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

This article analyzes Charles Yu's novel *Interior Chinatown* (2020) as a critical intervention at the intersection of Asian American literary history and neoliberal cultural critique. It argues that Yu exposes how neoliberal multiculturalism transforms Asian American bodies into commodified, fungible units of human capital through disciplinary scripts of adaptability and resilience, tracing this dynamic from historical exclusion laws to contemporary diversity commodification. The protagonist Willis Wu's progression from stereotypical roles to "Kung Fu Guy" dramatizes the market-driven performance of racial identity, while recurring "plenitude fantasies"—fatherhood, hybridity, familism, ethnic community, and diasporic nostalgia—are shown to promise relief from alienation but ultimately reinforce neoliberal market logic. Embracing alienation as an ethical resource, the novel proposes a public solidarity based on mutual estrangement rather than shared identity, offering a blueprint for resisting the commodification of difference and reclaiming Asian American literary discourse as a site of political possibility.