Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

  Young Wu finishes his two years at Mississippi with a 3.94 grade point average. When he graduates, he is accepted in a doctoral program at UCLA.

  Wu passes his qualifying exams at the end of his first year. Halfway through his second year, his mother falls ill, requiring him to drop out to earn money. He looks for work in his field. In other fields. Willing to apply his skills. But there are few takers, despite his grades. After one particularly bad interview, the recruiter offers some unsolicited advice.

  “No one really wants to hire you,” he says. “It’s your accent.”

  “I don’t have an accent,” Wu replies.

  “Exactly. It’s weird.”

  So Wu learns to do an accent, and then gets a job, the only one he can, as Young Asian Man, at Fortune Palace, a restaurant. Washing dishes, busing tables. In Chinatown.

  He does the accent, learns how the place works. It is not who he is, but he learns how to be Young Asian Man, gets good at it.

  EXT. DOROTHY’S BACKSTORY

  She moves to Chinatown from Ohio, packs her one blue suitcase. She brings six blouses, four pairs of polyester pants. She brings a picture of her mother and father, standing up straight and about a foot apart, not touching, taken on the street in Taipei where they first met. They are both looking right into the camera.

  She brings seven pairs of underwear, two pairs of shoes. She brings an anxious disposition. She brings a rowdy, somewhat unexpected laugh, the kind that erupts suddenly in a noisy party and then just as quickly disappears. She brings a memory of her mother dying in her bed at home, surrounded by her ten children, wondering aloud why, why, the question, undisguised. Why? Dorothy, throughout her life, will wonder now and then if that memory is trustworthy, or her own thoughts bleeding, over time, seepage from the frame into the picture.

  She brings incense, and a shrine to her ancestors, and a smaller one for a particular, minor deity. The minor god of immigration and prosperity in real estate transactions. Which started out, a long time ago, as the greater spirit of irrigation and good fortune in agriculture. This is a deity who understands, above all: location, location, location.

  To pray to the minor god, you close your eyes and you imagine a home for you and your family, with four bedrooms and two and a half baths, and you open your eyes and see yourself in southern California, and then you are.

  But despite her prayers, people do not want to sell Dorothy and Wu a house. And that’s okay, because they can’t afford one. But people also do not want to rent them an apartment. Which would also be understandable, as Dorothy and Wu have a meager income, except that their income isn’t the reason no one will rent to them. The reason no one will rent to them is the color of their skin, and although technically at this point in the story of America this reason for not renting to someone is illegal, the reality is, no one cares. The minor god of immigration has gotten Dorothy this far, but the real estate spirits have failed her. She and Wu rent in the only place they can go, which has the benefit of being a place they can afford. The Chinatown SRO.

  They take the biggest room they can find, on the best floor (the eighth), in a room that is twelve feet by ten (half again as large as the standard ten by eight), their double incomes, as Young Asian Man and Pretty Asian Hostess affording them a life of relative comfort, which is not saying much. But they can eat fish with most meals, and meat once a week, and they don’t have to buy broken rice like many who live on the floors below.

  They go downstairs together, working nights in the restaurant. She in the front of the house, he in the back. In her new job, she is scanned and studied, admired and assessed, pinched, grabbed, slapped, and, worst of all, caressed. The caressers fancy themselves to be gentlemen. They imagine that Dorothy returns their affections, plays coy or demure or even outraged, as part of the role. These gentlemen don’t go for the quick palmful of buttock or breast, the momentary violation. Instead, they imagine a world where they could keep her, in some small apartment, and visit their little China doll.

  Wu watches this, and bites his tongue. This is not the story. He is not a kung fu master yet, not supposed to defend her by taking out all these suckers with lightning strikes from his left foot. It takes great restraint, and constant reassurance from Dorothy, that he’s doing the right thing, that they must do this to survive. Pretty Asian Hostess is what pays the bills for them, and he knows it, and that makes it even worse. In this place, Golden Palace, Dorothy is almost a star, the light hits her just so, focusing on the curve of her hip, the way the qipao fits her. This is what she is, and all she is, good for some eye candy while the businessmen talk to the crime bosses, the seedy underworld scene plays out. Sometimes she lives. Many nights, she dies. Opium, maybe, or a revenge killing. Some spurned lover. Or caught in the cross fire.

  Sometimes she gets to weep before she dies, and on those nights, Wu will stop what he’s doing, stand in the background, and watch her work. Watch everyone else watching her, too. Transfixed. And he’ll know she’s destined for more. She weeps, then she dies, then they go upstairs and wash up, celebrate by sharing a bowl of noodles with a few preserved radishes on top.

  On off days, they venture out into EXT. CHINATOWN, not able to make it very far before they reach the end of the block, the area where the scenery ends. But it’s enough, to get some fresh air, to see real daylight, to hear sounds without a soundtrack.

  Dorothy tends toward those polyester bellbottoms and floral print blouses, with long, low, pointy collars. She pushes her midnight black hair back out of her face with a headband. She tries on looks, American woman looks, and with her fair complexion, she gets a kind of soft pass—begrudging admiration from the women, straight-up ogling from the men.

