Author Charles Yu talks about latest book, ‘Interior Chinatown,’ at Portland’s Ida B. Wells High School

Charles Yu has written a lot about the nature of reality, how we understand what is real, and the assumptions we make about each other and the universe we live in. Yu’s first novel, “How to live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” follows a time machine repairman who is searching for his father who is lost in time and memory. His latest book, National Book Award winning “Interior Chinatown,” takes place in a Chinese restaurant that’s also the set for a police procedural TV show and a sendup of stereotypes of Asian American characters. Yu talks to us in front of an audience of students from Ida B. Wells High School.

The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We’re coming to you today in front of an audience at Portland’s Ida B. Wells High School. We are spending the hour with the writer Charles Yu. [Applause]

Charles Yu has a knack for carefully constructing worlds and then breaking them apart to show us deeper truths about the way realities and our own identities are constructed. A novel about time travel tells us painful truths about our longings in the present. A novel as a screenplay of a TV show turns into a weird and wise and funny exploration of race in America. And a story in the form of a physics problem yields insights about the beginning and the possible end of a romantic relationship. His most recent novel, “Interior Chinatown,” won a 2020 national book award. Charles Yu, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Charles Yu: Thanks so much, Dave.

Miller: We’re in a high school, so I can’t help but ask this question to start with: what was high school like for you?

Yu: It’s pretty scary. I remember spending some lunches where I would just walk around pretending I had somewhere to be because, I don’t know, I had friends but I was sort of always scared to go eat with them for some reason. Now I have two high school kids of my own, and I don’t think they would give up their lunch to watch me talk, so I thank all of you for being here. This is very exciting. Also still a little scary, weirdly. I still have those weird high school anxiety dreams where I’m back at school and either not wearing pants, or the test was today and I didn’t study for it.

Miller: Was the fear then, and the fear now, of not fitting in? I mean, what do you think was behind it?

Yu: I don’t know. I mean, yes, I think that it boils down to not fitting in, just sort of feeling like people might not like me, or I don’t know where I belong. Am I in the right group? I’m not sure exactly where that came from, but I think it’s probably pretty natural for that time of life.

Miller: Yeah. You mentioned you have high school age kids right now. One of the themes, certainly in “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” but in others as well, is the kind of superimposition of memories and time, and of loops and repetitions. Has having kids who are now high schoolers, has that changed the way you think about your own high school time?

Yu: Yes, I think so. One, in some ways it feels like things don’t change that much. I still see them going through the same kinds of things I did: the first crush or first relationship, first heartbreak, but also the excitement of things. Obviously, things are different in terms of culture, and how much information they have access to, and how they connect with other people. That’s very different. But I think that what it sort of does for me is, knowing what I know, and being their dad, I try really hard not to impose what I had to go through and the mistakes I had to make. I just have to let them go through it, because I think that’s the only way they’re really going to understand what it really means to grow up. Someone can tell you something 100 times, but you’re not going to believe it till you actually do it.

Miller: We’re also in a library here surrounded by books, some of them yours, many of them, most of them, not yours. What were the books that really impacted you when you were this age? When you were 16, 17, 18 [years old]?

Yu: I definitely read a lot of books; I remember reading “Crime and Punishment” for AP English as a senior. I was like, “this is a very intense book,” you know? I remember reading short stories in 10th grade English, Hemingway and Steinbeck novels. I think all the sort of classics back then were obviously classics for a reason, but the things I really remember were reading science fiction or comics on my own. I read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” series, which was this big epic thing that’s now on Apple as a TV show, if anyone’s seen that. That’s kind of the stuff that got me excited, reading sci-fi and fantasy on my own.

Miller: We are in front of an audience of students, many of them, maybe most of whom, have read your latest novel, “Interior Chinatown.” For listeners who haven’t read it, can you just describe the central premise?

Yu: Yeah. The central premise: the protagonist of the book is Willis Wu, who is a background Asian man, and he exists in this kind of strange reality where he basically is on a TV show, but the TV show is reality and reality is a TV show. The main story of the book is that Willis starts as “Generic Asian Man Number Three,” which is very low on the kind of ladder of roles, and eventually progresses to become a star of the story, and in the course of that he learns a lot about himself, he learns about others, and he learns about sort of the roles that he will need to play in his life in order to be a good son, father, partner. It’s basically the story of this guy growing up.

Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What’s your name? And what’s your question?

Era [audience member]: My name’s Era, and my question is, is Willis unintentionally adhering to the stereotypes expected of him, thinking it will get him higher up the ladder to escape stereotypes?

Yu: That’s a great question. I mean, I don’t want to do the author thing of “What do you think?” I’ll try to give you an answer, but I’d also want to stress that my answer, even though I wrote the book, is not necessarily the right answer, because I think once you put something out in the world, you don’t always necessarily have a privileged access to it anymore. But I would say it’s a really good question, because it’s perceptive in the sense that yes, I think it’s very tricky, because he knows that the stereotypes will get him further, at least at first, and that people are going to be more comfortable if they can put him in a label or in a role that they understand. So whether consciously or unconsciously, I think Willis sort of adopts certain behaviors or makes certain choices that do lean into those stereotypes at times.

Miller: Well, if you don’t want to be in the position of saying, “What do you think,” I can do that. What made you want to ask that question?

Era [audience member]: I don’t know, because I just saw that there were a lot of roles that everyone was fitting into, there’s certain things that people expected of them, like you’re expected to do this, so I will act this way, kind of.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience, and I’m going to give our executive producer time to move around. Go ahead.

Kira [audience member]: My name is Kira and my question is, how do you think Asian American representation has changed in Hollywood in the last few years? Do you think we’re making progress in representation?

Yu: Great, great question. Yes, I think it’s changed a lot, even from the time that I published the book four years ago. It’s changed from the time when I started writing the book, which is 10 years ago or so. It’s definitely changed, to the point where there was a moment in 2018 when the movie “Crazy Rich Asians” came out. I don’t know if any of you have seen it, but it really felt like a big deal at the time. I’m of an age where I grew up seeing very, very rarely a movie of that scale, or a show of that scale, that really broke through in the mainstream in a big way, and it felt like this might actually change things. I actually think, not just from one movie, but it was the right thing at the right time, and it was the beginning of a lot more Asian American representation in TV and film. That’s really encouraging, it’s really exciting.

I think we’re still pretty early on in that expansion, and so I think there are still a lot of things to explore and a lot of stories to tell. But it’s really cool, to the point where my kids, I think they recognize that it’s still pretty special to see faces like theirs on screen, but they also don’t fully appreciate how novel it actually is, because they’re 16 and 14. They’ve grown up in an age where it’s not as shocking, whereas for someone my age, it’s still a little bit weird. It’ll always probably be a little bit weird.

Miller: How have you handled that, as a father? You’d mentioned earlier that, in terms of lessons, there’s a limit to how much you can just give a lesson, people have to just get them. I don’t imagine that you want to dwell on the fact that, or maybe you do want to say, “You don’t understand how different this is than in my childhood, what I saw when I turned on my three channels.” How much do you talk about that?

Yu: A little bit. I try to gauge them based on whether or not they’re checked out or not. If they’re looking at their phones, I’ll save it. Also I’d say, I generally try not to. I think they sort of know it. They’re very perceptive, and I have to remember they’re probably much better at consuming media and being aware of these things than I am. I’m sure they are. I think like the amount of discussion and discourse that’s out there, they get all of that. They know nuances of things that I’m probably pretty basic about, to be honest. I’m not saying it’s all right, everything they learn on TikTok. I definitely have to try to balance that with a dad’s perspective, a parent’s perspective, but I try not to be a person who’s lecturing them too much because I think they’re gonna know it.

They’re gonna either learn it or not, and it’ll mean more when they get out of their bubble. We live in this suburb that’s very safe and sterile, and once they get out, go to college or whatever, they’ll probably come back and say, “Oh, I get it now.” So I’m hoping.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Audience Member: Is Chinatown a metaphorical portrayal of cultural assimilation cap?

Yu: Yes. Great question. I think of it as a psychological Chinatown. It’s a mix of several actual Chinatowns, but it’s also its own thing altogether, and I think of it as the place in my head where, at least for me growing up, this weird space that Asian and Asian Americans sort of occupied in America, which is floating in the background, like you’re sort of there but you’re not there, and the story is not really centered on you. To me, that’s where the title of the book really kind of comes from.

