by Charles Yu
ALSO BY CHARLES YU
Third Class Superhero
How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
Sorry Please Thank You
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Charles Yu
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Yu, Charles, [date] author.
Title: Interior Chinatown / Charles Yu.
Description: First edition. New York : Pantheon Books, 2020.
Identifiers: LCCN 201901427. ISBN 9780307907196 (hardcover : alk. paper). ISBN 9780307907202 (ebook).
Classification: LCC PS3625.U15 I58 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 | LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2019014271
Ebook ISBN 9780307907202
www.pantheonbooks.com
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
ep_prh_5.4_c0_r1
For Sophia and Dylan
Contents
Cover
Also by Charles Yu
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
ACT I: GENERIC ASIAN MAN
ACT II: INT. GOLDEN PALACE
ACT III: ETHNIC RECURRING
ACT IV: STRIVING IMMIGRANT
ACT V: KUNG FU DAD
ACT VI: THE CASE OF THE MISSING ASIAN
ACT VII: EXT. CHINATOWN
Acknowledgments
About the Author
If a film needed an exotic backdrop…Chinatown could be made to represent itself or any other Chinatown in the world. Even today, it stands in for the ambiguous Asian anywhere.
Bonnie Tsui
ACT I
GENERIC ASIAN MAN
INT. GOLDEN PALACE
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
You are not Kung Fu Guy.
You are currently Background Oriental Male, but you’ve been practicing.
Maybe tomorrow will be the day.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
You are not Kung Fu Guy.
You are currently Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face, but you’ve been practicing.
Maybe tomorrow will be the day.
Take what you can get.
Try to build a life.
A life
at the
margin
made from
bit parts.
WILLIS WU
(ASIAN) ACTOR
Skills:
Kung Fu (Moderate Proficiency)
Fluent in Accented English
Able to do Face of Great Shame on command
Résumé/Repertoire:
Disgraced Son
Delivery Guy
Silent Henchman
Caught Between Two Worlds
Guy Who Runs in and Gets Kicked in the Face
Striving Immigrant
Generic Asian Man
Your mother has played, in no particular order:
Pretty Oriental Flower
Asiatic Seductress
Young Dragon Lady
Slightly Less Young Dragon Lady
Restaurant Hostess
Girl with the Almond Eyes
Beautiful Maiden Number One
Dead Beautiful Maiden Number One
Old Asian Woman
Your father has been, at various times:
Twin Dragon
Wizened Chinaman
Guy in a Soiled T-shirt
Inscrutable Grocery Owner (in a Soiled T-shirt)
Egg Roll Cook
Young Asian Man
Sifu, the Mysterious Kung Fu Master
Old Asian Man
INT. GOLDEN PALACE—MORNING
In the world of Black and White, everyone starts out as Generic Asian Man. Everyone who looks like you, anyway. Unless you’re a woman, in which case you start out as Pretty Asian Woman.
You all work at Golden Palace, formerly Jade Palace, formerly Palace of Good Fortune. There’s an aquarium in the front and cloudy tanks of rock crabs and two-pound lobsters crawling over each other in the back. Laminated menus offer the lunch special, which comes with a bowl of fluffy white rice and choice of soup, egg drop or hot and sour. A neon Tsingtao sign blinks and buzzes behind the bar in the dimly lit space, a dropped-ceiling room with lacquered ornate woodwork (or some imitation thereof), everything simmering in a warm, seedy red glow thrown off by the dollar-store paper lanterns festooned above, many of them darkened by dead moths, the paper yellowing, ripped, curling in on itself.
The bar is fully stocked with top-shelf spirits up top, middle-shelf liquor at eye level, and down at the bottom, a happy hour shelf of booze that you will regret for sure. The new thing everyone is excited about is called the lychee margarita-tini, which seems like a lot of flavors. Not that you’ve had one. They’re fourteen bucks. Sometimes patrons leave a sip at the bottom of the glass and if you’re quick, while you go through the swinging door that separates the front of the house from the back, you can have a taste—you’ve seen some of the other Generic Asian Men do it. It’s a risk, though. The director’s always got an eye out, ready to fire someone for the smallest infraction.
You wear the uniform: white shirt, black pants. Black slipperlike shoes that have no traction whatsoever. Your haircut is not good, to say the least.
Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the light. They’re the heroes. They get hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Designed to hit White’s face just right, anyway.
Someday you want the light to hit your face like that. To look like the hero. Or for a moment to actually be the hero.
