I had never heard of this book by Charles Yu before my book club elected to read it. I opted to get the ebook from my library and use the Kindle app on my phone to read it. It’s a super short book, so if you’re looking for a quick read, I highly recommend this one.
This book is so good. It tackles the issue of the specific kind of racism Asian Americans face, but it does so while playing around with the novel as a literary form, so when it comes to describing this book, I really don’t know where to start.
The main character is an Asian-American man named Willis Wu, who was born and raised in Chinatown (it’s never mentioned in which city Chinatown resides and I’m assuming that’s because it could be any Chinatown in the U.S.). He now lives and works in Chinatown as an adult, but the whole book is written in second person, which I always think is so powerful for a book discussing racism.
Willis works as an extra on a cop show he calls Black and White because it centers on a white detective and a black detective who work as partners (and also have some sexual tension between them).
Willis defines himself and those around him by the characters they get to play on TV, none of which have any names, except for Karen who is mixed race, allowing her to move between worlds. Willis envies her mobility, but doesn’t see the limitations that come with never been fully part of any one community.
Willis is obsessed with working his way up the ladder. You start out as an extra in the background (Generic Asian Man), and work your way up to Kung Fu Guy, which is the pinnacle of success in his mind, but still not high enough to earn a name.
Because the ladder Willis is trying to climb was created and defined by White America, he’s constantly trying to be what White America expects him to be, regardless of who he really is. For example, despite the fact that Willis was born in the U.S., they still expect him to have an accent, something he keeps forgetting in the course of filming. There’s even a discussion about what White America really wants when it says it wants kung fu. Does it want mixed martial arts? kung fu mixed with jiu jitsu? Do they just want a guy who can do splits in the air?
Willis is obsessed with becoming Kung Fu Guy, and it takes him to the end of the book (and some ruined relationships) to realize he only sees it as the pinnacle of his career because that’s what White American has defined for him, never letting him aim any higher. And it’s not worth the sweat and sacrifice to be just another nameless martial artist.
It also becomes clear that this is a generational thing. Willis’s dad, who moved to the U.S. from Taiwan, worked his whole adult life to become Kung Fu Guy, and now he lives on Social Security and charity. But he believed Kung Fu Guy was the goal, and so his son grew up believing that was the goal, and it took another generation to show Willis the error of his ways.
Most of the book is written as a TV script, although the narration does lapse into prose for the exposition required to explain how Willis’s parents met, fell in love, traveled to America, tried to make it in America, tried to raise him with limited funds and opportunities, etc.
The sections that are written as a script are fascinating because they blur the line between TV and reality. There are allusions to a script, but there’s also the sense that Willis is making up his role as he goes along and is surprised when his character gets killed off and he has to go back to the bottom of the ladder (after a 45-day break to give the audience time to forget that he was killed off). It was interesting and very effective.
I loved this book! It got a little preachy at the end during the court scene when it kind of felt like it was beating the reader over the head with the message it was trying to send, but overall, I found this just a delight to read and I cannot wait to read more by Yu.