'Interior Chinatown': Scripting identity
Also: The mysteries of family and death in "Passersthrough"
Charles Yu has written for both the printed page and the screen, a pair of skills that converges delightfully in his National Book Award-winning novel “Interior Chinatown.”
The protagonist: Willis Wu, whose story is told in second person. His bio: Wu is a young Asian American actor whose face has relegated him to bit roles ranging from Background Oriental Male to Delivery Guy to Silent Henchman to Striving Immigrant. After years of working and waiting, he’s climbed up to Generic Asian Man.
Like all the other Asian American male actors he knows, Wu thinks the biggest role he can aspire to is Kung Fu Guy. He yearns to strut his martial arts stuff on a show called “Black and White,” a police procedural starring a Black man and a white woman as a pair of detectives who circle each other flirtatiously. Wu hovers at the edges of “Black and White,” appearing in various scenes but never quite breaking in as a character.
“Interior Chinatown” is a novel written as a script that shoves a battering ram through the fourth wall and then strolls nonchalantly back and forth through the hole, creating a dialogue about Asian identity not only among the characters but also between author and reader.
Why doesn’t he have a role in Black and White?
The question is:
Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?
We’re trapped as guest stars in a small ghetto on a very special episode. Minor characters locked into a story that doesn’t quite know what to do with us. After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?
With this novel, Yu asks a question too many Asian Americans can relate to: Why are we not the stars of our own story?
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Peter Rock’s latest novel, “Passersthrough,” contains several mysteries that the author leaves unapologetically unsolved. No ending tied up with a neat bow for you, dear reader.
The story revolves around a father and daughter who’ve been estranged for decades after a camping trip near Mount Rainier that went very wrong and after the death of his son and her brother at a very young age. When the book opens, Helen has just reconnected with Benjamin at his Portland home, but is laying down strict guidelines for how they will communicate henceforth: primarily by audio and fax, preferably not by phone. Benjamin doesn’t understand, but agrees to all of Helen’s conditions if they mean he’ll be back in touch with her.
Their fragile truce is almost immediately threatened when a violent incident opens the door for a feral twosome, a woman and a teenage boy who claim to be siblings, to enter Benjamin’s life. Once he meets them, strange things start happening — and strange stories about that momentous camping trip start emerging.
I found myself fascinated by Rock’s book, to the point where the open-ended conclusion didn’t bother me at all. The book’s title seems a nod to the reality that we’re all just passing through this world. Some things we won’t know; some things we can’t know; some things we don’t want to know — and how much does any of that really matter?