Performing the Neoliberal Body: Alienation, Plenitude Fantasies, and the Ethics of the Public in Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown

This article situates Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown (2020) at the nexus of Asian American literary history and neoliberal cultural critique. Reading the novel through Lacanian psychoanalysis and neoliberal theory, it demonstrates how Yu exposes the disciplinary scripts of adaptability and resilience that convert Asian bodies into fungible units of human capital under neoliberal multiculturalism. By tracing a genealogy from the Page and Chinese Exclusion Acts, through the Cold War “model minority” myth, to the twenty-first-century commodification of diversity, the essay shows how Willis Wu’s ascent from “Background Oriental Male” to “Kung Fu Guy” dramatizes the conversion of racial identity into marketable performance. The analysis foregrounds five recurring “plenitude fantasies”—fatherhood, hybridity, familism, ethnic community, and diasporic nostalgia—that promise to cure alienation yet merely reiterate its structural impossibility and rehearse neoliberal multiculturalism’s market logic. Embracing alienation as an ethical resource, the novel gestures toward a public solidarity grounded not in shared identity but in mutual estrangement. In so doing, Yu offers a critical blueprint for resisting the commodification of difference and for reclaiming Asian American literary discourse as a site of political possibility.