Interior Chinatown

A very personal book on immigration, assimilation, racism, pop culture, and breaking free from the roles we are compelled to play.

Willis Wu sees himself as just another Generic Asian Man, not the hero of his own life. He is constantly reduced to a prop, yet sometimes he manages to pull off the roles of Background Oriental Making a Strange Face and even Disgraced Son. Nevertheless, he leaves his cramped room in a Chinatown SRO every day and walks inside the Golden Palace restaurant, where the procedural police drama Black and White is always in production. He's a little player here too, but his ambition is to be Kung Fu Guy, the most esteemed position that someone with his appearance can have. Does it not?

Willis is thrust into a larger world than he has ever known after tripping into the limelight; he learns about the hidden past of his own family as well as the hidden history of Chinatown. Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most poignant, audacious, and brilliant book to date. It explores the issues of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration in an endlessly innovative and highly intimate way.