Miller: We’ve been talking about your most recent novel, but I was actually wondering if you could read something from “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe,” because there are some interesting resonances for me. The central character of your first novel is a time travel technician, and in the excerpt we’re gonna hear when he was a kid, his father, who was an immigrant and an engineer, was always tinkering in their garage, sort of struggling, toiling, and he’s just explained to his kid, “Hey, what I’m working on is actually a time machine.”

Yu: OK. So I will read from this book, “How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.”

[Reading excerpt]: “As he described his invention to me, I found it hard to look at him. He was talking a little too loud, for one thing, which, if you knew my father, was alarming all by itself. My father was quiet, but not meek, soft-spoken but not unsure. It was more than that. Quiet speaking was more than just a controlled softness of the voice, more than the virtues of decorum and tact and propriety. Quiet speaking was more than manners, or a personal preference or style, or personality in total. It was a way of moving about the world, my father’s way of moving through the world. It was a survival strategy for a recent immigrant to a new continent of opportunity, a land of possibility, to the science fictional area where he had come, on scholarship, with nothing to his name but a small green suitcase, a lamp that his aunt gave him, and fifty dollars, which became forty-seven after exchanging currency at the airport.

“And here he was, voice raw, talking fast, excited in a way that made me uncomfortable, hopeful in a way that worried me. I didn’t believe it, or maybe I didn’t believe in him. Maybe I’d absorbed enough defeat in my short life from watching him, the look on his face as he pulled into the driveway every night, that I already doubted my own father. I thought he was brilliant, of course, he was my father and a hero, but would the world understand him? Would the world give him what he deserved? There were opposing vectors, stress from the tensors pulling between what was and what could be, between his science fictional hopes and the reality of the station wagon we were sitting in.”

Miller: You made a choice in that first novel to tell us that the main character’s father emigrated from what you call, “A far away country, a tiny island in the ocean.” There are some cultural details that you provide about religion or food that may give a little bit more specificity, but you don’t say, for example, that he comes from Taiwan, and I wouldn’t necessarily know that. I mean, I don’t know that he does. Your main character in your next novel does, and there is some specificity in that novel; you talk about New York City and Los Angeles and Tokyo.

I’m curious what went into that decision, to not name where he came from?

Yu: Yeah, that’s a really good question. There’s two parts to the answer. I think there’s a creative choice, and probably a personal choice. The creative choice, the impulse was, if I say Taiwan, one, it is so specific that it may pull the reader out of it momentarily and say, “Oh, I’m reading a story about a very specific family,” [it] kind of de-generalizes the experience, potentially. So as I’m telling the story, I’m just trying to balance how to tell this with enough specificity that it feels real and lived in, but not so much that it ties it to any one particular experience. That’s what’s in my head. I’m not saying that’s a rule, or prescriptive in any way.

But I think where that choice actually came from, and this is the personal reason, was a fear that it would expose too much personally. My parents are immigrants from Taiwan. One, I wondered how they would feel; there’s already some autobiographical basis for some of it. Also, I was afraid, would people care as much? Would they think, “Oh, I don’t care about this very specific story about immigrants from Taiwan.” And I think that actually in some ways led to me writing Interior China ten years later, is that struggle in myself, of thinking, “Is my story interesting enough? Is my parents’ story interesting enough? And is this fictionalized version of it? Do I need to kind of make it more interesting in order for it to be worthy of being in a novel?”

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Colin Wigman [audience member]: Hi, my name is Colin Wigman, and my question is, how do you think representation differs between Asian people in media and queer Asian people in media?

Yu: That’s a great question, Colin. I don’t know that I’m super equipped to talk at length about it. I feel like there’s probably still overall proportionately less representation of queer Asian people in the media, for one thing, so there tends to be more focus or pressure when you see the few representations there are. Probably because of that, it’s often still to some extent broader, because just by virtue of numbers, there’s less variety. Talking from the inside, too, when you are writing a character that you don’t get to see that much on TV, or film, often you want that character to stand for so many things, and it can be too much to put on any one character.

