A review by lk222
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

5.0

This book literally gave me chills. It was so. dang. amazing. This dark (often tragic) comedy is largely written as a script, following Willis Wu through Chinatown as he, his family, and his peers struggle against the roles they’ve been assigned in life and in the cop show Black and White, which films in the Golden Palace restaurant. In life and on screen, Willis endeavors to be more than Generic Asian Man, aka Background Oriental Male, Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face, and endless other marginal roles that trap him in the fringes. In a similar fashion to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Chicago, and Kurt Vonnegut, Yu blends the two sides of Willis’s experience together. Willis as Generic Asian Man in life bleeds into Willis as Generic Asian Man on screen, a bleed that that at times completely obscures which Willis we’re following. Once you let go of maintaining the threads of the real vs the scripted, you’ll find yourself falling down a rabbit hole that is profound in its surrealism. This liminal realm between the bleeds allows the plot to take fantastical turns, including reliving your parents’ romance on a spotlit stage and exploring a child’s castle in the sky of Phoebe Land. But it was the final courtroom drama that Willis finds himself in--which climaxes in its own incredible surrealist/antiracist fantasy--that really drives the story home. Willis and the defendant razzle dazzle the judge and jury with devastating facts from the US’s anti-asian history, begging the questions “Who gets to be American? What does an American look like?” Positing that the crux of Willis’s problem is “two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners” in America.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Winner of the 2020 National Book Award.