This paper attempts to analyze Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown through the philosophical lens of Baudrillardian theories of simulacra and hyperreality. According to Baudrillard, the concept of hyperreality explains the loss of distinction between reality and its representation—the loss of distinction between the real and its signifier. I will argue that Chinatown, both in fiction and reality and as a concept, is constructed as a simulation of society, in which the oriental identity and alterity are modeled on the imagined myth of Chinatown. These racial and sociocultural simulations have lost their origins, historically undergoing the theoretical phases of The Precession of the Simulacra, they have completely metamorphosed into a simulacrum. In Yu’s Interior Chinatown, the simulacra of typified oriental identity and alterity are commodified, fetishized, and culturally misappropriated. The simulated stereotyped generic Asian identities are interminably contested against the idealized simulacra of mythologized oriental archetypes. This research traces the developmental phases of such simulations and simulacra of race and identity in America, arguing them to be an inevitable outcome in American society, it being a multiethnic and diasporic empire since its inception.

Index Terms- Simulacra, Simulation, Hyperreality, Chinatown, Asian Stereotypes.