Interior Chinatown: Willis Wu and you

Weeks of confinement spawn the desire to roam free and unfettered, but what if the illusion of freedom only blinds us to our continued confinement? Charles Yu asks this question in his novel Interior Chinatown, a lively and entertaining romp through a mass-mediated world in which everyone is so busy acting roles that reality itself seems to have slipped off into the cheap seats to munch popcorn while taking in the performance.

You play the part of Willis Wu, a struggling actor who can't become the protagonist in his own life story until he marches up the ranks of bit-part roles from Generic Asian Man to Dying Asian Man to Special Guest Star to Recurring Ethnic to the coveted Kung Fu Guy--but is the climb worth the cost? As a child he'd revered the kung-fu stars he'd seen on television, actors like his father who seemed to defy gravity, "not inevitably bound by the rules of physics like regular mortals, rather by choice, returning to earth only if and when they feel like it and even then in their own manner."

Willis's father, also an actor, had reached that pinnacle earlier in his career but found himself trapped by dehumanizing scripts and stereotypes: "They ask him to put on silly hats. To cook chop suey, jump-kick vegetables into a thousand pieces. He hears a gong wherever he goes. He is told: You are a legend," but the problem with being a legend is that he is "no longer a person.... Just some mystical Eastern force, some Wizened Chinaman."

And what happens when he ages out of the Kung Fu Guy role? As the novel begins, Willis's father is relegated to bit parts like Old Asian Cook or Old Asian Guy Smoking, "a leading man trapped in the body of an extra. He looks tired. He is tired. He spent decades in this place, in the interior of Chinatown, taking the work he could get. Gangster, cook, inscrutable, mystical, nonsensical Oriental." 

An observant son might question the value of following his father's example, but young Willis is not the most observant character on the planet and has fallen prey to the lure of freedom from constraints imposed by his being relegated to the Generic Asian Man ghetto. He dreams "a dream of blending in. A dream of going from Generic Asian Man to just plain Generic Man," but the only way he can imagine to achieve this dream is to first work his way up the ranks to Kung Fu Guy and then become so famous that he can write his own script.

This doesn't work, of course, and not just because he's just as likely as his father to get trapped inside the role of a lifetime. Willis can't write his own script because he's merely a bit-part player in his own life, following the lines others have written, fitting himself neatly into templates outside his control. When his daughter asks him to tell her a story, he fumbles to find the right words, because he fears that the next word "will either open up the story, like a key in a lock in a door to a palace with however many rooms, too many to count, and hallways and stairways and false walls and secret passages, or the next word could be a wall itself, two walls, closing in, it could be limits on where there story could go." 

Trapped by words--but who set that trap? In a free-wheeling trial scene, Willis asks, "Am I the suspect? Or the victim?"

The trial is scripted as part of a formulaic police procedural show called Black and White, in which two attractive detectives, one black and one white, shoot smoldering looks at each other while tidying up crime in Chinatown, where Willis and his neighbors play various nonspeaking Generic Asian roles. When Willis's hard work leads to a recurring part, the black detective tells him, "Look what you made yourself into. Working your way up the system doesn't mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It's what the system depends on."

That's all Willis is good at, though--"To watch the mainstream, find out what kind of fiction they are telling themselves, find a bit part in it. Be appealing and acceptable, be what they want to see"--until he has so thoroughly internalized his role as Generic Asian Man that he can't tell the difference between performance and reality. The words with which he surrounds himself have become a solid brick wall too thick for even Kung Fu Guy to kick through.

Is there hope for Willis Wu--or for any of us feeling trapped in scripts not written by ourselves? You'll have to read the book to find out.