2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER“One of the funniest books of the year. . . . A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire.” —The Washington PostFrom the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.Willis Wu doesn’t … 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.
“Fresh and beautiful. . . . Interior Chinatown represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition.” —The New York Times Book Review
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My book club chose this book and I read it with no expectations. I was blown away by the unique presentation and writing style. Mr. Yu breaks down the wall between character and author, and between actor and person. It takes a little while to fully immerse in the newly-created genre, but once inside the author’s head, it’s a brilliant journey through the angst, fear, heartache, elation, disappointment, and self-examination that comes with being a struggling actor trying to overcome the stereotype of being, as he calls himself, Generic Asian Man. The writing style is what makes the book unique. But, the content of the unusually-told story that makes it wonderful.
The character/actor, Willis Wu, takes us through his climb up the movie-making ladder from generic background extra to guest start, to . . . where can Generic Asian Man go? Does he really want to be Kung Fu Guy? What he really wants is to be something other than a stereotype. Along the way, we meet his mother, brother, teacher/mentor, friends, fellow extras, love interest, and others who are spinning on the hamster wheel of being an actor in a world where parts are few and far between. Mr. Yu sets up his whole world inside the allegorical Chinatown and his perpetual movie set, the Golden Dragon restaurant. The line between movie script, fictional world, real-time movie set, and memoir merge together into what is both an entertaining stream-of-consciousness and a poignant autobiography.
The informal language and real-time narrative style makes it interesting to just flow along with, but it’s also a puzzle – challenging the reader to sort through the vignettes and monologues and piece together the underlying story. I suspect that some readers will find the puzzle too complex and the writing style too unusual. Those readers will be missing out.
In the later stages, the narrative pace changes. While the author unpeels the onion of the story very slowly in the first half, in the second half the events unfold much more quickly. His marriage, the birth of a child, and the pressures and emotional issues generated by that segment of his life fly by with much less detail. I wish Mr. Yu had devoted more time to those segments. The book is a very quick read, with plenty of white space on the pages during screenplay dialogue sections. There was time to devote to those segments, but it seems that the author got impatient about reaching the end.
The final stage of the story is a courtroom scene in which Willis Wu attempts to explain the feelings of being Asian in America. It is an immigrant/foreigner experience dissimilar from being Black in America (tainted always by the history of slavery), but still one of being an outcast – being so physically different that total assimilation is impossible. It’s a well-crafted look into the psyche of an Asian-American who was born here, but still made to feel like an outsider. This is the part of the narrative that is for every Asian American (actor or not), and it is touching and thought-provoking.
If you’re looking for something truly unique, and particularly if you’re intrigued by the mental gymnastics of an ethnic actor trying to climb the ladder against all the odds, throw away all preconceptions about what a novel is supposed to look like and dive into this book. You’ll be glad you did. Very highly recommended.
I’m a big fan of Charles Yu’s writing because of his wit and inventiveness. These talents are front and center in the brilliant and hilarious Interior Chinatown, which satirizes the racist imagination and brings us deep into the humanity of those who suffer from — and struggle against — dehumanization.
This book is quite different. While the protagonist is an Asian American, he is always cast as a generic Asian man, in real life and in Hollywood. The novel blurs the lines between real and imaginary. It pushes the reader to think about stereotypes.
Charles Yu manages that rare feat, storytelling that’s both funny and haunting. Interior Chinatown is like nothing else I’ve read, a genre-busting conceit pushed to its limits to tell us something important about the narrow possibilities for Asian-Americans to see themselves in our culture.
So well-written and thought- provoking
Having written screenplays myself, I could really appreciate what Mr. Yu was doing. His style is original and compelling. The book is a gut-punch to mainstream American tastes and Hollywood especially about the marginalization of Asian Americans, especially in the entertainment industry, but does not read like a tirade. I found the book fascinating and compelling and recommend it to anyone who would like to read something entertaining as well as worthwhile. Excellent read.
A very unique style and a fast read. It was written with humor, but the premise is depressing, especially in today’s climate. I found it eye-opening, and quite sad.
Too repetitive, boring. Never finished it
Yu has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut and I can see why. His masterful storytelling slices through the fabric of our society revealing the uncomfortable truths that lurk beneath. This book is part memoir, part Hollywood satire, and part treatise on idenity and racism in America. It is, to my mind, a literary masterpiece that offers piercing insights into the human condition. His style is inventive and captivating. His humor lightens the heart-wrenching theme. Yu offers “haunting depictions of the immigrant experience.” (L.A. Review of Books).
Interior Chinatown is totally moving and original. I can’t wait to read more of his books.
This book was absolutely perfect. I read it way to fast and then felt sad it was over.
I’m an avid reader – with coffee in bed in the morning and before I turn out the light at night. I read a lot of books in 2020 and sadly can barely remember the plot of many of them. And sometimes , maybe like you, I wonder what’s the big deal with this book? Award winner? Why?
