Interior Chinatown
Interior Chinatown
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.
Notes
Local
Part of 2025 Books
I enjoyed this book. I found myself agreeing at many points regarding its observations about what it’s like to be Asian. In particular observation about asian Americans and how we are in this strange purgatory where we don’t seem to quite belong.
Note 2025-03-20-Thursday
Time: 17:00 PM
- Finished
We’re trapped as guest stars in a small ghetto on a very special episode. Minor characters locked into a story that doesn’t quite know what to do with us. After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans?
Note 2025-03-16-Sunday
Time: 22:23 PM
Page 96
To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest
Note 2025-03-08-Saturday
Time: 15:37 PM
Page 58
Note 2025-03-07-Friday
Time: 21:04 PM
Page 26
He’d always be Your Father, but somehow was no longer your dad.
Because they’d also, in the way old people often do, slipped gently into poverty. Also without anyone noticing.
A performer may be taken in by his own act, convinced at the moment that the impression of reality which he fosters is the one and only reality. In such cases we have a sense in which the performer comes to be his own audience; he comes to be the performer and observer of the same show