Review: INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu

Highly recommended and worthy of the 2020 National Book Award.

I’ve had my eye on the novelist Charles Yu ever since he was poached to write episodes for season one of HBO’s Westworld. Not only did he successfully crossover into screenwriting and contribute to one of the best series on television, he then crossed back to write INTERIOR CHINATOWN. The novel’s 2020 launch is perfectly timed to contribute to discussions on race in America. Its prose is formatted as a satiric movie script in which all of the protagonist’s family and friends are forced to play stereotypes like Old Asian Man and Inscrutable Grocery Owner in a Soiled T-shirt. There is even a running detective show that cuts into the main script called “Black and White”. Asians only play bit parts in the exotic and seedy Chinatown set while the show’s Black and White star detectives get all the lines. Chinese Americans have contributed to this country for more than 200 years, Yu reminds us through his characters, and yet they are made to feel foreign and don’t have a voice in America’s binary paradigm of race.

Within the script, there is the protagonist—who longs to play the role of Kung Fu Guy. There are his aging immigrant parents, who start as bit roles but each have a rich but tragic past and a difficult struggle to assimilate and survive. Only when our protagonist fully understands their struggles can he understand why his future needs to be more than filling a predefined role.