Then there’s also just the reality of making TV and film; a lot of times there are compromises that happen creatively. It can have the effect of leaning into stereotypes, or relying on [perceived] representations or notions of people, rather than getting into really nuanced and specific portrayals of people. But I think, for both, there has been progress, and I think there will continue to be. So I’m very encouraged.

Miller: Both of the novels that we’ve talked about so far, they are a lot of things, but they could, if you boil them down and look and sort of squint your eyes a little bit, be read as explorations of the way our jobs define us. What interests you in the question of work and professions?

Yu: My parents both worked their whole lives, their whole careers, and they worked really hard. They weren’t home a lot, and I think that probably had its first effect on me as the idea of like, oh, this is what you do. When you get to a certain age, you go to an office and you sit there, and you come back, and you’re really tired.

Miller: It’s a grind. It takes you away from home, and it’s necessary.

Yu: All of that, and I would add to that one other thing, which is, I think for them, there was also an aspect of cultural assimilation because they were immigrants, they speak with accents. I think that culturally, they had to learn the rules, not just of being in that workplace, but being Americans in that workplace, and I think that sort of performance has always interested me. It’s influenced not just “Interior Chinatown,” but other stories I’ve written, where I think I constantly look at things as a kind of performance. Everyday life, there are interactions where, on some level, you are putting on some version of yourself.

Miller: It’s almost like a profession as code switching.

Yu: Yes.

Miller: You were a lawyer, to make it specific. For ten-plus years, you were a corporate lawyer, while you wrote some of your first books. At that time, what was your self conception? Was it a lawyer who wrote? A writer who lawyered? Neither?

Yu: My self conception was definitely not as a lawyer. It was someone who didn’t belong, like, “I am not a grown up and these are grown ups,” like, “10 minutes ago I was a student and now suddenly I’m wearing slacks and people twice my age are paying a lot of money for my advice.” They’re not paying me personally, but they’re paying my firm, and that was weird because I think my first kind of code switching was like code switching to be a responsible adult, which I didn’t feel like at the time.

Miller: How likely do you think it is that most people you are encountering, even in those scenarios, were also thinking the same thing?

Yu: I mean, in retrospect, probably a lot of us were.

Miller: I guess another way for me to think about it is that maybe the ones who didn’t think they were putting on a costume, are the ones we should really worry about. The ones whose identity truly simply was, “lawyer person.”

Yu: Yeah, like they were a baby, but somehow already a lawyer.

Miller: Yeah. You went from being a lawyer as your day job, to being a “Westworld” TV writer as your day job. Partly, you’ve said, because you wanted to be a writer, but with health insurance. This is America, and so we have to think about health insurance when we think about career choices. What was the beginning of that transition? Like when you arrived in the writer’s room, and that was your job instead of doing mergers and acquisitions, or whatever corporate law stuff you were doing?

Yu: Yeah, it was really bizarre. I took a few weeks off but it was really like, I got a call one day. I was sitting in my office and I got an interview, and I met with the showrunners of the show, and I got the job. Then the next month I was there at Warner Brothers lot, just having lunch, and it was really weird. Then my job went from talking about very dry legal things to just talking about a story all day, talking about characters, and getting to do research and have fun and talk, a lot of free snacks. It was pretty cool.

Then it became a really hard job, to be honest; there were really long hours and there was actually a lot of pressure to get things right. At least with a lawyer, you turn the thing in and, I don’t know if there’s a right answer or a wrong answer, but you kind of know when your work is done. Whereas with this creative job, it’s much more subjective. You don’t know if you’ve hit the mark or not, there’s always the chance that someone will come back and say, “Nope, do better.”

Miller: It seems like even this dream job in a sense, it was also a grind. It was also a job.

Yu: It was, yeah. It is, it remains a job. Still doing it.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience.

Luke [audience member]: I’m Luke, and my question is, what inspired you to choose the screenplay format in “Interior Chinatown,” and what is your intended effect with it?

