by Charles Yu
(surveys crowd)
Look at all of you here. We got our surfers there…our b-boys. Floppy-haired emo guys. Clean fade lowered-car guys. Tats, no tats. All of the varieties of the Asian American male. Most of us between five-six and five-eleven. On some level…we do share something. Played NES and D&D in middle school. Our moms make the same foods, frying up radish and taro cakes, a dollop of hot stuff and a splash of soy sauce. Snack time. Our houses smell the same way, have the same embarrassing piles of clutter, with random-ass Asian shit mixed in with plastic toys and free crap and a mishmash of furniture and decor…
A couple of mm-hmms, guys climbing on board now.
YOU (CONT’D)
…and bad carpet and so many styles because it all equals no style, because decor is not something our parents care about or can afford. Matching pillows and shit, that’s for White people. Our shit is functional, like a table is where you eat and do homework. And get good grades and be well rounded in extracurriculars and get into an Ivy or a good state school and then you graduate with a solid GPA and you come out here and find out that what you are is…Asian Man. But how often do you, or you, or any of us ever think the thought, I’m an Asian man? Almost never. Not until someone reminds you. Some guy bumps you at a bar, and makes a comment. Or you overhear some people talking, and one of them says, oh, your Asian friend so-and-so. And in that moment, we all become the same again. All of us collapse into one, Generic Asian Man.
(then)
What I’m trying to say is, we aren’t Generic Asian Men. I mean, look at us. We look ridiculous. All pretending to be the same thing. We’re not.
(pointing out guys in the crowd)
Choy, you know what I’m talking about. Fong. And you, you definitely know what I mean, right Carl?
NOT CARL
I’m not Carl.
YOU
Sorry. You get my point.
NOT CARL
I do. But I wish you knew my name. We went to junior high together.
YOU
I’m sorry, man. My point is, I’m looking out at all of you. And my parents, our elders, my friends.
(then)
At my daughter.
Old Asian Woman looks at you, then at Phoebe and Karen.
YOU
I’m looking at my wife. Ex-wife. But maybe ex-ex-wife?
Karen looks at you. She smiles. And frowns. And smiles a little bit.
KAREN
You’re sort of losing the thread here, Will.
YOU
Right. Thanks.
KAREN
I love you, though.
YOU (CONT’D)
And I just want to say one thing to all of you. The truth is, I am guilty. It’s my fault. The question isn’t where did the Asian guy disappear to?
The question is: why is the Asian guy always dead?
Because we don’t fit. In the story. If someone showed you my picture on the street, how would you describe it?
You might say, an Asian fellow. Asian dude. Asian Man.
How many of you would say: that’s an American?
What is it about an Asian Man that makes him so hard to assimilate?
Grunts from the gallery.
YOU (CONT’D)
Why doesn’t he have a role in Black and White?
The question is:
Who gets to be an American? What does an American look like?
We’re trapped as guest stars 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?
More grunts. Some mm-hmns. A “hell yeah.”
YOU (CONT’D)
I spent most of my life trapped. Interior Chinatown. I made it out, to become Kung Fu Dad. But that was just another role. A better role than 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.
So what do we do?
You look at Older Brother.
The gallery is fired up now. Angry Asians. The judge bangs his gavel, order order, but no one’s listening. It’s about to explode.
OLDER BROTHER
Plan B?
YOU
Plan B.
The music kicks in. A dozen cops come busting through the door, three from the front, one from the back, and one from upstairs. You take your stance. Older Brother next to you. Come on, you say. Come get this. You fight off the first wave, a bunch of slow-moving grunts, but then another wave. Then another. The SWAT team arrives. All the Generic Asian Men jump in now. It’s a melee. In all of the action, you find it: the thing Sifu told you. One thing. One thing a day. One thing at a time. Everything slows down, the music fades away, and it’s just breathing. Your breathing, and the sound of skin on skin, skin on bone, crunch and slap. Your kung fu is free, is flowing, is at a level it could never have reached, in all those years. Up block, side step, body punch, side kick, down block, down block. Jump, clear the counter, push off, SPLITS IN THE AIR, kicking two dudes at once, one in the face, one in the throat, who did that? You can jump like this, landing, no-look back kick, guy goes down with a liquid-y sound, like he’s a bag of organs, the energy from your foot in a strike point, radiating outward and who the hell are you, and this is not B or B-plus or even A-minus kung fu. Six feet above the ground, somersaults in the air, butterfly kicks, twisting horizontally, diagonally, three-sixty, seventy-twenty, ten-eighty. Gravity can wait. You’re six again, you’re fighting the whole world, your mom down there on earth, you in the clouds, Kung Fu Kid. You leap and twist, your leg slicing through empty space, splitting the world in two. Wave after wave after wave, until you have nothing left, fighting with everything in your heart and mind and body right up until the very end, when you hear the gun go off.
INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT—NIGHT
Kung Fu Guy is dead.
GREEN
He’s dead.
TURNER
Looks that way.
The Black cop and the White cop regard the prone Asian male body, partially covered with a sheet.
A crime scene investigator swabs something. Another one measures the radius and dispersal pattern of a pool of drying blood.
GREEN
(gazing at the dead Chinese)
What are we looking at?
TURNER
Family drama, probably. Some kind of cultural thing.
* * *
—
You open one eye, peek up at Black and White.
“Hey,” Turner says. Off-script.
“I can’t do this anymore,” you say.
Turner smiles. “Yeah, man. I know.”
“See you around, Wu,” Green says, pulling you up to your feet, a dead man now free. “Maybe we can work together again in the future.”
You close your eyes.
“Hey.”
You open your eyes to see Karen leaning over you. Her hair smells so good. She kisses you.
“What now?” she says.
“Looking forward to hanging out with our kid.”
Phoebe pounces, knocking the wind out of you.
“Did you win?” she asks.
“No,” you say. “I lost.”
“Are you dead?”
“Yes. No. I’m not sure.”
“Who are you now? Are you still Kung Fu Guy?”
“Nope,” you say. “I’m your dad.”
“Just dad.”
“Oh,” she says. “That’s good.” She pushes her head into you. Your side feels wet.
“Don’t cry,” you say.
“But I want to.”
“Okay. Cry.”
Black and White is leaving town. The cops all filing out. The place is a mess.
You see Old Asian Woman and Karen talking. Uh oh. They approach together.
“We were just talking,” your mother says.
“This can’t be good,” you say.
Old Asian Woman turns to you. She makes that face. Secret pride, maybe. Or bittersweet pain. Little of both.
“You used to jump off the walls. Like a monkey.” She asks, “What did you call yourself?”
“Kung Fu Kid,” you say. Karen laughs.
Old Asian Woman closes her eyes.
“You always tried so hard at everything, Willis,” she says. “Maybe I was wrong,” she says. “Telling you to be more.”
“I just wanted you and Ba to be happy.”
“I was happy. Eating dinner with you. Your chubby little hand, holding the bowl.” You hug her, kiss the top of her head. It smells just like it used to. You are not Kung Fu Guy. You are Willis Wu, dad. Maybe husband. Your dad skills are B, B-plus on a good day. But you’ve been practicing. You say the words. Take what you can get. Try to build a life. Sometimes, things happen. Mostly they don’t. Sometimes you get to talk. Mostly you don’t. Life at the margins, made from bit pieces.
All the Old Asians, wandering, standing around. No show. No plot, no world. Just characters. Golden Palace dismantled. The sky up above. EXT. CHINATOWN.
POST-CREDITS
Miles Turner left the force to attend Harvard Medical School. He is now a surgeon.
* * *
—
Sarah Green started a singing career. She still moonlights as a PI.
* * *
—
Green and Turner have started seeing other people, but they’re still friends. And sometimes more.
EXHIBIT B
LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES, PART II
1943 The Chinese Exclusion Act is repealed by the Magnuson Act and Chinese in the United States are given the right to become naturalized citizens, although ethnic Chinese in America were still prohibited from owning property or businesses. The quota for Chinese immigration is set at 105 people per year.
1965 The Immigration and Nationality Act (Hart-Celler Act) is passed by the 89th United States Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. The law abolishes the quota-based National Origins Formula that had been the basis of U.S. immigration policy since 1921.
Chinatown, like the phoenix, rose from the ashes with a new facade, dreamed up by an American-born Chinese man, built by white architects, looking like a stage-set China that does not exist.