  She isn’t often called chink, although sometimes when she speaks, people have a hard time understanding her, or at least they pretend to have a hard time.

  Young Wu has a harder time fitting in. Wears pants an inch too short. Short-sleeved shirts boxy and too big for his wiry frame. They split a Coke, just like Dorothy used to do with her whole family, and she drinks too much and gets a stomachache, and he holds her hand and lightly rubs her belly.

  Young Wu turns to Dorothy and stops.

  What is it?

  We’re going to get out of here.

  At the end of the night, Young Wu has a look in his eye, and this is the first time Dorothy has ever seen that look on Young Wu’s face. The first time Dorothy had ever seen that look on anyone’s face. It scares her a little. But it is also when she finally falls for him.

  MING-CHEN WU

  This is how we met. And fell in love.

  DOROTHY

  In this place? This is no place for a romance. This is a place for the police to find dead bodies. This is a place where day and night are interchangeable, where we don’t know who we are allowed to be, from one day to the next. How do we have a love story in a place like this?

  MING-CHEN WU

  It’s true. We don’t choose our circumstances. We will have to fall in love when we can. Stolen moments. Between jobs, between scenes. Not a love story. But our story.

  They’re married in the restaurant, a small impromptu gathering of the waitstaff and cooks and busboys.

  They luck out—two rock crabs get sent back to the kitchen, and a lobster comes back almost untouched, and they use every part of the crustaceans, frying up rice with the eggs, dicing up meat to eat with noodles. Someone turns on the radio. There’s eating and dancing, and it’s hot as hell, everyone sweating through their costumes, but no one cares tonight.

  In the swirl of bodies, Wu takes Dorothy’s hand, holds it lightly, whispers to her. Not a love story, he says. Not our story. Just us together. More than enough. She kisses him. A cheer goes up. Some large bottles of Tsingtao are procured, and it’s a good time until they remember where they are. Who they are.
The boss comes back to the kitchen and tells everyone to get back to work. Dorothy and Wu take a moment to collect themselves, and with heavy heads and limbs and full stomachs and hearts, put their Asian costumes back on.

  GENERIC ASIAN KID

  And then you arrive on the scene, Baby Willis. A little tiny Kung Fu Boy. And for a moment the backstories and fragments and scenes filled with background players and nonspeaking parts, it all makes a kind of sense, all of it leading to this. A family. They bring you home from the hospital, at which point everything speeds up. It’s a montage of first moments, all of the major and minor milestones: first step, first word, first time sleeping through the night. There are a few years in a family when, if everything goes right, the parents aren’t alone anymore, they’ve been raising their own companion, the kid who’s going to make them less alone in the world and for those years they are less alone. It’s a blur—dense, raucous, exhausting—feelings and thoughts all jumbled together into days and semesters, routines and first times, rolling along, rambling along, summer nights with all the windows open, lying on top of the covers, and darkening autumn mornings when no one wants to get out of bed, getting ready, getting better at things, wins and losses and days when it doesn’t go anyone’s way at all, and then, just as chaos begins to take some kind of shape, present itself not as a random series of emergencies and things you could have done better, the calendar, the months and years and year after year, stacked up in a messy pile starts to make sense, the sweetness of it all, right at that moment, the first times start turning into last times, as in, last first day of school, last time he crawls into bed with us, last time you’ll all sleep together like this, the three of you. There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them.

  GENERIC ASIAN FAMILY

  You have done this before, all of it. Have done your best to become Americans. Watched the shows, listened to the tapes, eliminated your accents. Dressed right, did your hair, took golf lessons. Encouraged English at home, even. You did everything that was asked of you and more.

  Your parents, they work. For the pleasure of strangers, losing themselves in their various guises. Saying the words, hitting the marks, standing near the good light.

  From the background, you watch.

  At night, your mother puts on the costume.

  At night, your father studies kung fu.

  They weep, they die. They get by.

  Finally, after years, he perfects it. He emerges one day as a kung fu master.

  He gets work as Sifu. He’s in high demand.

  You celebrate by frying up a steak, the three of you eating happily and washing the greasy meat down with a two-liter of Coke. A toast: to not being other people anymore. Your parents make plans to move from the SRO. Everything is going well. Until it’s not.

  Until your father realizes that, despite it all, the bigger check, the honorable title, the status in the show, who he is. Fu Manchu. Yellow Man. Everything has changed, nothing has changed.

  Yes, yes, your kung fu is perfect. Immaculate, pristine, Platonically Ideal Kung Fu from the highest plane of martial arts. But, and we hate to ask this—can you still do the accent?

  They ask him to put on silly hats. To cook chop suey, jump-kick vegetables into a thousand pieces. He hears a gong wherever he goes.

  He is told: you are a legend.

  You see where this is all headed, but it’s too late. You can’t control it. Neither can he.

