Interior Chinatown

Author:: Charles Yu Full Title:: Interior Chinatown Tags:#media/book

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* Highlights first synced by Readwise 2021-01-06

• First, you have to work your way up. Starting from the bottom, it goes: 5. Background Oriental Male 4. Dead Asian Man 3. Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy 2. Generic Asian Man Number Two/Waiter 1. Generic Asian Man Number One and then if you make it that far (hardly anyone does) you get stuck at Number One for a while and hope and pray for the light to find you and that when it does you’ll have something to say and when you say that something it will come out just right and have everyone in Black and White turning their heads saying wow who is that, that is not just some Generic Asian Man, that is a star, maybe not a real, regular star, let’s not get crazy, we’re talking about Chinatown here, but perhaps a Very Special Guest Star, which for your people is the ceiling, is the terminal, ultimate, exalted position for any Asian working in this world, the thing every Oriental Male dreams of when he’s in the Background, trying to blend in. Kung Fu Guy. (Location 106)
• All you want is for him to make that face, the one that looks like internal distress possibly of a gastrointestinal nature but actually indicates something closer to Deeply Repressed Secret Pride Honorable Father Has for His Young but Promising Son; (Location 127)
• a half-eaten pear under the Formica table, there since the day after your last visit, having dropped and rolled to a stop right in that very spot, left to slowly rot, the gentle descent into squalor not a function of sloth but simple, physical inability. (Location 181)
• The apologies, the true sign—that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is. (Location 184)
• But the old parts are always underneath. Layers upon layers, accumulating. Which was the problem. No one in Chinatown able to separate the past from the present, always seeing in him (and in each other, in yourselves), all of his former incarnations, the characters he’d played in your minds long after the parts had ended. (Location 206)
• The reality being that they’d lost the plot somewhere along the way, their once great romance spun into a period piece, into an immigrant family story, and then into a story about two people trying to get by. And it was just that: getting by. Barely, and no more. Because they’d also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty. Also without anyone noticing. (Location 212)
• But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. (Location 216)
• Being on this side of it means that time becomes your enemy. You don’t grind the day—the day grinds you. With the passing of every month your embarrassment compounds, accumulates with the inevitability of a simple arithmetic truth. X is less than Y, and there’s nothing to be done about that. (Location 220)
• a young man’s dignity replaced by a newly acquired clumsiness, the hands and mouth and belly knowing what the heart and head had not yet come to terms with: hunger. Nothing like an empty stomach to remind you what you are. (Location 232)
• Even if Older Brother were not actually a real person, he would still be the most important character in some yet-to-be-conceived-story of Chinatown. Would still be real in everyone’s minds and hearts, the mythical Asian American man, the ideal mix of assimilated and authentic. (Location 306)
• Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White. (Location 320)
• There’s just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it’s just easier to keep it how we have it. (Location 382)
• inter-window messaging system for the building, which works in real time and is lower than the lowest of tech—basically you point your face in the general direction of the person you want to communicate with and you yell at them what you want them to know. Somehow, despite the cacophony (or because of it) your recipient usually gets the message. (Location 448)
• A room isn’t a layout, a footprint, it’s a space, a volume, and when you start to understand that, you can’t believe how much volume there is in here. You hang things, and you hang things on those things. You stack and pile and cram, you make use of every available cubic unit of your life, not just a floor plan or a schematic. You find hidden spaces within a hollow object, a hamper or a laundry basket, a box of dried tea leaves, a cookie tin, things inside things inside things.) (Location 511)
• Kung Fu Guy is the pinnacle. How could anyone be more? (Location 562)
• as if nothing matters because nothing does matter because the idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived. You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country. (Location 576)
• As, everyone knows, water hates poor people. Given the opportunity, water will always find a way to make poor people miserable, typically at the worst time possible. (Location 609)
• Treating the broken, the inexpensive, the humblest of possessions with dignity, just as Old Fong had taught him to do. (Location 652)
• Has he forgotten you’re back here, or does he just not care? The latter, you think. Young Fong isn’t performing for twelve million people a week, or even twelve, by this point the rest of the SRO’s inhabitants having mostly drifted away. (Location 654)
• by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home. (Location 673)
• Kung fu master to fry cook, the easiest transition in the world. Change wardrobe, hair, a career forgotten. A lifetime repurposed. A kind of amnesia that he has internalized, a fog of amnesia that hangs over this whole place. (Location 876) ^WRihzDNS1
• The texture of everyday actions, simple movements and gestures, is harder than it looks. The great shame of your life that you can’t speak his language, not really, not fluently. (Location 884)
• But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing. (Location 1398)
• There are a few years when you make almost all of your important memories. And then you spend the next few decades reliving them. (Location 1520)
• She says that telling a love story is something one person does. Being in love takes both of them. Putting her on a pedestal is just a different way of being alone. (Location 1656)
• You got exactly what you wanted. Didn’t you? Or did they give it to you. The thing you thought you wanted. The role of a lifetime is one you can never bring yourself to quit. Karen was right: you are trapped. Doing well is the trap. A different kind, but still a trap. Because you’re still in a show that doesn’t have a role for you. (Location 1752)
• Watching her is like finding old letters, of things you knew thirty years ago and haven’t thought of since. How to feel, how to be yourself. Not how to perform or act. How to be. (Location 1895)
• But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category. (Location 2363)
• By imagining that no one wants us, that all others are so different from us, we’re privileging our own point of view. (Location 2368)
• 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. (Location 2379)