Yu: Yeah, thanks. Great questions. What inspired me was that I had started working in TV at that time. If I wanted to write a story about Willis as performing being an Asian, performing who he is, writing it in a script format gave me as the writer, but also gave the reader I think, a very easy visual distinction to know when you’re in the story and when you’re not in the story, when you’re in Willis’s personal life. I needed that device to be able to jump back and forth, if that makes sense. What was the second part of your question?

Miller: The other part is, for listeners at home, what’s your intended effect with it?

Yu: The intended effect is one, to keep it more fun, to not be reading whole passages where I’m describing it, but I can just show, look, there’s this world he wants to be part of, and that’s the script world, and there’s the world of his own thoughts, and that’s the regular prose world. It gave me a visual and a conceptual way to distinguish between the two worlds.

Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name? What’s your question?

Henry Taylor [audience member]: Henry Taylor, and I was wondering, how [have] your experiences working in television with “Westworld” influenced your book “Interior Chinatown,” and what other influences helped you create it?

Yu: Thanks. These are all such great questions. It influences a lot. In “Westworld,” if anyone’s seen it as, it has a lot to do with reality and performance, and artificial realities, and also loops, and I think all of those things actually are in “Interior Chinatown.” No doubt, the content informed me. The other thing that was really helpful is, for “Westworld,” for the first season, that writer’s room was just filled with so many super talented people, and I felt super lucky to be learning from all of them. They were all more experienced than I was in TV.

As a fiction writer, I just spend most of my time alone writing and I don’t workshop it with anyone. I don’t show it to anyone, usually, so getting to not just work with other writers but literally watch them go through their own process, I was able to incorporate those voices in my own head and take that with me back to the book and say, not so much, how would so and so write this, but that education was really valuable.

It was also inspiring to be around other people’s creativity, because there’s a tendency, at least for me, to think, oh, this is so hard or such a slog, and it’s not a great mindset. To be lucky enough to get to do something creative is pretty amazing. But then to do it with other people, and always have that energy to feed off of, is really, really invigorating.

Miller: Let’s take one more question. Go ahead.

Emily [audience member]: My name is Emily, and my question is, did Karen have an inspiration? Why was she written the way she was, and did she have an inspiration?

Miller: I should say, Karen is one of the relatively major characters in your new novel.

Yu: Great question. Yes. Roughly, Karen’s inspiration was…from a personal perspective, my wife, whose name is not Karen. Karen for Willis is someone who’s a grown up in a way that he isn’t, and that’s how I felt when I first met my wife. I probably needed to grow up in order to stay with her. I also wanted to investigate, if Willis is obviously the main character of the book, there’s an Asian American male-centric perspective to the book. Necessarily, that’s the one I understand the most, and that I was trying to portray in this book, but I did want to have some variety in terms of being able to portray a very different experience, which I think would be the experience of someone like Karen, who’s a woman and also multiracial and just navigating the world in a different way.

Miller: Let’s take another question from one of our students here.

Beckett [audience member]: My name is Beckett, and my question is, how does it feel for your book, “Interior Chinatown,” to be turned into a TV series?

Yu: Thanks Beckett, good question. It feels weird. It’s like a dream come true, but also scary to potentially bring it to a bigger audience. Also, I’m very involved in the process, so it’s weird to have written a book and taken this long to write it, and then kind of have to do it all over again, because a lot of things that work in the book do not work in a visual medium like television. That’s been really tricky and challenging, but really fun.

Miller: How much can you tell us about how you dealt with what I imagine to be one of the central challenges of [adapting] a book that is a meta narrative? As you’ve already talked about, it is about a TV show that is essentially reality. But how do you turn that into an actual TV show? How do you approach that?

Yu: A lot of trial and error. I took a lot of false starts and dead ends, and even just trying to get to the first script stage.

Miller: When you say that you had to basically start again, it seems like you’re not exaggerating. You had to create a whole new work to make this work, maybe more so than some other adaptations.

Yu: Yes, I think so. I had to take a few swings just to crack the idea, and I will say, it’s not the only way I could have done it. In retrospect, there’s probably things that I would do different, but also this is the way that it evolved, and there’s a lot of reasons for that. I’m excited for people to see it. But yeah, I think you put your finger on it. It’s very tricky to nail that meta aspect, because what you can hold in your mind, it doesn’t translate on screen where you have to see something.

