research on the performance of everyday life is quoted. Even when Willis starts to achieve a measure of happiness it somehow seems even less real, however emotionally rich the experience might appear to be. If there are weaknesses, they are the same sort of weaknesses that How To Live Safely... had, which is that the emotionality can seem at once overdone and rather flat and facile. But this is still a throught-provoking, powerful, very sarcastic book that will stay with you after you've finished.