daricommons

[daricommons]

19. Interior Chinatown (Charles Yu)

Finished this today! It's a short, slightly on-the-nose book about being Asian American, about the barriers and constraints placed upon us from the outside (government, white society, capitalism), but also about the constraints we place on ourselves from within (hence INTERIOR chinatown).

It's written from the perspective of a struggling actor and blurs the line between his stereotypical acting roles (generic asian man #3, kung fu guy, etc.) and his societal role as an Asian in America(yellow, in a world of black and white). And the blurring of that line is done so creatively, it's so much fun. It's also sad and relatable, and although none of it felt ground-breaking, it did make me feel very very seen.

[daricommons]

That’s how them demons work. How them ghosts follow you around. Be proud you gone out and faced him straight on. Ain’t everyone brave enough for that. But you should know it ain’t gonna change nothing. You still gotta get up each morning. Still gotta settle down each night.

[daricommons]

The present thunders on while the past is a wound untended, unstitched, felt but never healed.

[daricommons]

And perhaps that was the great ill of the world, that those prone to evil were left untouched by guilt to a degree so vast that they might sleep through a storm, while better men, conscience-stained men, lay awake as though that very storm persisted unyieldingly in the furthest reaches of their soul.

[daricommons]

Old Ox was no longer home. None of this was. Even the cabin had the air of the unfamiliar. He’d swear to his room being smaller, and the passageway leading to the stairs tighter. It was as though the space, in his absence, had begun to shape itself to the contours of his parents, having forgotten the child who’d wandered off. In his heart, though, he knew the house hadn’t shrunk. He’d simply learned how immense the world was. Probably any man who returned to his boyhood would discover the exact same phenomenon.

[daricommons]

“You’re wrong,” Isabelle said, and put her hand in the air. “There’s nothing to apologize for because you’re simply wrong in your accusation. You don’t have a clue how I feel. You might stifle your hurt, but that doesn’t reflect why I went to Selby. Any pain I have is not to be hidden. It’s a point of strength. And I will do good with it. A goal so esteemed as to help an innocent man wrongly accused—well, your apology would only tarnish the undertaking.”

[daricommons]

This man was an individual, Prentiss now saw, entirely different from himself. It wasn’t his cunning, or the evil coursing through him, but his confidence—the surfeit of knowledge in his broad smile, which indicated that although his son had been accused of a cold-blooded murder, everything in the world was aligned to ease his livelihood, no matter who, or what, got in the way.

[daricommons]

He could make it a task to sit in bed for ten hours straight, without moving a single toe, yet he would still somehow exhaust himself by the work. It was unbelievable, yet it was so.

[daricommons]

“My duty?” Glass said, incredulous. “I doubt you have the faintest clue what my duty is. The very definition of the word is beyond you, as it is for so many men who come from so much and need so little from those around them.

[daricommons]

For so long Landry had been the focus of his dreams, his world, and Prentiss felt there was a selfishness in his brother’s sudden absence, as though rather than truly dying, Landry had been set free, only to leave Prentiss in the horror of living without the very person who had made doing so worthwhile.

[daricommons]

the language of grief was often nothing more than silence.

[daricommons]

How else to explain a world of cruelty that had also carried in it the great joy of watching his mother at the mercy of Little James’s fiddle on a Sunday afternoon, the miracle of a fresh tick mattress, the sweetness of water after a day spent picking in the fields?

[daricommons]

That was the beauty of nature—it was always a step ahead, privy to a joke he did not know, a riddle with no answer.

[daricommons]

His footsteps on the stairwell, his knock on Caleb’s door, his invitation to eat: it had all reached her as a disappointment; the boy she wanted to see, the one who might mend her heart, would never appear there again. And if that was so, why had he ever thought she’d open the door at all?

[daricommons]

His love had never been gracious, and he had no means to recognize what Isabelle might require of him—the necessities of her grief.

[daricommons]

Their mother would say that Landry had once been full, and then halved, until he was inevitably left in so many bits she could not piece together the boy she’d once called her own.

[daricommons]

envisioning the worst possible thing isn’t the same as being protected against it.