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.