ABSTRACT
Charles Yu’s novel Interior Chinatown (2020) and Sally Wen Mao’s poetry collection Oculus (2019) each investigate the rich lineage and liminal archive that lies behind the stereotype of Asian Americans in Hollywood’s studio system. Charting this genealogy is valuable because it tracks Asian American narrative from deprivation and to new stories, presenting an optimistic counternarrative away from the historical confines of the past. Collectively, these two works of Asian American literature mark the failure of liberal-capitalist progress, what Lauren Berlant calls the fantasy “by which people hoard idealizing theories and tableaux about how they and the world ‘add up to something’” (2011, 2). The fungibility of Interior Chinatown and Oculus allow Yu and Mao to frame their narrative avatars as critiques of Asian American performativity par excellence, so that the rebelliousness of their hermeneutic—which spoils the conventional archetype of individual progress as representative of a larger systemic racial progress—ultimately resists indulging the Hollywood model in favor of broader coalitions of multiracial reciprocity and reconciliation.
