What a weird little book. It kind of reads like an extended fever dream from a guy trying to make it as a king Fu master in TV and movies, ala Bruce Lee. I couldn't really tell you a sequence of events that happens; it's more a collection of often exaggerated snippets of events, sometimes told in screenplay style.

I think the main character (some Asian guy ... gah, sorry for that one!!!) lives in an apartment building over a Chinese restaurant which is often used as a set for cheap TV crime shows. The running joke is that they are all random Asians, not regulars but just background. They are always foreigners, no matter how many decades their families have lived in America. And if their character is killed during the show, then it's fine for the to be recast as some other Asian guy in six weeks; no one will remember them that long anyway.

The big theme here is that permanent, inescapable label of "foreigner" that Asians often get. And they feel like they can't quite complain, since at least they haven't had it as hard as the blacks.

I thought this quote about another character actor was a perfect encapsulation of the theme: "The Emperor's job was to present these plastic trays of steaming delicacies to a family of blond people somewhere in the middle of America, and then bow to them, while off-screen, in the shadows, a gong sounded (and further off-screen, in the mists of history, you could hear the collective weeping of a civilization going back five thousand years.)"

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