Interior Chinatown
A Novel (National Book Award Winner)
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4.1 • 440 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
SOON TO BE 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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
How many times have you felt like an extra in someone else’s movie? For Willis Wu, the protagonist of Charles Yu’s inventive novel, that sense of disposability follows him every day as he navigates his real and “reel” lives—living in a depressingly tiny L.A. apartment while appearing on a TV series in the role of Generic Asian Man. Structured like a screenplay, Interior Chinatown made us root for Willis’ dreams to break free from his demeaning reality. Yu has a talent for turning hilarious pop-culture riffs into meaningful explorations of social and racial issues, but his novel really hits home when he touches on the real emotions beneath the jokes. He shows us how Asian Americans can feel culturally adrift in—or outright rejected by—their own country, and looks at the ways people find a sense of self-worth and community in spite of these roadblocks. Fast and funny, this wonderful read has a devastating sting.
Customer Reviews
Wow.
The prose kept me hooked.
An incredibly innovative approach to analyzing culture and media.
Grasping for Identity
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.
Eye opening, engaging take on dangers of stereotypes and racism
It starts slowly, building the world and developing the characters. But once you’re familiar with the structure and willing to dwell within the limited world, you find yourself identifying with and rooting for the main character. At the halfway point, I couldn’t put the book down and wanted to see how it ended.
If you’re looking for a book to take with you on a plane or vacation, this is a good choice.
The story is relatable no matter what your ethnicity. The straightforward prose and in your face stereotypes, allows one to see how the roles/stereotypes they’ve voluntarily adopted or been forced in affect worldview and shape behavior.