Review: Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This mind-bending satire of race in Hollywood from an Asian-American perspective has been on my radar for a while, in part because of a lot of different updates about planned movie and/or streaming adaptations. As I remember it, stars like Jimmy O. Yang, Simu Liu, and Chloe Bennet have been attached to the project at different times, and I'd really love to see how the adaptation pulls it off. It helps that much of the book is written in screenplay format already, which makes it a much quicker read than you might think since there's less text per page. But the text that's on the page is a massively on point commentary on numerous levels. It addresses not only the various stereotypes of Asians in media, but also the model minority myth, relations between Asian and Black people, and also some past horrors in Asian history (though most Westerners would know that Communist China under Mao committed so many atrocities, many wouldn't know about the atrocities carried out under Chiang Kai-Shek and the Nationalist Party.) And some of the meta-humor - since the book takes place largely in relation to a fictional police procedural, deliberately written to be as obnoxiously clichéd as possible - very clearly draws on Yu's experience as a Westworld writer, with the various Asian Background Characters having to abide by a lot of similar rules to Westworld hosts. The library up the street from my work had this one on a special display for AAPI Heritage Month, and I'm glad I finally got around to reading it - it's fast, it's smart, and it needs that adaptation yesterday. Especially if, as expected, Yang plays the lead role and Yu writes the scripts.

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