Interior Chinatown

BLACK AND WHITE. Two cops, one of each race. In the opening credits they drive around in a black-and-white police car, even though they're detectives. Which doesn't make sense. Often neither does the plot nor the motivations of the characters, nor the backstory, nor any of it, if you think too hard, which means thinking about it for more than the time spent watching it. but the template works, and you don't mess with a working template.
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Downtown may be gritty and dark and full of evil but on some level an unspoken belief, a faith that we live in a manageable world with its own episodic rule and conventions:

Life takes place one hour at a time.

Clues present themselves in order, one at a time.

Two investigators, properly paired, can solve any mystery.

And there's just something about Asians - their faces, their skin color - it just automatically takes you out of this reality. Forces you to step back and say, Whoa, whoa, what is this? What kind of world are we in? And what are these Asians doing in my cop show?

This is a fairly short novel formatted like a stage play and written in the second person for most of it, which is extremely unusual; the reader is addressed as "you", you being Willis Wu, Generic Asian Man with ambitions to become Special Guest Star and ultimately Kung Fu Master on the recurring cop show Black and White. The story is a little hard to follow at times, partly because of the above and partly because the reality of Willis Wu's life is described along side and often at the same time as the filming of the TV show Black and White, which employs so many of the residents of Chinatown as extras. Willis Wu and his neighbours aspire to roles within the show, but it's also clear they see the same roles being forced upon them in the real world outside the show. So Willis Wu has grown up thinking of himself in terms of roles like Generic Asian Man or Kung Fu Dad whether he's acting in the show or not; and through his eyes we also see how the rest of America expects Asian Americans to fit into the same roles they've learned to expect from TV.Most of the book is a fairly amusing account of Wu's procession through the roles available to Asian men on Black and White, but the cumulation is some very valid questioning about why it is that despite Asians having lived in America for over 200 years, they are still seen as other, not American, and why Chinatowns are still built in so many cities and maintained with exaggerated architecture that doesn't resemble any genuine Asian heritage, for the enjoyment for tourists rather than the preference of the residents. There's no other minority that's so visibly exoticized and othered in quite the same way, and this book does a great job highlighting that but in a very easy to read way.

"He is guilty, Your Honor and ladies and gentlemen of the jury. Guilty of wanting to become a part of something that never wanted him."

This was a really good book, and my first addition to my 2021 favorites shelf. It's less a story and more a narrative framing device used as social commentary about the Chinese American experience. The book follows Willis Wu, "Generic Asian Man", as he describes growing up and wanting so bad to become what he thinks is cool -- Kung Fu Guy from TV and movies. He grows up, fights hard to become what he thinks the ideal Chinese American should be, then discovers that he didn't want that after all.

What I described is only the framework of the book. The real meat and potatoes comes in the form of social commentary about what it means growing up Asian American, both on a personal level and at a societal level. How the roles one plays as an Asian American on television doesn't seem to end when you leave the set, that you always feel like you're performing for your fellow Americans, because they have a set idea of what an Asian American should be and how they should act.

I really liked the point of view this book exposed me to. I found myself thinking a lot about what was said even when not actively reading it. While the storytelling isn't necessarily straightforward, I think the message is.