There is little distinction between the TV script and real life.

He wants to be the protagonist of a story, of his story.

The first thing that happens is that you can't work for forty five days.' Willis Wu is tired of being a nobody. But that isn't as bad as when his character dies because '.it sucks to die. If Wu gets any speaking parts on the show he is forced the deliver his lines in a fake Asian accent. The story is divided into seven 'acts' showing the arc of the life of Willis Wu, a Taiwanese-American actor who keeps getting stuck in the role of 'generic Asian man' or 'Asian delivery man' when what he hoped for, and finally obtained, was the role of 'Kung Fu Guy.' Yu splits the script between the interior monologue Willis Wu is having with himself about what is he experiencing and feeling, and the actual script from the TV show 'Black and White', a cop show staring Sarah Green, a sexy, white detective, and Miles Turner, her Black partner. Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes- Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu won the National Book Award in 2020 and I imagine that was at least in part because of the format the story was delivered in - a television script.

Or is it?Īfter 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, and what that means for him, in today's America. but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy-the highest aspiration he can imagine for a Chinatown denizen.

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. Willis Wu doesn't perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: he's merely Generic Asian Man. From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Interior chinatown book review