A lot of it has to do with the lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. As our narrator laments: “Black and White always look good. They’re smart, accomplished, and really good-looking. Black and White stars a Black male cop named Miles Turner and a White female cop named Sarah Green. Black and White is a buddy cop show set in a Chinatown restaurant called the Golden Palace. Interior Chinatown’s protagonist, Willis Wu, works on a television show aptly called Black and White. In this case, the central allegory, the central symbol, is the archetypal and Platonic idea that all the world is a stage. And Yu does allegory as well as anybody, taking an outrageous concept and using it to communicate the dire mundanity and the resonant emotional struggles of the human experience. It’s all of those things, but maybe mostly, it’s allegory. It’s an identity story couched in a kind of a fantasy setting, a kind of a George Saundersesque alternate reality. It’s satire in its political and social commentary.
It’s family drama in the centrality of family relationships. It’s not easy to define what kind of novel Interior Chinatown is. In the process, he reflects on the nature of being Asian American in a black-and-white America. Our protagonist, Willis Wu, strives to land the biggest starring role of an Asian-American man can land: Kung Fu Guy. Roles that will deliver them happiness, move them up the social ladder, and bring them to the doorstep of assimilation. Actors try to land increasingly better roles, bigger roles, within these limits. Every actor has only a few roles that are available to them based on the demographic limits of their race, gender, and age. In Interior Chinatown, the conceit is a world where literally everyone is an actor and the world itself is an omnipresent television production studio (the entire novel is written in the form of a screenplay). That novel is a father/son story couched in a sci-fi premise. A time machine repairman kills his future self in an effort to undo this act, the repairman goes back in time, and in doing so, reflects on his relationship with his father.
#Charles yu talks about how to
In his first novel, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, the conceit is a world where literally everyone is a time traveler. CHARLES YU SPECIALIZES in ferreting out that peculiar angle, that spark of the unexpected, that re-illumination of an otherwise age-old narrative, and then taking that fantastical story element and spreading it horizontally until it coats the entirety of his writing’s universe.
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