3.5
Interior Chinatown
ByPublisher Description
NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • 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.
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.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communities3118 Reviews
3.5
Caitlin Vivian
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Change and growDiverse representationLikeableMinor characters stand outMultilayeredOriginalClever plottingFast-pacedNonlinear narrativeAtmosphericGrittyMagicalRealisticSetting fits the storySurrealUnique locationDescriptiveEasy to readFunnyOriginalWittyCaptivatingEngagingThought-provokingTimelyEasy to followFlows wellClearConciseEasy to readEffective visualsEngagingFunnyStylistically uniqueRacism
asha
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Bailey
Created about 18 hours agoShare
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jenuine
Created 1 day agoShare
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“I think this book was alright considering I had high expectations. While I appreciate the ingenuity of the format as a script and how cleverly it depicts the loneliness and lack of opportunities that typically accompany the migrant experience and the cycle of disadvantage, the satire didn’t hit the mark for me. I’m not sure if it’s because I don’t understand the American experience thoroughly enough, or that my local Chinatown is NOT actually where Asians live and breathe, or that those community spaces are no longer ghettoes, or that the main character kept changing roles so while you feel for their circumstances and the part they have to play in society to survive but you don’t actually learn much about the characters or who they are. After all, they are archetypes. Their personality can be summed up into the 3 words that make up their name when the credits roll. While this book focuses more on the Asian-American experience in general, I think “The Whitewash” was a funnier, sharper and more nuanced take on Asian representation and experiences in Western society, centered on film.”
Jen Z
Created 2 days agoShare
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About Charles Yu
CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents.
Other books by Charles Yu
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