Miller: When’s it gonna be released?

Yu: Don’t know yet. I’m hoping this fall. I’m in the process of basically editing; we’ve shot all of it, and now we’re doing post production on it.

Miller: Let’s take another question. Go ahead.

Suha [audience member]: Hi, my name is Suha, and my question was, how did being a lawyer affect the way you write?

Yu: Great question. I was a pretty lazy high school and college student, I’ll be honest. And I think being a lawyer forced me to be much more precise with my words, and it forced me to really iterate. The idea of sending something to my boss, and then having it come back, and then just doing that over and over again, at first was like, “Oh my God, this is what I’m gonna be doing.” But that actually trained me really well for writing prose, and also TV and film as well, because you just have to do a lot of drafts of things to get them right. It’s not a thing where that’s failure. That’s actually just how you make something better. And I think being a lawyer was actually really good training for that. The subject matter is much more dense, and to me wasn’t as interesting, but it gave me a lot of discipline.

Miller: I heard you say in an interview once that most of what you write bores you. What do you find to be boring? I imagine this was about editing, in a sense. Going back and looking at what you’ve done, what do you find to be the most common things that you’ve written, or that other people write, where you lose interest?

Yu: I mean, when I write it, I lose interest when I feel like I’m being more serious, and I’m just being a little pretentious, or it’s just not coming from a real place. That’s often why I’ll just start to switch it up in terms of the rhythm of a sentence, or just curve the language a little bit, so it’s less straight, a little less serious, it is not taking itself too seriously.

In terms of what I read, I read a lot of stuff that I would, I could, never write. I try to read pretty broadly. I’ll be honest;  a lot of stuff bores me too. Like most TV bores me. I just start it and I’m like, “I don’t want to watch any more of this.”

Miller: Do you stop?

Yu: I definitely stop. There’s too much on. I watch a lot of YouTube now because I’m like, well, it’s three minutes and I can do that. I feel like I might just have a very low threshold for boredom. I also think the internet has probably changed that for me.

The things I look for are often things where there’s, even if it’s not perfect, there’s something raw or real happening where you’re surprised. For me, the opposite of boredom is something just really unexpected, even if it’s weird or not great. That’s what I’m looking for.

Miller: I wonder if you could read us an excerpt from your latest book. This is from near the end of the book; it’s when your main character, Willis, finds himself in a new role as a dad, a sitcom dad, “Kung Fu Dad.” He has not been around his daughter Phoebe much in the past, and now he is putting her to bed.

Yu:  [Reading Excerpt]:

“Phoebe: Can you tell me a story?

Kung Fu Dad: I don’t know how. No one’s ever asked me to.

Phoebe: Can you try?

Kung Fu Dad: Ok, I’ll try. There once was a little girl who was …

“You pause, unsure of what to say next. This is a key point in the story. The next word, and whatever you say after that, will determine a great many things about it, will either open up the story, like a key in a lock in a door to a palace with however many rooms, too many to count, and hallways and stairways and false walls and secret passages, or the next word could be a wall itself, two walls, closing in, it could be limits on where the story could go.

“You searched for the right word, the pressure and expectation from her little face mounting with each millisecond of silence that passes, and it is about to come to your lips and tongue. You’re just about to say it when your daughter turns to you and says, ‘It’s OK, daddy.’’'

Miller: What did you want to explore in that scene?

Yu: Where this comes from is, I have a daughter and a son, and I think a lot of the most honest conversations I’ve ever had, still, a lot of my favorite conversations ever, were just me like half asleep, [when] I’m trying to get my daughter to fall asleep. She was a bad sleeper at first, she’s still a very bad sleeper. But out of those, came these kind of moments of just her surprising me, and her being so much more aware and so much more emotionally present than most adults ever are, than I ever was, kind of waking me up out of my middle aged complacency. What I was exploring was just this relationship, this intimacy and these moments between a parent and a kid, when you can be real with each other. And the hope for Willis as a dad is to try to give his daughter something and ultimately the kids saying, “You don’t have to give me that. We’re here together already and that can be enough.”

