12. Interior Chinatown

By Charles Yu

I'd only heard of Interior Chinatown vis-à-vis the recently released TV series starring Jimmy Yang and Donny Chieng (with a fair amount of Asian Americans as major creatives).  I was spurred to seek out the book when my friends John and Christine had started watching the show, and promptly borrowed a hardbound copy from my neighbourhood library.

 

Within the first twenty pages, Interior Chinatown was already a let-down. I was able to finish it within 3 days, mostly due to a lot of page-skimming, and how the bulk of the book was written like a screenplay.  The central theme of internalized racism in Chinese American men was explored in such a simplistic, repetitive, and heavy-handed way.  Interior Chinatown could’ve been more relevant had it been published twenty, even ten, years ago, but in 2020, it seemed dated somehow.

 

Perhaps the book had the bad timing of being released on January 28, 2020, just before the Covid pandemic fueled anti-Asian racism.  Many people, Asians and non-Asians alike, experienced a crash course on institutional racism, white supremacy and identity politics.  But even if COVID had never existed, Interior Chinatown was still painfully cringey in its portrayal of internalized racism through the POV of a struggling young Taiwanese-American man. 

 

Willis Wu dreams of being the star of his own show.  The show, known as Black and White, is fictitious, but it’s also the world that Willis inhabits, which is a construct, just as Chinatown is considered a western construct 

because its spatial and cultural boundaries were largely defined by the dominant Western society, which isolated and exoticized Chinese immigrants and their communities. These enclaves functioned as "other" zones, concentrating negative stereotypes about Chinese people into a single, contained, "Oriental" space. While originating as a reaction to racial exclusion, Chinatowns have been transformed into sites of commodified culture and tourism, and their meaning continues to be debated by diasporic and neoliberal forces. 

The television show format is also a metaphor of what the American Dream means for Chinese immigrants, especially the First Generation descendants, who don’t fit into mainstream society, ie. black and white.  Willis longs to be Kung Fu Guy, but due to external and internal forces, is always relegated to Generic Asian Man, or Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face, or Guy Wo Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face.  As an Asian man, Willis is invisible in the world of black and white. 

 

The problem with Willis is that being Kung Fu Guy is his only M.O.  He has no other interests, other than comparing himself to others.  Unlike Willis, the mother and father are given a bit of backstory, which is well-written in prose, but you wish for more, as the prose is the only opportunity to imbue some depth into the thinly drawn characters.  We know Willis' dad loves to karaoke to John Denver, but what does Willis love?  Eventually, Willis meets a Pretty Girl of mixed Asian-ancestry and he becomes Asian Dad.  But he’s still obsessed with being Kung Fu Guy, his unconscious desire to assimilate into white dominant society.  Yu attempts to consider the POV of others, but barely.  Willis is not just obsessed with being Kung Fu Guy, he’s obsessed with how the system is rigged against him.  By the end of the story, he learns a painful lesson.  But the reader has to suffer through Willis’ narrow, colonized mindset, which gets tiresome real fast.

 

I’m sympathetic to the plight of the Asian American man.  I know there are many who are like Willis Wu.  But I’m not sympathetic to whiny self-involved, narcissistic behaviour. During the COVID pandemic, I was on a FB group that offered a platform to talk about Anti-Asian racism in Montreal. I ended up discussing with other women about their experiences being exoticized or harassed as an Asian woman.  A Chinese guy went on, saying how this is nothing compared to what Asian men have to go through, how they have it much worse, how he’d get beat up, bullied, etc.  Basically, being resentful and minimizing our experiences.  Thankfully, quite a few women did not let him off easy and gave him a piece of their mind.

 

I just don’t see how Interior Chinatown would help this guy, or if he’d even bother reading a book like this.  Taking a look at the first few pages of Goodreads reviews, the readers were primarily made up of white men and women, and East Asian women, but I couldn’t find a single review from an Asian male.  If Yu wanted Asian-American men to be his target audience, he failed.  Maybe Asian men don’t read these kinds of books, probably preferring to escape into well-written fiction!

 

I think if you were quite ignorant of American history and the current socio-economic realities of minorities, it would be eye-opening, but Yu kept repeating his central theme over and over.  So much so that there was very little substance in the narrative or in the character of Willis Wu, who merely served as a Cipher for the author to ram home his points.  Worst of all, Yu committed the greatest crime of all by shoehorning didactic expository monologue literally spelling out its central themes (in case you hadn’t caught on to what the book was about from page one), as well as a quick history lesson, into the bogus court room scene towards the end of the book!