Philip Choy
ACT VII
EXT. CHINATOWN
MING-CHEN WU
Late one night you see him in the kitchen. With Phoebe, both of them sitting on overturned plastic crates, laughing. Wearing one of his shirts from the seventies. So old that it went out of style, came back, went out again. On the verge of coming back around a second time. He was, he is, more handsome than you. In his eighth decade, enough thick, black, straight hair to comb back and across, a clean part on the left side. The way he first learned how Americans did it, watching old film reels in central Taiwan, his home now a distant, watery memory from a Period Piece.
This stranger, your father. Sifu still in there. Flickering in and out. There is a dusky, twilit understanding in his eyes—the gulf inside that he is slowly falling into. His eyes almost a little wet. The gulf between the two of you. Permanent aliens to each other. How many early mornings and late nights has he spent there? Interior Golden Palace. He’s probably seen it reconfigured, repurposed, same flimsy walls, a hundred different stories, five hundred. Same small space. This place preserved as if in amber. Like a museum, a presentation of a time and place that always exist, and never did. A holding cell, purgatory, a vestibule, the anteroom, the waiting room. It’s in the United States, but not quite America. Some trick of geography. The story doesn’t need to change, doesn’t need to evolve. Because it never existed. Better if it doesn’t. Dinner theater without a stage. Playing out the same tired old skit, chopsticks and dragons, Family and Duty, Father and Son. You wondered if it would ever change. You didn’t know then what you know now.
Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll teach you. If she can move freely between worlds, why can’t you? You watch him for a while. You want to reach out and touch his face. Then someone in the front of the house turns on the karaoke machine, testing testing.
“Dad,” Phoebe says. “Are you okay?”
“Yes honey,” you say. “Watch this. A-kong is up next.”
Ming-Chen Wu takes the stage, smiles. Testing, testing, he says, and he clears his throat, ready to sing about home.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This novel has the tremendous good fortune of being published by the many talented and hard-working people at Pantheon, Vintage, and the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, including (but not limited to) the following individuals:
CAST
Cover Designer……………………………Tyler Comrie
Text Designer……………………………Anna Knighton
Production Editor……………………………Kathleen Fridella
Copy Editor……………………………Fred Chase
Proofreader……………………………Chuck Thompson
Publicist……………………………Rose Cronin-Jackman
Marketer……………………………Julianne Clancy
Managing Editor……………………………Altie Karper
Associate Managing Editor………………………Cat Courtade
Publisher Extraordinaire………………………Dan Frank
Fancy Pants Imprint………………………Pantheon Books
Like many indie productions, making this book was a labor of love. There were many moments of frustration and self-doubt. There were also moments of joy, of shared creation and discovery, thanks mostly to the intelligence and care of:
Executive Producer………………………Julie Barer
Executive Producer………………………Josefine Kals
Executive Producer………………………Anna Kaufman
Executive Producer………………………Tim O’Connell
Julie and Tim: this book would literally not exist without your patience, guidance, and extraordinary contributions. (And thanks as well to Nicole Cunningham at The Book Group.)
As evidenced by the epigraphs, certain books were invaluable resources to me in the writing of this novel (in addition to The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman, a book I will keep rereading until I can’t read anymore):
American Chinatown…………………Bonnie Tsui
San Francisco Chinatown…………………Philip Choy
For generous financial support provided during the long, sometimes lean, years between books, I am grateful to:
Santa Monica Artist Fellowship………………………City of Santa Monica
Nathan Birnbaum………………………Cultural Affairs Director
There are certain other people whose support has been essential, both professionally and personally. Having the opportunity to work with people this smart is a privilege, but having them believe in me has been more important than they may realize:
Super Smarty Pants………………………Jason Richman
Super Smarty Pants………………………Mickey Berman
Super Smart
y Pants………………………Mark Ceryak
Super Smarty Pants………………………David Levine
Super Smarty Pants………………………Katy Rozelle
Super Smarty Pants………………………Howie Sanders
The people whose lives and love inspire and motivate me to write:
Mom………………………………………Betty Lin Yu
Dad………………………………………Jin Yu
Daughter…………………………………Sophia Yu
Son……………………………………Dylan Yu
Father-in-law……………………………………Val Jue
The Real Star of the Show…………………Michelle Jue
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CHARLES YU is the author of three previous books, including How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, which was a New York Times Notable Book and named one of the best books of the year by Time magazine. He received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award and has been nominated for two WGA awards for his work in television, which includes writing for shows on HBO, AMC, and FX. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Believer, and Wired, among other publications. Yu lives in southern California with his family.
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