Interior Chinatown: A Novel (National Book Award Winner) (Vintage Contemporaries)
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER - "A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood" (Vanity Fair) and a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy--the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration--Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
BUY THE BOOK
Community Reviews
Charles Yu has presents us a novel that at its core, is an effort to identify, challenge, and rewrite stereotypes. It’s told using a unique and refreshing voice that captures the immigrant experience. Even more so, it tells the minority experience as a whole. A life of constantly grasping for an identity that is not your own just so you can be seen.
The author goes a layer deeper and adds in the complex dynamics between generations. Relationships made even more fluid by the compounding pressures of western cultural mores. The people we celebrate are diminished before our eyes when we step outside. Everything you work for and achieve has an asterisk next to it to signify achievements by “the other.”
Through our narrator we also get a cynical behind the scenes commentary on the mundane aspects of the entertainment industry. Particularly how the industry exasperates stereotypes. Overall a short and swift story that is rich in details and texture. Yu puts on a writer’s clinic in how careful word selection and pacing paints a complete picture by deploying the reader’s imagination.
273 pages
From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. Every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He's a bit player here too. . . but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the highest aspiration he can imagine for a Chinatown denizen. Or is it?
After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he's ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family, and what that means for him, in today's America.
Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
See why thousands of readers are using Bookclubs to stay connected.