In Charles Yu’s new novel “Interior Chinatown,” the author juxtaposes the struggles and off-screen life of actor Willis Wu, his family and his community with the marginalization of Asian and Asian-American characters on television. Published in January by Pantheon, the book intertwines its narrative with a fictional “Law & Order”-type procedural television show called “Black and White.”
Television, says Yu, can be “can be very reductive, both at the casting phase and at the writing phase” in how it deals with race, gender and sexuality.
“It tends to reflect a somewhat distorted and oversimplified view of race relations, of racial groups and of how people actually live their lives,” he says. “There tends to be this exoticization or flattening of whole groups. It doesn’t just apply ethnically, but in terms of gender and sexuality.”
He adds, “Anything that’s too complex tends to get squished into something that’s much more digestible.”
In the novel, for instance, there’s a rule for Asian TV guest stars and background actors: If your character gets killed, you can’t appear on the same show for a period of 45 days, which is “just long enough for everyone to forget you existed.”
It’s not a real rule of TV, says Yu. “Not that I know of,” he adds with a laugh. “It seemed like it could be.”
Faced with limited choices as an actor and as a person in the novel, Wu begins the book in the role of “Background Oriental Male” but he aims to one day become “Kung Fu Guy,” what he sees as a more revered, higher-level type of character.
“It’s almost the ultimate example of how marginalized Willis and people like these generic Asian characters were in the story because they’re not really characters in the story,” Yu explains of the types of characters who have often shown up on TV. “They’re essentially props or background or instruments for the storyteller to use and so you don’t have a real story about them.”
To demonstrate this, the story unfolds in a format resembling a script, one that includes references to Los Angeles’ own Chinatown, itself a popular filming location, and well-known spots like Phoenix Bakery.
“I wanted it to be an actual physical place where things have been filmed for decades,” says Yu, who also had another idea in mind as well. “The idea of Chinatown in the American imagination as a place where you go to see the other.”
Yu, the Irvine-based author who previously wrote “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” spent years working on what would become “Interior Chinatown.” Yu’s own parents immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan and the author grew up in Southern California, and he wanted to write about the immigrant experience but struggled.
“I couldn’t find a framework of how to write about that,” he says.
“I found myself writing, basically, realist descriptions of it. It felt naturalistic and it felt like what I was hoping was an important story or a meaningful story to tell,” says Yu. “I just couldn’t get it to get any traction emotionally. “
Then Yu started writing for television, and that milieu helped him get inside the story he wanted to write. TV, it turned out, became the solution to “Interior Chinatown.”
“I think that having spent so many months in the writers’ room for first ‘Westworld’ and then a series of other shows that I’ve worked on, I started becoming much more familiar with the language and the tropes and the craft of TV writing,” he says.
Plus, the procedural show format that frames “Interior Chinatown” will ring familiar with readers.
“I feel like most readers have seen ‘Law and Order’ or some show like it,” he says. “It’s almost a form for our times that people understand.”
Yu takes readers through the investigation and the courtroom in an exploration of media stereotypes, as well as the U.S. laws throughout history that have been directed towards Asians and Asian-Americans.
“The law is, ultimately, the thing that both was used as the tool to exclude Chinese and Asians and people from almost any country that the government wanted to exclude immigrants from,” he says. “Even beyond that, in terms of restrictive covenants and housing discrimination, until very recently, it was the tool.”
Using these settings does more than just provide readers with a pop culture point-of-reference. They become powerful tools for Yu to explore the question, “What does it mean to become an American?”
He says that this question, ultimately, “has to involve the law.”
Despite its problems with representation, Yu says television has been changing.
“There’s this explosion of people on-screen with different points of view and ethnic backgrounds and sexual orientations, other backgrounds, being able to tell their stories on TV,” he says. “I’m glad to be writing the book at a time where…there are still plenty of shows that are trying to change the way things are.”
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March 21, 2020 at 03:02AM
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Charles Yu’s ‘Interior Chinatown’ busts TV stereotypes to explore Asian immigration and representation - OCRegister
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