 

Here's an example.  When the judge asked Willis what he had to say for himself, Willis finally spoke up in a monologue that reminded me of America Ferrara’s painfully didactic speech from the Barbie movie:

 

It sucks being Generic Asian Man. But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance beings. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category… By putting ourselves below everyone, we’re building a defense mechanism. Protecting against real engagement. By imagining that no one wants us, that all others are so different from us, we’re privileging our own point of view.

 

Yikes. Ugh. I'm sorry, but this was Just. So. Bad.  There was also another passage that struck me:

 

But how often do you, or you, or any of us think the thought, I’m an Asian man? Almost never. Not until someone reminds you. Some guy bumps you at a bar, and makes a comment. Or you overhear some people talking, and one of them says, oh, our Asian friend so-and-so. And in that moment, we all become the same again All of us collapse into one, Generic Asian Man.

 

This insight is objectively true – anyone who’s a “visible minority” would not normally self-identify as “I’m Korean”, or “I’m Columbian” while going about our day-to-day lives.  Like anyone else, we see ourselves as individuals, ie. “I’m Stephanie.”  It's the structured racism that always reminds us of our place in "Western" society.  

 

However, this is not the case for Willis Wu, who's always obsessing about his own race!  For the past 200 pages, he has been constantly reminding the reader how he’s Background Oriental Male or Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter.  He never sees himself as Willis.  Even people with internalized racism don’t think like this.  You can't sympathize with Willis because he's never portrayed as an individual at all, he's simply a Cipher for All Asian American Men.  And he was annoying as f***.  

 

I was really surprised Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award.  I suppose this makes sense in the context of mostly white foundation members who may not read a lot of Asian American literature… but, that can’t be, as there has been decades worth of excellent Asian American literature exploring the immigrant experience with real depth and nuance that is sorely lacking in Interior Chinatown.

 

I still plan on watching the TV series though, as adaptations can sometimes do something more, or different, with the source material.

 

This Goodreads review summed up my feelings about the racial politics of Interior Chinatown really well:

 

Cringey and anti-Black. I'm so disappointed.

First of all, placing an asian sadboy (lmao) into a "White and Black" cop show is soooo "bbbut what about Asians??" whiny. The narrative that "yellow people are forgotten in a white-and-black-world" idea is so problematic. To complain that Black people get to be represented in the media more, when in reality they are stereotyped and relegated to minor roles even when they are represented, is dismissive, self-centering Asians at the expense of other minorities, and completely ignores our own active role in racism and violence against Black people in America. We, as Asian people, are and have always been anti-Black as fuck, and now we're complaining that Black people are more visible than us?

 

This book gives me very "pick me" vibes (along with a lot of recent Asian American literature, to be honest) and its popularity makes me extremely worried about the future of Asian American racial politics and our continued obsession with "existing" in America while putting down other minorities and doing nothing to acknowledge or remedy our own anti-Blackness.

Secondly, stop romanticizing Chinatown. It's a real place with real lower and working-class Chinese immigrants. In real life, post 1965 Hart-Cellar Act educated Taiwanese immigrants like Wu's family would have CHOSEN not to live there because they have the capital to live in wealthier neighborhoods with better schools. They aren't forced to live there because of racism. This is dangerously rewriting history in a way that lumps together the educated Asians of today (like the author himself who went to UC Berkeley and Columbia Law School) who are not invisible and are doing quite well in society, with the true lower and working-class Asian immigrant diaspora.

Also the switching between screenplay and prose was weird.

11. Are You Willing to Die For the Cause?

By Chris Oliveros

Got the signed English version (149/200) of Mourir pour la cause for Olman as a Xmas present.

 

I had assumed that it would be a graphic non-fiction account of the FLQ leading up to the October Crisis in 1970.  Instead, it illustrated the chaotic origins of the FLQ founded by Georges Schoeters, reconstructing the three main incarnations (and waves of terrorism) during the 60’s, up until the imprisonment of Pierre Vallières in 1968.  There was an epilogue illustrating a police raid in early 1970 of a secluded FLQ hideout in Prevost where they found a post-dated ransom letter of a planned kidnapping of US Consul Harrison W. Burgess.

 

It was a relief to see that Book 2 is in the works, which will go into the events leading up to the October Crisis, which is primarily what the public associates with the FLQ, including yours truly.  I was somewhat disappointed that I’d have to wait for at least another year for Book 2, but nevertheless, learning about the early beginnings of the FLQ was fascinating.  I suspect many people, Quebecers included, have little knowledge about the FLQ's early days.  First, it was composed of a fairly disorganized, motley group of disaffected young men.  Second, it was led by a Belgian immigrant, Georges Schoeters, who proved to be a bit of a coward after being arrested.  This is the kind of stuff that patriotic Quebec historians would probably rather sweep under the rug.

