16 / 40
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 9, 2020
2
Books
Carolyn Kellogg
THE WASHINGTON POST - One of the funniest
books of the year has arrived, a delicious,
ambitious Hollywood satire.
Interior Chinatown
follows a Generic
Asian Man in his efforts to become more
than a bit player. "Ever since you were a boy,
you've dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy," he tells
himself over and over, a mantra for success.
He wants to move from the background to
the centre of the screen.
It's not easy. For the past century or
so, American movies and television have
relegated Asian characters and actors to the
margins, with few exceptions. Generic Asian
Man - he has a name, Willis Wu - is stuck
playing Background Oriental Male. If he's
lucky, he might get to speak a few words as
Delivery Guy.
Willis is trapped in these roles - not just
as an aspiring actor but as a character on a
page. That's because this novel is written in
the form of a Hollywood screenplay.
It's all in Courier font.
The descriptions, including the title, are
in a shorthand used in scripts.
Dialogue sits in themiddle of the page with
wide margins and centred character names.
This stripped-down format is the perfect
delivery system for the satire of
Interior
Chinatown
. Ridiculous assumptions pop.
Readers may know author Charles Yu as a
National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honou-
ree or remember his popular 2010 novel,
How
to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
.
Television aicionados might recognise
him for his work as a writer and story editor
for HBO's
Westworld
and as co-producer on
FX's
Legion
.
Yu was among a wave of novelists who
moved to television, and it's as if he's returned
from another world with a mission to blend
the two.
While sticking to the screenplay form,
Yu bends it enough to go deeper - long
descriptive passages become mini short
stories. In these narratives, we learn about
Willis' past, his parents, his friends and the
strange Chinatown they inhabit.
All the Asian characters live together in a
crummy apartment building above a Chinese
restaurant. They are Korean and Chinese,
Japanese, Taiwanese and Thai, and second-
or third-generation Americans - yet they're all
lumped together, Generic Asians above the
Golden Palace.
It's a community of poor families, cooking
on hot plates, worrying about each other, hav-
ing celebrations. Boys ight, bond and practice
martial arts. An absent, idealised older brother
is held up as a model of success.
"You're here, supposedly, in a new land
full of opportunity," Willis explains, "but
somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend
version of the old country."
There's one main show that he's cast in,
a
Law & Order
spoof called
Black and White
,
with two sexy detectives solving crimes while
lirting with each other. Willis lands tiny parts,
then slowly gets better roles.
He's proud of the work but frustrated by
the stereotypes he plays.
He sees that the African American and
white leads on the show have full-ledged
characters while he's forced to perform with
a fake foreign accent.
He complains about it to his fellow actors.
One replies, "Look what you made yourself
into. Working your way up the system doesn't
mean you beat the system. It strengthens it."
Although this conversation takes place
during a break from shooting, so the charac-
ters are just having a conversation, the book
never breaks the screenplay form - their words
are trapped in the script format. The perfor-
mances within the show and the real life of
the story blend and overlap. Like Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern from Tom Stoppard's fa-
mous play, the characters see and comment
on the artiice of their creation.
It's mind-bending storytelling, not easy to
pull off. Yu does it with panache.
Now they're shooting, now they're talking,
a fantasy sequence becomes real, all in
screenplay format.
Is there even a world outside "Interior
Chinatown?" Forget it, Jake. I mean Willis.
After Willis falls in love and has a daughter,
he can see a way to break free. Taking that
path, however, has complications.
All knotted up together are his ambition
and professional limitations, happiness and
desire, assimilation and identity.
In Paul Beatty's satire
The Sellout
, which
won the 2016 Man Booker Prize, a character
takes American racial prejudice to such an
Yu’s ‘Interior Chinatown’ brilliantly
skewers Hollywood typecasting
Ron Charles
THE WASHINGTON POST - The United
States (US) never declared war against
Laos. The country’s destruction was irst
secret, then denied and always incidental to
America’s grander aims in Southeast Asia: a
Dr Strangelove plan to defend freedom by
obliterating as many people as possible.
During a long sojourn of mayhem from
1964 to 1973, the CIA and US Air Force
dropped an estimated two million tonnes of
ordnance onto the tiny, landlocked country,
making Laos the most heavily bombed coun-
try per capita ever. Worse - for survivors - mil-
lions of those cluster bombs didn’t immedi-
ately explode but waited patiently for years
or decades for a farmer or a child to complete
their deadly mission.
By the time Paul Yoon was born in New York
in 1980, the US was done ighting in Asia, and
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were busy
fabricating their reputations as master states-
men. But Yoon’s family offered a portal through
years of national amnesia and obfuscation.
