1/5/2024 0 Comments Charles yuI spoke to Yu over the phone last week about science fiction as its own stereotype, book sci-fi vs. But Interior Chinatown, even in its goofier fake-cop-show-screenplay mode, is ferocious in its determination to shrug off Asian cultural stereotypes, a struggle Yu delved into just as explicitly in a recent Time essay headlined “What It’s Like to Never Ever See Yourself on TV.” For those who fear that science fiction is now synonymous with dystopian doomsaying, his work is especially vital in this fraught Future-Indefinite moment, hilarious and even silly in a way that’s also sneakily profound. It’s heavy stuff, but delivered with a light, playful, endlessly inventive metafictional voice that Yu, a Los Angeles native born to Taiwanese parents, has spent the past decade honing on the page and onscreen. “Your kung fu is worthless here,” he is informed while struggling with parenthood he learns that in a bedtime story that starts with, “There once was a little girl who was …” it’s what you say next that matters, representing either limitless possibility or the absence of any other possibilities or meaningful roles altogether. Willis climbs that ladder, a comically humiliating spectrum of roles with Bruce Lee as the platonic ideal, but his success gravely affects his relationships with his parents, his cool older brother, and eventually his wife and daughter. Interior Chinatown mostly takes place in an apartment complex above a Chinese restaurant that doubles as the set for a gritty/sexy cop show called Black and White, named for the ethnicities of the two gritty/sexy leads and content to treat all the restaurant’s employees, who double as background actors or at best Very Special Guests, as interchangeable Asian American stereotypes. “You are not Kung Fu Guy.” Instead, Willis’s acting repertoire thus far includes Disgraced Son, Delivery Guy, Silent Henchman, Caught Between Two Worlds, Striving Immigrant, and Guy Who Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face. “Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy,” the novel begins. The role Willis is hoping to transcend, specifically, is that of Generic Asian Man. Nor does Willis Wu, aspiring actor and protagonist of Yu’s fourth book, this week’s Interior Chinatown. But despite his love for science fiction in all of its forms (his first book was the 2006 short-story collection Third Class Superhero), he doesn’t want to get stuck in any one role or mode or, uh, tense. Charles Yu is a visionary novelist, adventurous TV writer (from Westworld to Legion to Lodge 49), and unofficial time-travel expert: His first acclaimed novel, 2010’s flamboyant and tender How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, starred a flustered repairman in a TM-31 Recreational Time Travel Device whose Tense Operator was usually stuck in Present-Indefinite.
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