 

Author and illustrator Chris Oliveros took pains in making the meticulously researched account as objective as possible.  As Toula Drimonis wrote in the back blurb, “Oliveros reveals fascinating details of a group that, depending on which side you find yourself on politically, was either a ragtag team of terrorists or well-intentioned freedom fighters.”

 

Although I finished the main part of the book around the time I started reading The Decagon House Murders, the footnotes were really dense and interesting.  I wish I had discovered them while I was reading through the illustrated section, but this wasn’t a bad way to go about it either, as the flow wasn’t broken by the constant referencing.

 

It also wasn’t until I finished the book did I realize that author Chris Oliveros was the founder of Drawn & Quarterly and its publisher until 2015, when he stepped down to start writing this book!  So it took him about eight years to work on the project.  I just hope that it doesn’t take him another 8 years to release Book 2!  I’m assuming a lot of the research has already been done and he just needs to put it all together.  Some info I found interesting:

 

·       The footnotes really outline how much research Oliveros had devoted.  He even scoured obscure reference sources that didn’t age well, such as Terror in Quebec by prison psychiatrist Gustave Morf.  Despite its abundance of sweeping generalities (it’s clear he saw the FLQ as lowlife degenerates), Morf seemed to be the only researcher given full access to several incarcerated GLQ members, including François Schirm (a Hungarian immigrant who was part of the third wave that focused on military training in the woods).

·       I think because Pierre Vallières had infamously written Nègres blancs d'Amérique, I always thought of him as a Mathieu-Bock Coté of his time, which was based on not really knowing much about him at all.  Vallières was more concerned about class struggle and how francophone Quebecers were treated as second class citizens.  By 1971, he had denounced the FLQ’s use of violence and sought independence for Quebec via nonviolent means by co-founding the Parti Québecois. Even though he was accused of being a sellout by his former cohorts, he also became disillusioned with the PQ and his later years he foucs on other forms of activism, including LGBTQ rights, First Nations self-governance, and aid to war-town Bosnia. 

·       The book was based his account on a fabricated “lost” CBC documentary from 1975 containing fictionalized interview transcripts from real people.  According to Oliveros, while this narrative device is fictional, the actual content hews very closely to the facts”.

 

 ·       About a year after starting work on the book, he discovered that there was a long-forgotten 1975 CBC documentary on the FLQ, a three-hour TV special called “the October Crisis”, that met “a similarly mysterious fate”!  It did air once, for a single evening in October 1976, and was never broadcast again.  Unlike Oliveros’ fictionalized doc, the real TV special focused on the October 1970 kidnappings, mostly skipping over prior events from the 1960s.

 

·       I find it mind-boggling how easy it was to steal cases of dynamite when the underground Metro was being built.  FLQ members were able to descend the ladders down what was to become Sherbrooke Station and make off with three crates of “EXPLOSIFS”!

10. On the Far Side of the Mountain

By Jean Craighead George

9. The Decagon House Murders

By Yukito Ayatsuji

I first heard about The Decagon House Murders, and the genre of Japanese honkaku, from Olman.  The premise (and cool book cover) seemed very appealing:  a group of university students who are part of a Mystery Fiction Club get dropped off by boat to spend a week on Tsunojima Island, once home to a famous yet eccentric and reclusive architect, Seiji Nakamura. He had built the Blue Mansion where he and his wife resided, as well as the Decagon House, a ten-sided annex building that was primarily designed for amusement. 

 

Several months previous, a multiple homicide occurred on the island, with the Blue Mansion completely destroyed by fire.  The bodies of Seiji Nakamura, his wife (missing a hand!), their housekeepers, and the gardener’s wife were identified, but the gardener had apparently disappeared without a trace.  The case remains unsolved by police.  The uncle of a member of the Mystery Fiction Club had recently bought Tsunojima Island, so this gave the other members an “in” to visit the site and investigate the mystery of those recent events. 

 

The seven students use the still standing Decagon House as their home base.  The idea of a group of characters staying in a ten-sided house on a tiny island is genius, providing a cool location in which to set a locked room mystery. An illustration of the interior early on in the book's pages shows how the layout is designed:  a decagon within a larger decagon.  There are ten rooms that comprise the outer decagon: 7 guest rooms with the remaining 3 rooms as the entrance hall, kitchen and bathroom.  The main hall takes up the inner decagon and in the middle of the decagonal hall is a decagonal table with ten chairs.  There are even ten-sided plates and cups!  Also included in the book is an illustrated map of Tsunojima Island showing the location of the Blue Mansion ruins and The Decagon House. 

