Anonymous Jumping Upstairs Neighbor

a review of Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

There are only so many hours in the day and no one tells you how much time to spend on introspection. And what counts as introspection? Journaling about desires, surely (which is not something I do anymore, because any desires I once had have been extinguished like a spent Winter Balsam Yankee Candle). What about scrolling through the profiles of insta-baddies and thinking “If aliens came down to earth (likely) they would not even believe me and this 21 year old were the same species?”  Contemplating a shower? Anything that comes before the words “I pondered”?

I am constantly moshing around my own mind, like it’s a Girl Talk concert at Perry’s. When I spend too much time thinking about myself, I start to worry I’m not a Female Protagonist but a  Funny Best Friend or just like, that girl journaling in the some independent coffee shop b-roll. Or worse than anonymity, what if I’m Bizarre Bratty Enemy. I was working out in my top floor apartment, where I am truly ALL OF THE TIME,  doing a sequence that was essentially JV soccer practice on a yoga mat. Between high knees and squat jumps and that inside outside feet thing that they do in Gatorade commercials, I was realized who I really was: Anonymous Jumping Upstairs Neighbor.  

Weirdly this is me doing JV soccer drills in my top floor apartment in a desperate quest for endorphins.

Willis Wu is the protagonist of Interior Chinatown but Generic Asian Man to everyone else, including himself. Everyday events take on a low-budget, cinematic quality because it’s written like a screenplay. I don’t really understand why people on Good Reads use the word “disturbing” like it’s a bad thing… good art makes you uncomfortable, babe (which begs the question, is the meat-themed erotica I wrote in the body of an iMessage good art? Because it definitely makes the reader uncomfortable).

Yu bequeaths us a wonderful gift: a title with multiple meanings. Unlike our Dying for an iPhone? friends he doesn’t need to erect a literary billboard to explain it. To what extent is our understanding of the who we are shaded irreparably by how we’re seen by the outside world? Should I start a lucrative, plagiarism-based business writing English papers for high schoolers? The answers to both questions are not clear cut.