We've been living in an age of irony for years now, it seems, but more recently, at least in literary fiction, there's been a wave of really dense satire about race. I know people have written, and are writing, about this, and I need to read that stuff, but I will confess that I often struggle with the novels. They are, of course, intentionally inhospitable, so it's not surprising, but my discomfort is not that I feel called out so much as that it can often feel like telling rather than showing. Everything is exaggerated, when it feels like nuance would be more illuminating. But sometimes, in the most successful versions of this kind of thing, the exaggeration is so extreme that it goes all the way through and back to nuance again, forcing you to excavate the specificity within the outsize shapes. That, I think, is how Interior, Chinatown works.
It took me awhile to get into it, because you have to negotiate the utter artificiality of the conceit, the intense layers of irony and parody. The novel is a script/story about Willis Wu, Generic Asian Man, who yearns to become Kung Fu guy — but also to break free of cliche roles. The commitment to the form means that the story can be frustratingly rote, emotionless, and of course, that's the point, as is the disorientation of not knowing whether this is a movie or "real life."
But once you get into it, it's absolutely brilliant, and quite lyrical. I'm realizing that I've read more than a few texts this year by Asian American authors that are grappling with the complexities of Asian American identity in the racial eco-system of the US — not out of a concerted effort on my part, more by happenstance, but doubtless inspired by the reckoning emerging as a response to the increasingly blatant outbursts of anti-Asian violence. This one is more specifically engaged in the question of representation in movies and tv shows, and how that shapes identity, and it examines these issues in really powerful ways.
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