ROLES
First, you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes:
5. Background Oriental Male
4. Dead Asian Man
3. Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy
2. Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter
1. Generic Asian Man Number One
and then if you make it that far (hardly anyone does) you get stuck at Number One for a while and hope and pray for the light to find you and that when it does you’ll have something to say and when you say that something it will come out just right and have everyone in Black and White turning their heads saying wow who is that, that is not just some Generic Asian Man, that is a star, maybe not a real, regular star, let’s not get crazy, we’re talking about Chinatown here, but perhaps a Very Special Guest Star, which for your people is the ceiling, is the terminal, ultimate, exalted position for any Asian working in this world, the thing every Oriental Male dreams of when he’s in the Background, trying to blend in.
Kung Fu Guy.
Kung Fu Guy is not like the other slots in the hierarchy—there isn’t always someone occupying the position, as in whoever the top guy is at a
ny given time, that’s the default guy who gets trotted out whenever there’s kung fu to be done. Only a very special Asian can be worthy of the title. It takes years of dedication and sacrifice, and after all that only a few have even a slim chance of making it. Despite the odds, you all grew up training for this and only this. All the scrawny yellow boys up and down the block dreaming the same dream.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE
Ever since you were a boy, you’ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
You are still not Kung Fu Guy.
You are currently Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy. Your kung fu is B, B-plus on a good day, and Sifu once proclaimed your drunken monkey to be nearly at a level of competence that he could perhaps at some point in the future imagine not being completely embarrassed of you. Which, if you know him, well, that’s a pretty big deal.
To be honest though it can sometimes be hard to tell with Sifu, who is famously inscrutable. If you could only show him what you’ve become. All you want is for him to make that face, the one that looks like internal distress possibly of a gastrointestinal nature but actually indicates something closer to Deeply Repressed Secret Pride Honorable Father Has for His Young but Promising Son; means Deliciously Bittersweet Pain That Comes from Knowing Honorable Teacher Is No Longer Needed. That’s how you see it in your head: he would make that face, smile, you’d smile back. Credits roll and you’d walk off, arm in arm, to the horizon.
OLD ASIAN MAN
These days he is mostly Old Asian Man. No longer Sifu, with the pants and the muscles and the look in his eye. All of that is gone now, but when did it happen? Over years and overnight.
The day you first noticed. You’d shown up a few minutes early for weekly lesson. Maybe that’s what threw him off. When he answered the door, it took him a moment to recognize you. Two seconds, or twenty, a frozen eternity—then, as he regained himself, his familiar scowl, barking your name
WILLIS WU!
half-exclamation, half-confirmation, as if verifying for both you and himself that he hadn’t forgotten. Willis Wu, he said again, well come on, what are you doing, don’t just stand there in the doorway like a dum-dum, come in, son, let’s get started.
He was fine for the rest of the day, mostly, but you couldn’t stop thinking about the look he gave you, oblivion or terror, and for the first time you noticed the mess his room had become, not unusual for any other man his age living alone, but for Sifu, who taught and valued order and simplicity in all things, to have allowed his dwelling to reach this state of disorganization should have been a warning sign to all. Maybe not the first, but the first one that came to your attention.
Fatty Choy went around telling everyone that Sifu was on food stamps, saying how gullible can you be (“You idiots think being Wizened Chinaman pays well? Are you crazy? Why do you think he fishes bottles and cans out of the trash?”) but no one wanted to believe it. At least in public. In private, the thought did occur. Sifu never had the lights on. Said it was to train the senses. He saved everything: disposable chopsticks, free glossy calendars from East-West Bank (“good for wrapping fish or fruit”), packets of soy sauce and chili paste from the dollar Chinese down the street. He’d patched his old fake leather couch so many times there were cracks on the patches. Which of course he also patched. The Formica two-top he ate on was the first and only kitchen table he’d ever bought, purchased for seven dollars and fifty cents from the salvage bin at the old restaurant supply warehouse down on Jackson and Eighth, that place long gone now (converted to INT. RAVE/GRIMY CLUB SCENE) but the table still there in the kitchen. An artifact of the previous century, it had worn down to a smoothness so comforting and cool it felt soft to the touch, the patterns of use, hundreds, thousands of meals together in the corner of that small, low-ceilinged room, the surface preserving the teachings of Sifu, wisdom over time recorded in the warp and wear, in the markings of the modest table itself. Come to think of it, Fatty Choy, despite the fact that he was and had always been a total gasbag, a mostly insufferable close-talking blowhard (made all the more insufferable by the fact that he was not infrequently right about things), was simply stating what you all knew but didn’t want to admit: Sifu had gotten old.
