Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu
2020
Rating: 6

Interior Chinatown is an example of how a smart premise can almost by itself carry a novel. The premise in question is that the protagonist, Willis, is so invested in his dream of becoming Kung Fu Man in a TV series that is filmed in Chinatown, Black and White, which by extension entails embracing Hollywood’s de-humanizing stereotypes of Asians, that the line for him between the show and his life collapse.

Yu’s prose is not particularly visual, but the book’s tone and wit more than compensate for mostly unremarkable language.

It did feel like the book was missing something. Weight, perhaps. It’s a very breezy book, which is not to say that it’s all fun and games until someone gets kicked in the face, but at times the book had a dashed-off or even quasi-cartoonish quality to it. It was almost like the book wanted you to read it quickly.

Toward the end there is a trial, as with The Sellout, but I think the trial worked better for The Sellout, which was, like Interior Chinatown, set in Los Angeles.

This was not a major issue for me, but I wasn’t sure that positioning Asian-Americans a step below “Black and White” Americans made that much sense. One of the show’s two main characters is a white woman, and the other, her detective partner, is a black man. The book posits a kind of parity between white and black people (actors, in this case) that most certainly does not reflect reality.

It’s a criticism that Yu anticipates and writes into the story at various points, but it’s not clear to me that the way he anticipates or responds to that critique resolves it in a meaningful way.

Minor gripes aside, I did enjoy reading it and would recommend it.