Together, Black and White head up the “Impossible Crimes Unit,” all crimes taking place in or around the Golden Palace inside a generic rendition of Chinatown. The narrative alternates between Willis’s personal story and the ongoing, racist, and insipid plot of Black and White, a good cop/ bad cop show starring… a Black male cop (“He’s a third generation cop who left Wall Street to honor his father’s legacy”) and a White female cop (“She’s the most accomplished young detective in the history of the department”). The heart of the story belongs to “Kung Fu Kid,” known off-set as Willis Wu, who lives with his parents in an apartment complex near the Golden Palace where the television show Black and White is being shot. I recommend you set aside a quiet couple of hours to lose yourself in the sad and memorable hilarity within Interior Chinatown’s layered contrivances. Charles Yu’s originality, his clarity of dialogue as he satirizes the experience of Asian-American actors living in studio housing inside a set of Chinatown, and his unforgettable characters – the stereotyped and the actual – make the novel an absolute must read. National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown is one of the best books I have read not just so far this year but in my life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |