Interior Chinatown
✒️ Author: Charles Yu |. 📖 Published: 2020 | 🗓 Read: May 26, 2020 | 📄 Pages: 288
Summary
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here too. . . but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the highest aspiration he can imagine for a Chinatown denizen. Or is it?
Why You Should Read It
Written like a movie script, Interior Chinatown walks the tightrope between a novel and poetry with a sprinkle of humor. It’s now a finalist for the National Book Award.
Notable Highlights
The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is.
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But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by.
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The daily mail bringing with it fresh dread or relief, but if the latter, only the most temporary kind, restarting the clock on the countdown to the next bill or past-due notice or collection agency call.
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But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty.
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Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.
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There’s just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it’s just easier to keep it how we have it.
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You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.
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As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible.
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by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.
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There we go. The two words: Asian Guy. Even now, as Special Guest Star, even here, in your own neighborhood. Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here.
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Behind many masks and many characters, each performer tends to wear a single look, a naked unsocialized look, a look of concentration, a look of one who is privately engaged in a difficult, treacherous task.
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Not a love story, he says. Not our story. Just us together. More than enough.
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There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.
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She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone.
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