Miller: I was also struck by the idea of Willis in that scene as a father as you’re describing but also as a writer or a storyteller, as a kind of author figure who is scared that each word that follows can either simultaneously open a door but also foreclose other possibilities. Do you feel that way yourself, as a writer, that pressure that every choice you make, it closes some doors?

Yu: Yeah, that is ultimately what it comes down to is choices, and you have to close the door, you have to take the path that means you’ve lost other opportunities. But otherwise …

Miller: There’s nothing.

Yu: There’s nothing, yeah. You hit on something else important that I forgot to say, Dave, which is as a parent too, especially when they were younger but even now, I think about I don’t want to infect them with my sort of limitations, like the way I see the world. The last thing I want to do is for them to just see it the way I do because one, I know the limitations of that, and two, they’re different people. I worry I shape them unconsciously, and no doubt a parent does, and that’s part of what we’re supposed to be doing, but I think I also try to be mindful of not doing that too much.

Miller: We were talking earlier about the roles that we play, consciously or not, in various ways. What roles do you feel like you have now, in 2024?

Yu: I don’t know. As someone who’s written books, I get to talk to people that read them, and especially increasingly students, which is really exciting and fun. That’s the most gratifying thing, because when you write this, when I was a student and reading things that really affected me, I imagined someday actually writing something that was the dream, that would affect someone else too, and that would touch them. Whether or not someone likes the book, or even gets it at all, just the idea of having a conversation about it, that’s really exciting. So, I guess one role is as someone who wants to make things and share them with people.

As a dad, my kids are not that far from college or from moving out, so that’s my main role. As a husband and trying to be good, too, as a son. My mom passed away and my dad’s very old. I feel like I shouldn’t say very old, but he is old. I’m starting to think of myself as someone who’s got to take care of him as well. Those are the main roles, I would say. I’m kind of a bad friend. I don’t keep in touch with my friends, so I want to be better at that.

Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. Go ahead.

Calvin Haworth [audience member]: My name is Calvin Haworth. My question is, in “Interior Chinatown,” the main character talks about being trapped. Did you ever feel trapped, or do you still feel trapped, in your career?

Yu: Thanks. It’s a great question. Is your name Kelvin, with a K? Oh, a C. Just wondering. My brother’s name is Kelvin, like K-e-lvin.

I definitely identify with Willis in some ways, in terms of being trapped, feeling trapped. Part of writing the book was the exploration of that mindset. As I’ve adapted it for a TV show and talked to so many other people, I realized not only does it not resonate with some people who have very different experiences, even people who outwardly are similar to me, demographically, don’t all identify with that experience either. And there’s people that are very different from me who do.

I feel like it’s not just about race or a generational thing, but it’s a feeling of being a background character, of being marginalized. That’s something that, for whatever reason, I’ve always identified with. I still do. I think it goes back to what I was saying about being scared of lunch. Just not knowing where I fit in and always having that anxiety is real. I still have that kind of social anxiety. Maybe that’s why I became a writer, because I think ultimately, a writer is an observer from the outside, usually, of an experience or of life.

Miller: We have another question from the audience. Go ahead

Audience Member: Building off of the Willis question, I wanted to ask, is Willis really the main character of “Interior Chinatown,” or is it rather about Chinatown/assimilation/immigrants at large?

Yu: A really good question. Both. I think it’s both, and it really is not a cop out. This goes back to what we’re talking about with specifics and universality of, can you tell a story that’s both? Should a story be very specific or should it be very general? And I think yes. Specificity doesn’t actually detract from the universality. It often helps it, because people say, “Well, I don’t get the particulars of that, but I like them, and that’s interesting to me.” Yet it’s somehow seeing that the commonality underneath the surface differences that actually starts to make the universal part more meaningful.

I really don’t want to approach it through a message, or through larger themes. I hope the theme emerges from the specific story that I’m telling, but when you step back and look at it, it has to work on both levels to have weight for me.

Miller: We have another question. Go ahead.

Colin Wigman [audience member]: I’m Colin Wigman. So I know for me and many others, writing about negative topics can be really difficult emotionally. Do you ever feel that way about your work? And if so, how do you separate yourself from that negativity?