It was easy to lie to yourself about it. Although naively you believed he had by some miracle of genetics and sheer follicular willpower managed to reach his seventh decade without a single hair turning gray, in hindsight you remember once seeing an empty box of natural seaweed coloring in his wastebasket, Sifu emerging from his room with the occasional smear where he’d gotten a little careless and ended up painting the top edge of his forehead a swath of kelpish green.
And even if he could still break a cinder block with three fingers, that was nothing compared to back in the day, his younger self, when he could do it with just one—a single powerful blow of any digit. You pick! You couldn’t bear to watch, peeking through your fingers when you were little, and as you got older still wincing in expectation of painful failure. But young Sifu never failed. He always found the necessary reserves of qi, was able to summon forth from whatever intangible reservoir the required force to smash through it, and everyone gathered around would clap and shout their praise at the latest demonstration of Sifu’s mind over matter, mental and physical, an impossible feat right there in the alley behind the kitchen in the middle of a Tuesday. At the sound of the exploding energy you would uncover your eyes and exhale with relief, proud and grateful that he had done it once again, hadn’t mangled his hand, and also slightly ashamed by your lack of faith, when everyone else, the assembled friends and strangers, had never doubted him in the slightest.
Your earliest memories of him as a young dragon, a rising star, thick straight hair the color of night combed slowly and carefully straight back in a lustrous wave. Forearms like steel barrels lifting you out of the makeshift playpen in the corner of the room and flying you around up above his head, almost crashing into the bed and the lamp and the ceiling as you laughed and laughed until your mother said sio sim, sio sim, that’s enough, Ming, please, stop before he gets sick, and he’d do one more revolution before setting you down safely, your feet back on solid ground, the world still spinning.
Whether we admitted to it or not, and sometimes you did admit it to yourself, right before falling asleep, in the way thoughts like this come to you: your first, best, and only real master, the source of all your kung fu knowledge, was no longer himself. He’d aged out of his role and into the next one, his life force depleting with every exertion. Wisdom and power leaking from him with each passing day and night. He’d played his role for so long he’d lost himself in it, before some separation that happened gradually over decades and then you waking one day to feel it, some distance that had crept in overnight. Some formal space you could no longer cross.
He’d always be Your Father, but somehow was no longer your dad.
No longer running up walls, no more leaping from the curved roof eaves of the Bank of America pagoda. More often found nodding off during a meal, eaten alone, in front of the six o’clock news. Long after you’d graduated into an adult role, you still continued coming to him for these weekly lessons, but the lessons had turned into a flimsy pretense layered atop their real purpose: your delivery of provisions on which your old man depended. A few groceries, toilet paper, his various prescriptions. Putting things out so they’d be easy for him to access, wiping the floor as best you could. There was only so much time. Checking for dampness on his mattress pad, changing it if necessary, picking up laundry, sweeping from his nightstand the accumulation of balled-up napkins enclosing clots of dried phlegm and blood. More napkins behind the nightstand and all around, a half-eaten pear under the Formica table, there since the day after your last visit, having dropped and rolled to a stop right in that very spot, left to slowly rot, the gentle descent into squalor not a function of sloth but simple, physical inability.
I’m
sorry. I can’t reach.
It’s okay, Ba. I got it.
The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is.
You did what you could despite being generally ignored. Sifu-now-Old-Asian-Man having forgotten not just his kung fu technique but also his most loyal student, regarding you with a blank if slightly wary amiability, as one might endure an overbearing but helpful stranger. Your relationship having turned into a pantomime, a series of gestures in a well-worn scene, played out again and again, any underlying feeling having long since been obviated by emotional muscle memory, learning how to make the right faces, strike the right poses, not out of apathy or lack of sincerity, rather a need to preserve what was left of his pride.
The trick was learning what not to say. To enter the theater of his dotage quietly, sit there in the dark and not ask him any question, however simple, that might cause momentary confusion, might turn your rote interactions into something too raw, remind yourselves or each other of what was happening here, the inversion of the relationship, the care and feeding, the brute fact of physical dependency: If you don’t do this, he can’t do it for himself. If you miss a week, he sits in the dark. Not that he’ll die. Although there is always that possibility. But he’ll be lonelier that day, hungrier. He’ll lose something or drop something or break something and have to wait for you to call or come by. Staying in character avoided all of that, allowed you to prolong your respective roles for just a bit longer, and in a good week, when things were going along relatively well, you could get by, could walk through your blocking and lines, make it to the end of the day. But on bad days or if you’d stay too long, his patience or working memory would reach its limit, and he’d edge into a twilight distrust, fear in his eyes.
