Review: Interior Chinatown

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
My rating: 

This book, at least in my opinion, is funny.

One thing that we need more of, and something I loved about this book as well as Yu's recent book ,How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, is a sense of humor. It is so great to laugh while thinking about difficult concepts of identity and assimilation. Of course, humor is not the only way to make diversity an easier topic. Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon was an important movie because it had an Asian star, but also, it was an exciting movie.

I thought the end of the book summed up some of the most important themes in the book:

The question is:

Who gets to be an American?
What does and American look like?

We're trapped as guest starts 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?

I spent most of my life trapped.
Interior Chinatown. I made it out,
to become KungFu Dad. But that
was just another role. A better role
that I've ever had, but still a role. I
can't just keep doing the same
thing over and over again. My dad
did that. And where did it get him?
He was a true master, someone
who had mastered his craft. And
what did his life add up to? You
never recognized him for what he
could do. Who he was. You never
allowed him a name.

The book also reminds you that, all joking aside, Chinese people were discriminated against, by law in a law signed in 1882:

On May 6, 1882, the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act is signed into law by President Chester A. Arthur, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers, the first law preventing all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating into the United States.

Did I mention that the book is funny?

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