Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • From 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. "One of the funniest books of the year.... A delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire." —The Washington Post 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.

That bit about Taiwanese immigrants loving to sing John Denver for karaoke is A+ authenticity.

I really enjoyed this. It feels like a very personal take on what it means to be an Asian American, yet it is an extremely stylized telling as it's often written in the form of a screenplay AND in second person, which I'm not sure I've ever seen outside of short stories. And it GOES PLACES the further you get into it (which isn't too long, the audiobook was just over four hours). I still need to process my thoughts and do some reading / podcast listening to understand this better.

I have a new favorite book this year and I'm pretty sure it's cresting into my top 10 books of all time: INTERIOR CHINATOWN by Charles Yu.

The storytelling in INTERIOR CHINATOWN is commanding. I had no idea TV scripts - the scripts themselves, not the acting bringing the scripts to life - could be so arresting.

It's difficult to explain what this book is because it's so many things. It's an exploration of Asian American masculinity interlaced with the model minority myth – all told from the perspective of our protagonist, Willis Wu. It's also a glimpse behind the scenes at pop culture and Hollywood tropes. This book challenges you to center neither white nor Black, but the unique experiences of marginalized people who don't fit into the racial binary. Ugh this is all coming out clunkily - I'm a reader, not a writer - but it's very meta while still being character-driven.

If you're like me, at some points in this book you might be confused. “Are we in the script, or are we out? Are all these people who live in the Chinatown SRO actually actors, or are we in the show when we're not in the show?” Around the 50 page mark, “have you ever questioned the nature of your reality?” kept popping into my head. (It's a Westworld quote.) For good reason, I found out; Yu is also an award-winning story editor and writer on Westworld. Stick with it. He makes biting and incisive social commentary that is also really funny. Yu delves into what it means to be a trope in the real world, and what it's like when society has already made up its mind about you.