Yu: Yeah, that’s a good question. On some level, I try not to shy away from it. Maybe this question is slightly different than what I’m gonna say, but I feel like it’s often the things that make me uncomfortable or the painful part where I’ll avoid it for a long time, and then the writing will feel somehow shallow or just not hitting the mark, and I’ll realize it’s because I’m trying to skirt the issue and I need to write into the pain, into what’s making me uncomfortable. Sometimes that can feel negative, but if I’m approaching it from a place of honesty, and if I’m just trying to show an experience and not necessarily judge it or characterize it or judge or characterize people, but just tell the emotional truth about it, then I feel like that’s usually where it actually starts to get traction for me emotionally.

Miller: To change subjects greatly, you wrote a fascinating essay for Harper’s Magazine after the 2020 election, where you basically used the science fiction idea of world-building to try to describe support for Donald Trump. Can you first of all just explain what world-building means in this context, what it means in the fictional context?

Yu: Yeah. In big Marvel movies or a big sci-fi show like “Westworld,”  it’s the idea of not just telling the main story or your main characters, but that in a more holistic way, you’d have answers for, “What is the economy like there? What do people do in their free time?” The density and the richness of the world, even when it doesn’t show up in the text or on screen, can all inform the richness of your story. I think that gets categorized as world-building now.

Miller: How is it that this idea helped you understand support for Donald Trump in the aftermath of the election?

Yu: I’m no fan of his in any way, but I think what I was trying to do is understand the particular skill and talent that he has in a slightly different lens, and the way I think of it is that he has ways of … To me, the trick of world building when you’re creating, say, a sci-fi show or a novel, is you suggest things and the reader is doing most of the work. It’s not even 50/50, it’s like 10/90, if you write something and someone is like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And then they’re suddenly writing fanfiction about it, or not, they’re just thinking about your world.

Miller: They fill in the rules or the details based on sort of gestures on the part of the writers.

Yu: Yeah.

Miller: And you think that’s one part of the things that Donald Trump does.

Yu:  I think so. I think what it is is a very incoherent worldview if you actually pieced it together, but the level in which he can evoke feelings, and the longing for a kind of impossible or never-was world in the minds of people that support his policies, that’s what he’s doing, is essentially writing fiction about a reality that a certain segment of people really want to exist.

Miller: With this as your thesis, what is your prescription for how to unravel a world built on lies, but the belief in that world has become central to people’s identity? How do you unravel a world like that?

Yu: If I had an answer, I would be out doing something about it. One very hopeful, probably overly optimistic answer is to tell a better story. I don’t know that that works. I think people have been trying to do it, and people have been doing it, and I don’t know if that works. People have said it better than I’m going to say it, but I think it’s really true; I don’t think it’s necessarily through rational argument or facts. I think it’s clear that you can’t fight the power of that fiction and world-building with a bunch of statistics, no matter how obvious it may seem. What I hope is that it’s a combination of very skilled world-building in a different way, and also reaching people somehow, in their heart on an individual level, rather than messages or propaganda that just bounces off people for the most part, when they feel like, “Oh, I know who the audience for this is and it’s not me.”

Miller: One more big swerve of a question here. To go back to time travel, which we talked about at the very beginning, in “How to Live Safely,” your narrative says that when you get down to it, people want to relive their very worst moments over and over again. These are people who can go anywhere in their lives, and they go to their worst moments. Have you thought about where you would go in your own life, if you could travel forward or backward in time?

Yu: If I had a time machine?

Miller: Yeah.

Yu: This is pretty sappy, but my family and I moved to where we live now, about 10 years ago. And that first year, I remember even just the first moment we came in, walked into our new house and it was totally empty, but it was really exciting for our kids because they now each had their own bedroom, they ran to it. It was pretty nice. We had air conditioning. It’s nice.

Miller: The suburban dream.

Yu: Yeah.

Miller: Charles Yu, it was great talking to you. Thanks very much.

Yu: Thank you, Dave.

Miller: Thanks as well to Cassie Lanzas, the librarian here at Ida B. Wells High School and English teacher, Kevin Kilgour. And to Olivia Jones-Hall from Literary Arts. Thanks in particular to our fantastic student audience here and all the questions that you asked.

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