![]() ![]() Maybe I wouldn’t want any more of that than I actually have. Even just momentarily, when you can have a real honest moment with someone. I love the moments in everyday life when it feels like we do slip out of those roles. It seems other people are always playing the roles, too. ![]() Not only am I playing a role that feels sort of internally imposed by myself, but externally imposed by other people. ![]() Feeling kind of trapped in the matrix of it. When you say “encased”, I think that’s a good word for it. This book is obviously me doing some thinking and writing, and asking some questions about these roles. And all of a sudden, it felt like I was inside and I could write about it all through Willis, through his experiences.ĭo you ever crave an escape from context, from pop culture, from the identity that culture encases us in? Or am I showing my serious white-male privilege? But when that line came out, it carried with it the character. And I think in some ways, they have as well – themselves as Americans, the lives they’d spent here as Americans and whether or not they’ve ever fully felt like real Americans. It was probably also no coincidence that the book crystallised in 2017, after the election when I started to see things very differently. And I really wanted to tell the story of what it was like for them as Americans, this kind of three-act structure, in which, near the end of their lives, things have really changed. My dad has been in America more than 50 years now, so two-thirds of his life has been spent here. And the story of my parents’ generation, coming from Taiwan. I’d been trying to write a story about being an immigrant, being a child of immigrants. I had written this novel, or at least big chunks of it, twice and had effectively thrown most of it away twice. I had been trying to write this book for years – four to five years. I have to write a whole book of this.ĭo you then reverse engineer the decisions of the plot to get over those roadblocks? You want to make a political/sociological statement and so you throw these particular rocks at your character. There were plenty of roadblocks along the way. That feels like a ball that’s sitting at the top of a hill. I’m not Kung Fu Guy and I was like, there’s a story there. And then all at once the first line came to me: “Ever since you were a kid you wanted to be Kung Fu Guy”. How these things usually go for me is, it seems like I’m going nowhere, I’m stuck in a cycle. The premise of Interior Chinatown a story about Generic Asian Man, is primarily a social observation. We spoke to the Taiwanese-American novelist, Writers Guild-nominated TV writer, father, husband and dogwalker about the everyday bits of life that give flight to his fantasies, his fiction and his sense of himself. In a way, as the world has become more and more disorientating, bizarre and seemingly otherworldly (dead seas, space tourism, apocalypse… eventually), Mr Yu’s fiction has counter-steered towards a more recognisable, everyday plane. In Interior Chinatown, identity becomes the main material of the novel – a novel that, for all of its layers of metaphor and wonder, is set in the familiar here and now of present-day Los Angeles (in as far as anything is real and present in Los Angeles). Even though his protagonist is not named Charles Yu, as he was in How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, Willis Wu is interested in many of the same things that dog Mr Yu. Early on in the book there is an incredible riff on the strata of Asian-American men in cinema, from Chinese Restaurant Waiter (of whom there are many), all the way up to Kung Fu Guy (of whom there are three – Messrs Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Bruce Lee). In Mr Yu’s latest novel, Interior Chinatown, Willis Wu is an actor who inhabits the role of Generic Asian Man, the only role society has allowed him. In this mode, you may begin to adopt Mr Yu’s almost post-modernist point of view, take on his pattern of observation of life, of yourself observing life. You may obsess over the same behaviours around which he likes to tarry, to consider, to turn inside out and study from various angles – until he catches a reflection of himself studying it and then begins to study himself studying it. ![]() When you are reading one of them, whether it’s Third Class Superhero (which prompted the National Book Foundation to name him one of its “5 Under 35” to watch), How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe or his collection of short stories, Sorry Please Thank You, you may start to notice the same snags in reality that catch Mr Yu. Reading Mr Charles Yu’s books does something to you, to the location where “you” sit within your own brain. ![]()
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