Being More Than Yourself

Review of Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (USA: Pantheon Books, 2020)
By Felicia Chan

A seasoned writer, Charles Yu is no stranger to using and subverting the conventions of different literary genres. His acclaimed debut novel How to Live in a Science Fictional Universe tackled, through the use of science-fiction tropes, the themes of family and tradition. Yu also worked as an editor and writer for TV shows such as Westworld. Yu’s latest work Interior Chinatown is the culmination of his screenwriting experiences, which include navigating the film industry as someone from a racial minority. Taking us “behind the scenes,” Yu examines the marginalization of Asian-Americans on the silver screen, how they are constantly presented as blurry extras within America’s cultural landscape.

Formatted to resemble a screenplay—with the use of Courier font, wide margins, and centered character names—Yu’s novel traces the attempts of its protagonist Willis Wu, a struggling actor, to transcend his bit role as “Generic Asian Man” on the procedural cop show Black and White. Divided into seven acts, Interior Chinatown tracks the highs and lows of Willis’s career, starting from the moment he is elevated to “Special Guest Star” and is given the chance to act alongside Miles Turner and Sarah Green, the Black and White leads. By presenting the cop show as a-script-within-a-script, Yu illustrates the very real impact of fictional narratives on society, how they blur the border between performance and reality, and even influence one’s most intimate relationships.

The novel opens in the second person—“Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. You are not Kung Fu Guy.”—and so not only does it immediately elicit the reader’s sympathy for Willis, but it also implicates the reader in his misidentification. Despite his powerlessness, or perhaps because of it, Willis nurses an almost obsessive desire to achieve fame. In his desperation, he is willing to be typecast in a show because there are few alternatives for an Asian-American actor. Willis’s resume, a reflection of the blatant discrimination, is both funny and painful to read. It alternates wittily between the ridiculously specific (“Guy Who Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face”) and the blandly generic (“Striving Immigrant”).

The role of “Generic Asian Man” becomes a recurring motif, as Willis finds himself sidelined both on television and in his daily life as the perpetual foreigner, unable to fit in despite his best efforts. Ironically, Willis’s willingness to perform these stereotypes alienates him from his parents, a problem that worsens when he starts his own family. Willis’s struggle to integrate into a society determined to classify him as the “other” drives much of the plot of Interior Chinatown.

One strength of the novel is how Yu fleshes out the world of Interior Chinatown and humanizes its characters by emphasizing the unique individuality of every resident. Unlike the one-dimensional supporting roles in Black and White (“Lowlife Oriental,” “Disgraced Son”), the residents of the apartment building above the Golden Lotus defy easy categorization. Willis speaks for his author when he introduces residents as “The Generic Asian Men, except up here they’ve got names: The usual suspects. Chen, Lin, Ling [...] Lam, Yip, Sam.” By painstakingly listing each name, Willis returns individuality to the people who otherwise exist only as unnamed extras.

The novel is also very interested in the mutability of identity. During filming, Willis’s actor-friend Fatty Choy, changes roles easily: “One moment he’s your boy from the SRO, the next...a Lowlife Oriental.” The observation gives voice to the non-Asian’s uneasiness with apparent Asian interchangeability, but the same supposed trait, as the novel shows, is exploited by film directors and producers to lower costs and sideline Asian actors.

Marginalized by his industry, Willis has only himself to count on to make an impact. He finally steps up when he becomes indignant on behalf of his father. At one point during filming, Willis breaks the fourth wall by literally and figuratively stepping into the spotlight:

Using the physical margin of the book, Yu creates a powerful movement by having Willis visually break away from it and come symbolically “into focus” as an actor. The reader, having been drawn into Willis’s internal monologue by the use of the second-person pronoun, experiences the same cathartic relief.

Though Interior Chinatown is primarily focused on the prejudice faced by Asian-Americans, it makes clear that the struggle to reconcile one’s public and private personas is a universal one. Black and white actors, whom Willis envied, are trapped in the stereotypes associated with their roles. When Willis engages in a heated argument with Turner, his black co-lead on Black and White, Turner rebuts with a point of his own about the limitations that are forced onto him by his deceptively respectable role:

Like Willis, Turner is not seen as an individual, but a “category.” Yu draws attention to the extensive effects of racism by offering a parallel to the invisibility of Asian-Americans in media. Furthermore, the screenplay format frames Turner’s dialogue as part of the script of Black and White, blurring the boundary between performance and reality. In depicting Turner as sympathetic, if narrow-minded, Yu places Willis’s plight within the larger issue of systemic discrimination, slyly putting the xenophobic comment—“go back to China”—in the mouth of one who also faces racism.

Another foil to Willis is Karen, an Asian actress. If Willie suffers from fixity from typecasting, Karen represents fluidity and, with it, potential for change. When Karen is first introduced, she laments her function as "Ethnically Ambiguous Woman Number One." However, as she is constantly recontextualized in different roles, she begins to transcend the confines of her script, in sharp contrast to Willis’s rigidity. This difference between them can be seen when they begin a romantic relationship:

Though this part of the narrative begins in traditional prose format, it switches back to the screenplay format when Willis feels drawn to Karen and is thus vulnerable. In the screenplay, Willis insists on othering himself as “Special Guest Star” but Karen retains her own name. Here, Willis could be trying to defend himself from hurt. After all, one cannot be rejected if one has never belonged. Moments such as this not only show up Willis’s human vulnerability but also serve as authorial commentary on social exclusion.

So how, then, does one achieve self-identity? The last acts of Interior Chinatown seem to advocate for the destruction of the familiar, which impedes one’s ability to progress beyond one’s assigned roles. This can be deduced from the narrative flashbacks to when Willis’s parents first met:

Willis’s parents name themselves (“Dorothy” and “Ming-Chen Wu”) as an act of rebellion against the generic personas that they have been assigned. Having remained nameless for most of Interior Chinatown, they name themselves also to take control over their own narratives. They take center stage in their own stories.

At the novel’s conclusion, after a climactic courtroom scene where Willis decries racism and its effects on Asian-Americans, Yu cuts to Willis’s death in Black and White, a seemingly disheartening return to status quo. Yet it is not so, as can be seen from Willis’s conversation with his daughter about his career:

The parallel between this moment and an earlier memory Willis had of his mother (“When she was dead, she got to be your mother”) is no coincidence. Prior to this, Willis was estranged from his daughter, their relationship sacrificed for the advancement of his acting career. By changing his priorities, Willis regains agency from his assigned social script. He finally grows beyond the claustrophobic role of “Kung Fu Guy,” choosing a more comfortable identity as “just dad.” The fact that the title “dad” is uncapitalized signals that it is not a role like the others he adopted in his acting career. Willis is allowed to be truly himself.

Although at times the novel can get confusing as Yu pushes Chinatown’s function as both setting and symbol to its figurative limit, I find the indefinable nature of Chinatown an apt anomaly, one that reflects the ever-evolving discussion of minority representation in the media. The book offers no easy solutions to dissolving longstanding social issues, but it does communicate Yu’s hopes for a less divided future. With reference to the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, Yu himself has observed that “It seems like there's an openness, both commercially and just in terms of mindset, to the possibility of more Asian-American stories.” Ultimately, Interior Chinatown speaks to a familiar desire to find a sense of belonging within a larger narrative, a desire that many people, Asian or not, can certainly identify with, in the hope of achieving it some day.


Felicia Chan is currently an English Literature undergraduate at Nanyang Technological University. Her interests lie in mythology and folklore, and when not lost in books, can be found learning art.