"Me describing this book to my professor: Interior Chinatown satirizes the literal commodification of the Asian American identity crisis and the ethnic entrepreneur.
Me describing this book to anybody else: Layers. Onions have layers. Ogres have layers. Onions have layers. You get it? We both have layers."
Publisher Vintage
Publication Date 2020-11-17
Section New Titles - Paperback / Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Lily R.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9780307948472
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.
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even 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. At least that is what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: be more.
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.
