8/16/2023 0 Comments Charles yu talks about interior![]() ![]() ![]() Though the titular Chinatown is that of Oakland, California-I’m guessing based on the streets mentioned-we could be in arguably any Chinatown in the country. The Golden Palace restaurant-around which much of the novel’s first half takes place-was “formerly Jade Palace, formerly Palace of Good Fortune,” he writes. ![]() Willis’s mother once was a Pretty Oriental Flower and a Restaurant Hostess, his father a Kung Fu Master and an Egg Roll Cook. Willis embodies the ambient anxiety of lacking an explicit identity-Asian Americans take up what Cathy Park Hong calls “apologetic space”-which Yu gestures toward humorously in these ironic naming choices. His characters are walking assemblages of clichés who speak broken English, connote untrustworthiness, and frequently get killed off. In the meantime, he cycles through a blur of meaningless-and worse, perhaps, nameless-roles in a Special Victims Unit-esque cable cop show. The alpha and the omega of his existence, however, is to one day secure the elusive role of Kung Fu Guy-a goal that can be taken both at face value and as a metaphor for peak cultural and economic assimilation. Through most of the novel, he is referred to as Generic Asian Man. The story’s pensive, wry protagonist, Willis Wu, is an aspiring actor with a pitiable IMDb page: He’s only ever played the Disgraced Son, the Delivery Guy, the Striving Immigrant. Charles Yu’s funny and surreal new novel, Interior Chinatown, hijacks the leaden tropes of Hollywood and the bare form of screenwriting to excavate the inner life of an Asian American man struggling to repudiate the hard-baked boundaries of marginalization. ![]()
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