Interior Chinatown

“To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest.”

4/5. This book is probably best read as only semi-fiction. There really isn't much of a plot, and what plot there is really just functioning as an expansive metaphor for the place that Asian-Americans have in American society today. When taken in this light, this book does have a lot of really sharp and provocative insights into the Asian-American experience, the glass ceilings and the box that society continually puts them in.

“You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.”

Black and White

“Chinatown and indeed being Chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning, a construction, a performance of features, gestures, culture, and exoticism. ... Figuring out the show, finding our place in it, which was the background, as scenery, as nonspeaking players. Figuring out what you're allowed to say. Above all, trying to never, ever offend.”

“The two words: Asian Guy. ... Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here. Who you are. All you are. Your most salient feature, overshadowing any other feature about you, making irrelevant any other characteristic. Both necessary and sufficient for a complete definition of your identity: Asian. Guy.”

”... while your community's experience in the Uniteed States has included racism on the personal and the institutional levels... you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent... Your oppression is second-class.”

“Why doesn't this face register as American? Is it because we make the story too complicated? ... If we haven't cracked the code of what it's like to be inside this face, then how can we explain it to anyone else?”