Last week I brought a book home from the library and several pages in I knew this would be one of those books I don’t forget. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu. It took me a few pages to get comfortable with the form—primarily written as a movie script—but soon I was engaged, reading about pop culture and racial stereotypes. I found humor and heartbreak sometimes on the same page.
In the novel the narrator Willis Wu strives to do more than work in a Chinese restaurant and play minor roles in TV shows and movies. All the stereotypes have names: White Lady Cop, Black Dude Cop, Generic Asian Man, Kung Fu Guy, and more.
At the end of my first night of reading, I closed the book and reviewed my early exposure to Chinese culture. I remembered growing up in my all-white midwestern neighborhood, a Chinese family moved in and left after six months—ignored or worse. A special Chinese dinner at our house came from Chun King cans—wonderful crispy noodles and Chicken Chow Mein. BTW – did you know that Chun King, billed as “the royalty of American-Oriental Foods,” was owned by Jeno Paulucci, creator of Jeno’s Pizza Rolls and frozen pizza.
Twice my worldly Uncle Paul took us to a downtown St. Louis “real Chinese restaurant.” We sat in a private booth and everything was new and delicious. I kept my fortune from the cookie for a long time. That was it, except for unabashedly pulling our eyes out at the corners when we pretended to be Chinese and switched an L for an R in mimicry. We knew not to use certain racist words in our rhymes and riddles. But no one ever mentioned that this was racist too. They were a silent minority who built the railroads, worked in the mines, and more.
Those sparse experiences were all I had to go on except for visiting Chinatown in San Francisco when I lived in the Bay Area. In Yu’s novel he refers to SRO housing. (Single Room Occupancy) hotels – what a history and who it serves today. The rooms are barely big enough to fit in a bed and a small table, with shared communal kitchens, showers, and toilets. Here’s more:
https://www.chinatowncdc.org/sro-families-the-core-of-our-chinatown-community
Yu is incredibly skilled at weaving in poignant history for a reader like me, vaguely aware of the history and struggles of the Chinese people who ARE Americans. And wanting to know more, to change my ignorance into knowledge which books can do so well. Toward the end of the novel he provides a list, as Exhibit A, of the Laws of the United States starting in 1859. The list is long and shameful. Various state and federal acts prohibit the Chinese from owning property, voting, limiting the number of immigrants, prohibited from citizenship, and the US Cable Act of 1920 decreeing that any woman who marries “an alien ineligible for citizenship shall cease to be a citizen of the US.”
Charles Yu gives us a glimpse of the Asian-American experience in Chinatown.The author writes of his father as one whose wisdom and power leaked from him each passing day and night .He’d played his role for so long he’d lost himself in it.The writer describes Chinatown as the place where the old parts are always underneath .Layers upon layers accumulating ,no one able to separate the past from the present .Always seeing in each other all your former incarnations ,the characters you played in your mind long after the parts had ended.When the main characters wife and daughter move away he is unable to escape the place he wanted to escape from .The author tells us you never really leave the golden palace one of the restaurants he has worked in even in your dreams .He reminds us there are a few years when you make all your important memories and then you spend the next few decades relieving them The writer had Willis Wu tell us in the end you try to build a life . Sometimes things happen Mostly they don’t .Life at the margins ,made from bit pieces One can only ask was it all worth it !
Interior Chinatown is wrenching, hilarious, sharp, surreal, and above all, original. This is an extraordinary book by an immensely talented writer.
Brilliantly unexpected and inventive, Interior Chinatown upended all the things I was sure I knew about the insidious power of stereotypes and left me feeling a little more hopeful for our collective future. Charles Yu’s writing is TRANSFORMATIVE.
Most books are lucky to be either clever or deep, but Charles Yu’s new novel is both, and makes it look easy. Interior Chinatown is essential reading for anyone who’s obsessed with pop culture, identity, and all the ways that we’re all playing roles, all the time.
Interior Chinatown is a fascinating novel, hilarious and melancholy, a clever depiction of Hollywood dreaming itself and a sharp critique of the nature of those dreams. If it’s said that one of the reasons we watch films and television is out of a wish to ‘see ourselves,’ Yu adeptly raises the question of whether what we’re shown in response to that wish can ever be what we truly are.
I devoured this novel. Yu masterfully orchestrates a heartbreaking and hilarious tale of race in America through the lens of the HOLLYWOOD ACTION MOVIE™. It’s an examination of how popcorn-flick pop culture shapes our understanding of each other, and tragically, our own self-definition as Americans and as human beings.
I have long admired Charles Yu’s daring and original fiction, and Interior Chinatown not only met my expectations — it exceeded them. I can’t recall the last time I read a novel this inventive and surprising, and which wrestled with serious issues in such a playful manner. Yu is not afraid to take risks, and he somehow, magically — beautifully — makes those risks accessible. This book is smart and fun, comedic and sincere, thought provoking and impossible to put down. Yu is one of the most exciting writers telling stories today.
Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown is a biting commentary on racism and pop culture in America, told in a form so original it will have readers questioning both the characters’ reality and their own. But at its heart, it’s also a moving family story of a man learning to be a son, brother, father, and partner in a world that treats him as barely human.