But this new life is rigged with many of the same booby traps as the old one.
Eventually, he leaves Chinatown to build a new life. He begins to build true personhood, outside his TV-set persona. What looks like redemption arrives when he finds love and eventually has a daughter. But what becomes clear is that success, and the pressure to succeed, is as much a mode of oppression as any other – a way of keeping people in their preordained roles. It seems at first as though Willis may follow this path.
How about his mother’s advice: “Don’t grow up to be Kung Fu Guy Be more.” Ah, the American dream. What options are there for Willis? Get the girl? Get the job? Steal a car and drive off into the sunset? He manages all three. But the book is a satire of TV tropes, and everything is laced with irony, even the elevator pitch. The book takes that guy, gives him a name and makes him the star of his own show. Yu, who is also a screenwriter, has said the inspiration for Willis came from the image of an Asian guy who’s unloading a van in the background of a Law and Order Chinatown special. His dream is to be Kung Fu Guy – the pinnacle role, but also, as we soon learn, a glass ceiling: a symbol both of what is possible and all that is not. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face.
His life is a performance: he and all his neighbours are extras in a procedural cop show, called Black and White, which is filmed in the restaurant where Willis works. It is set in a fictional Chinatown, and a Taiwanese American man named Willis Wu is our protagonist. The 2020 winner, Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, looks at the way in which large swathes of people, in this case Asian Americans, have been excluded from the story of America for decades.
They wrote out of a sense of urgency fuelled by the state of the nation. Who knew that Donald Trump would have such an impact on American literature? Both of the last two winners of the US National Book Award for Fiction have quoted the president as the influence behind their books.
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