 

I love the concept of a Decagon House, and there are a number of artistic envisionings of Nakamura's decagonal curiosity in mangas and various book covers (shown above and below).

 

And I really enjoyed reading the novel, though I wasn’t able to figure out who the murderer was until the end.  As with most mysteries, it was slow going at first, as characters got introduced and the set up was established.  The narrative alternated between the students trapped on the island and the few characters on the mainland, three of whom received a mysterious letter, apparently from the ghost of Seiji Nakamura. 

 

 

 

I haven’t read very many of the classic mysteries, including And Then There Were None, from which The Decagon House was heavily influenced by, having only read one Agatha Christie book, Murder On the Orient Express.  As I had already noted:

 

“I always thought that part of the fun of reading murder mysteries is to guess who the culprit is based on what the investigator discovers and observes, but I find this limiting as you can only deduce based on what the author chooses to reveal in the narrative.  Thus, the reader always has an unfair advantage, especially if you’re dealing with an implausible story.”

 

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

 

 

 

This same limited omniscience also applied to The Decagon House Murders.  The plot was not as implausible as Murder On the Orient Express, but it did involve love triangles, secret affairs, illegitimate children, and of course, multiple murders. The author was very careful to mask the murderer (for both the backstory AND the present timeline) for the reader until he was ready to spring the surprise. It was very nicely done.  In hindsight, all the clues were there, though doled out very strategically, and I think if one took the time to analyze all the characters and the carefully revealed info, it’s possible to deduce who the mastermind was.  I only took a few moments to think about who the murderer could be, and my best guess was it could’ve been the First Victim, Orczy (only one of two females, the other being Agatha).  Orczy had a motive as she was good friends with Chiori (later revealed to be Seiji’s daughter) and was devastated by her death. If she were to take revenge, Orczy would’ve feigned her death and be in cahoots with Poe, the medical student who confirmed her death to the others (plus the monologue at the beginning was male).  No one else really looked at her body, so it was easy to keep herself confined to her room, yet she can go out the window to commit her nefarious deed.  Of course, when Poe died, I knew I was wrong, because author Yukito Ayatsuji was very careful to set things up to have the reader rule out the actual suspect.

 

First, you never knew the real names of the Mystery Club members, as they went by their famous author nicknames from the very beginning.  When it was revealed that six bodies were found, you then realized that it could be either Van or Ellery, but then Ellery’s body was identified.  So who was Van (Dine)?  And then shortly after, it was revealed to be the armchair detective, Kyoichi Morisu, who had a secret romance with Chiori. Then it launched into his POV, ie. his motives, him making sure to tell certain people he had opted out of going to Tsunojima Island, and then took great pains to hide the fact that he had been traveling back and forth between the island and the mainland to make it seem that he was always at each respective location to whomever he was interacting with.  As Van, he had to convince the other club members, who were sharp and observant mystery fans, that he was sick with a fever so that he could retire early to rest in his room. 

 

The one factor that the novel hinged on was that, even though it had occurred to the students that it was necessary to search each other’s rooms, to see if they were hiding anything, this never happened for whatever reason I couldn’t remember.  But this should’ve been a priority, especially after two of their members had died by strangulation and poison!  It seemed a little hard to believe that no one looked inside Van’s room this entire time.  One of them even remarked how odd it was that he locked his door when he gone to bed early that first night!

 

The Decagon House Murders has recently been adapted for a 2024 Japanese mini-series, and has received some decent reviews.  I may have to check this out now that I’ve read the book.  Olman also has no plans of keeping the book, so I'm holding onto it for now!

 

Some interesting info:

The Decagon House Murders is the debut novel of Yukito Ayatsuji, and the first volume of the House Series. A draft of the novel was originally submitted to the twenty-ninth Ranpo Edogawa Prize in 1983 under the title Island of Remembrance, but ultimately fell short. It was later published by Kodansha Novels with its updated title in 1987.

Although Souji Shimada's 1981 debut with The Tokyo Zodiac Murders is oftentimes credited as the first true shinhonkaku detective novel, The Decagon House Murders is widely given credit for launching the boom in shinhonkaku-style novels that came to dominate the 1990s. Many of the trademarks of the movement can first be seen in this particular title, such as metatextual references to classical detective fiction, as well as subtle nods to more contemporaneous writers.