Experimental Meditation on Immigration and Assimilation

 Another great Decemberween gift from Auntie Peg and Uncle Dan:

Author Charles Yu has written for many shows across many prestige channels, as well as being a decorated fiction and non-fiction writer.

This novel is broken up into Acts and uses a font that is used with film scripts. The main character is introduced as Generic Asian Man and described as one would describe a character---a bit character, mind you---in a movie, with even a bit of resume from Willis Wu (as in "Can do 'face of great shame' on command" and "Can speak well with accent").

The action all takes place at the Golden Palace, a Chinese food restaurant with 8 floors of SRO above where all the Generic Asian Men and Pretty Asian Ladies live. Willis aspires to the highest position allotted to his people: "Kung Fu Guy."

At the Golden Palace is a television show in constant production called "Black and White," a buddy cop procedural starring a Black dude and a white lady. Oh, how the lighting on them is always correct. 

Not being the center of one's own story is a major theme, one that many folks, minorities especially, can identify with. Sometimes the action takes place written as prose, like any other novel. Sometimes it follows a script-like written pattern. The inventiveness is part of the charm for me.

Two things specifically I wanted to mention, besides that I really enjoyed it (the experimental nature I find inspiring) are:

1. The concept that the oppression that was/is inflicted on the Asian diaspora in America is such that they feel that because they weren't subjected to enslavement like Black people, their oppression is not as bad, and that they feel self-conscious about complaining about it; they may have had it bad (and they did, as the author lays out some of the laws enacted over the years), but it's just not as bad; and;
2. That "falling in love" is an act one person in involved in, a story a person tells themselves; while "being in love" takes two people and is much harder and way more satisfying.

The love concept, beyond the nailing-it discussion of Asians-in-America oppression, is what stickes with me from this novel.

I really enjoyed it, and would reccommend it.