“The Korean War is personal to me,” he
once said. His grandfather and young father
escaped to the south during the ighting.
Much of his iction, starting in 2009 with
his irst story collection,
Once the Shore
,
revolves around the experience of war and
vicissitudes of light.
Soon after that collection appeared, the
National Book Foundation named Yoon one of
its 5 Under 35, an annual award for promising
young writers that’s as much speculation as
recognition. In Yoon’s case, the foundation
was clearly prophetic.
Though presented as a novel,
Run Me to
Earth
is a tightly integrated collection of six
masterfully written stories. It begins in 1969
in a Laotian valley called the Plain of Jars,
where the sound of bombings is so frequent
that nobody hears them anymore. A gracious
farmhouse, abandoned by its French owner,
is the site of a makeshift hospital offering
what little medical attention the exhausted
staff can manage with dwindling supplies
and intermittent electricity. Surrounded by
unexploded cluster bombs, the hospital has
no shortage of mangled patients, who arrive
on foot or in wheelbarrows - sometimes
blown to bits as they approach the building.
Run Me to Earth
focusses on three
teenagers - Alisak, Prany and his sister, Noi
- who have known nothing but war most of
their lives. Their parents either succumbed to
opium or were shot, leaving them to wander
the country as a tightknit trio.
Relief arrives when a nurse spots the
orphans sleeping near a river and asks if they
can drive motorbikes. In that moment, they
become accidental partisans in a conlict
they know nothing about. “The vehicle that
pulled up to recruit them could have been
from the other side and they wouldn’t have
cared if it meant, on that day, the promise
of shelter and food,” Yoon writes. “Because
they were children who had nowhere else to
go. And because, for what seemed like the
irst time, the people who had approached
them had been kind.” Suddenly, working as
couriers and orderlies, the three orphans are
earning more money in a day than they used
to make in a month.
Yoon’s perspective shifts nimbly from one
teenager to another, catching the currents of
delight, confusion or terror litting through
this “orbit of chaos.” The farmhouse, once
the centre of a lucrative tobacco plantation,
is now a fragment of its former glory, a surreal
mix of fresh gore and abandoned art. The
night air is as likely to be disturbed by cries
and helicopters as the sounds of the piano
on the second loor. Alisak knows better than
to say it out loud, “but he felt as though he
could stay here with them in the madness of
this house forever. He thought there would
be nothing better,” Yoon writes. “The three of
them always together.”
We know, of course, how impossible
that modest dream is for these three young
friends working in the most dangerous spot
on Earth. But Yoon’s narration is so closely
pared, so free of excess drama that when
violence rips through these lives, it feels
especially shocking.
In a sense, he’s re-created the psychologi-
cal experience of battle: the weird interludes
of happiness and boredom suddenly shat-
tered by incomprehensible disorder.
From this spellbinding beginning,
Run
Me to Earth
progresses over a half century.
Jumping across decades and continents,
the chapters delineate the trajectories of
lives ricocheted across the world. Yoon
follows Alisak, Prany and Noi as they struggle
to survive, grasp for shreds of justice - or
retribution - and attain whatever peace
they can. Prany realises that he has been so
repeatedly displaced that “it was impossible
for him now to deine a home”.
Individually, the chapters exercise
hypnotic intensity, but the overall effect is
even more profound. With his panoramic
vision of the displacements of war, Yoon
In ‘Run Me to Earth’, three orphans struggle to survive in deadliest place on earth
extreme that he winds up in court. So, too,
does Willis.
This is risky: A writing classroom rule is
"show, don't tell," and courtrooms are built
for telling. A message will be delivered. It
might be a straight shot of truth.
"They zoned us, kept us roped off from
everyone else," Willis' lawyer declares.
"Chinatown and indeed being Chinese is and
always has been, from the very beginning,
a construction, a performance of features,
gestures, culture and exoticism." The riff
continues, pulling the lens back from
Hollywood to America as a whole.
Is there a role for Generic Asian Man that's
less stereotypical than Kung Fu Guy? Would
Generic Man be better? Maybe in 2020, this
book asks us to imagine, we can igure out
another way to break down the boundaries
we've created.
reminds us of the people never considered or
accounted for in the halls of power. Hearing
bits of a speech by President Johnson, they
ask, What on earth is a domino? What does
your Cold War have to do with us?
Yoon makes us care deeply about these
adolescents and what happens to them. For
all that he eventually reveals, some details are
forever dropped between the shifting plates
of survivors’ memories. That’s cruel, but like
everything else here, entirely true to the lives
of people scattered by war.
The novel takes place in Laos where deadly bombings are so common, nobody hears them anymore.