Excerpts - Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

(A series of my favorite sections, excerpts, and quotes from texts.)

One of the more dynamic books in recent memory has been Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown. Works have utilized the film script formatting before, although perhaps never in such a thematically resonate way as Yu does in his now adapted-for-television novel. This section in particular, where Yu describes the occupancy hosuing where several Chinese families live, really stands out:

“INT. CHINATOWN SRO

Most nights in the SRO you go to bed a little hungry. Which is made worse by having to wait until one or even two in the morning to take a shower, the better to avoid the long wait, people lined up all the way down the hallway and into the stairwell, holding their toothbrushes, towels slung over their shoulders, reading the paper, gossiping, staring at the walls. Nighttime is a battle against boredom and hunger and heat and humidity. By midnight, your stomach’s making all kinds of noises, and it becomes a game to imagine that the various gurgly complaints coming from your abdomen are actually your internal organs’ way of communicating very specific things to you (“How about a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder” or “What if you cooked your shoe?” or “What if you cooked your shoe with some garlic and chili sauce?”). A damp washcloth thrown in the freezer and pulled out later can be a treat, if someone else doesn’t get to it first.

Once in a long while, late-night fever takes hold of the building, spreads down one hallway then up and down the stairwells like wildfire. Frustration boils into indignation which condenses into something like, how funny is this shit? Because at some point, this shit kinda is funny. Someone says to hell with it and digs out from the back of the icebox the flank steak they’re supposed to be saving, throws it into a pan, and fries it up with onions and mushrooms, slices bok choy and ginger and garlic, sizzle and grease and the smell floating down and up and all through the corridor. A teenager turns on some music. Once that gets going, doors start opening until they’re all open, the whole building buzzing until sunrise, 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.”

Excerpt From

Interior Chinatown

Charles Yu