  Your mother weeps, and dies. Weeps and dies. Weeps and doesn’t die. Just weeps. Because now, your father is no longer a person, no longer a human. Just some mystical Eastern force, some Wizened Chinaman. Her husband is gone, Wu is gone, even Young Asian Man is gone. They took him away from her. He is lost now, in his work, in who they made him. Distant. Cold, perfectionist. Inscrutable. No descriptors, anymore, no age or build, just a role, a name, a shell where he used to be. His features taken away and replaced by archetypes, even his face hollowing out.

  This is how he became Sifu. This is how she lost her husband. How you lost your dad.

  * * *

  —

  He comes in and out of the room, odd hours, waking you and your mother up to rant about this or that, to tell you his plans, how he will show them one day, to imagine a world in which his son can grow up proud to be in this family. He does this regularly if infrequently, then sporadically, then not at all. You get news of him from others in the building, hear rumors. He’s taken to drinking, breaking props. They put him in epics, and he disappears for long stretches, just rumbling drums and violent strings and always gongs, always always gongs. They push in on his eyes, the dead eyes, they’ve turned him into what they wanted, what he was destined for all along, a cheaper version of Bruce Lee. You grow up like this, in Chinatown, your dad no longer your dad. You can hear them talking at night, about how to get out, about the dream of getting out, about never getting out.

  YOUNG ASIAN MAN

  What happened? What have they done? They’ve trapped us.

  YOUNG ASIAN WOMAN

  Or maybe we did it to ourselves.

  YOUNG ASIAN MAN

  Were we always this? Wasn’t there more?

  YOUNG ASIAN WOMAN

  There was. There can be more.

  You hear them at night and you think: someday, you’ll get out.

  EXT. THE ALLEY BEHIND THE RESTAURANT—PRESENT DAY

  First drag’s the best drag. Second drag you remember you hate smoking. You hold the cigarette away from your body, watch the lonely ribbon drift up toward the billboard, thirty feet high in the sky:

  MILES TURNER SARAH GREEN

  BLACK AND WHITE

  their perfect, huge faces, looking down on you. Even out here, the light hits their faces just right. Wherever they go that’s where they’re meant to be, the center of things always white and black and black and white. Even in the picture, the tension is unbearable, some spot halfway between their two noses the romantic center of gravity, the two of them facing each other, in profile. Both of them with such luscious lips. Are those their real lips? They can’t be. You take your thumb and index finger to your own lips, checking to see how meaty they are. How do you get lips like that? Lips that look permanently ready to be kissed, a perpetual state of plumpness. Supple. Pouty and tough. Those are some sexy cops with sexy lips. You wish your face was more—more, something. You don’t know what. Maybe not more. Less. Less flat. Less delicate. More rugged. Your jawline more defined. This face that feels like a mask, that has never felt quite right on you. That reminds you, at odd times, and often after two to four drinks, that you’re Asian. You are Asian! Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.

  The door swings out, startling you. It’s her. Karen Lee.

  “Easy there,” she says. “How’s death?”

  “Are you talking to me?” you ask her.

  She looks around, as in, who else, dude?

  “Sorry. I’m not used to, uh, women like you talking to guys like, uh…”

  “Women like me?”

  “Women with options.”

  She laughs. Studies you for a moment. “You’re not really smoking, are you?”

  You look at your cigarette. “No.”

  “Then why are you holding that?”

  “I don’t know. Goes with the outfit, I guess.” You drop the cigarette, crush it out with your shoe.

  “So. How are you?”

  Whoa, you think. Is she messing with you? She’s messing with you. She has to be messing with you. A woman like this is not going to be interested in a Dead Not Quite Kung Fu Guy. A Generic Asian Man. If there’s one thing that you have to remember, it’s that. Sure, they’ll talk to you. Be your friend. But deep down, she doesn’t think of you like that—

  “Hey, Will, you still there?
Lost in your internal monologue?”

  “Sorry. I guess so.”

  “It’s nice out, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from here. Chinatown. What about you?”

  She flashes her eyes at you, and you almost die all over again. “Where do you think I’m from?” she asks.

  “You want me to guess?

  “I want to know your impression of me.”

  “Okay,” you say. “I’ll give it a shot: you went to a good-to-very-good liberal arts college in the Midwest. No—back east. You know how to ride a horse, drive stick, use chopsticks. You did a semester abroad in Osaka, yeah? Or Kyoto maybe. Solid grades. You have an accounting degree to fall back on if your dreams don’t work out.”

  “So far so good, except it was Taipei, not Osaka, history, not accounting, and I was dean’s list all four years, and to be honest, I’m not sure what my dream is yet—it might be grad school—so I don’t think I’ll be crushed if, as you put it, it doesn’t pan out for me.”

  “But that’s the thing, Karen. For you, it always does. One way or another. Pretty Girl is never not going to be in demand. Kind of how it goes. Things work out pretty good for your kind. White People: Pretty Much Good, Pretty Much Always. Didn’t they teach that in history?”