Interior Chinatown
by Charles Yu
Summary
Willis Wu lives above the Golden Palace restaurant in a Chinatown SRO and works, in every sense, as Generic Asian Man: background player in Black and White, the police procedural that is filming, always and forever, downstairs. The novel is typeset as a screenplay, courier font, slug lines and all, because Willis's world literally runs on the format: his neighbours are day players, his father, once Sifu, the Mysterious Kung Fu Master, has aged into Old Asian Man, and the best a Chinatown resident can dream is the ceiling role, Kung Fu Guy, which is still a costume with no interior.
Yu plays the conceit for sustained comedy, the procedural's leads, Turner and Green, performing their Black and white buddy drama around Asians who exist to deliver takeout and die colorfully, and then keeps pushing it somewhere sadder and stranger: Willis gets lines, gets the girl, Karen, whose own role oscillates between ethnically ambiguous and lead, gets marriage, a daughter and a suburban show called Phoenix, and discovers that every promotion is another part, the assimilation itself scripted. The history arrives in dossier form, exclusion acts, massacres, the hundred year legal manufacture of the perpetual foreigner, and the finale gathers everything into a courtroom episode where Willis stands trial, more or less, for wanting to be a person.
Around two hundred and seventy pages, read in an afternoon, quoted for longer.
Best for readers who want the satire of representation done from inside the format, funny on every page and angrier than it lets on.
Historical Context & Significance
Interior Chinatown won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020, the ceremony itself conducted over video in the pandemic's first year, and the win registered as a threshold: the fully formal experiment, a novel in screenplay, taking the establishment prize while carrying the Asian American argument, invisibility, typecasting, the model minority script, to its widest audience yet. It became a New York Times bestseller.
Charles Yu came to it from both sides of the camera, a former corporate lawyer turned novelist, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, and television writer, Westworld among his rooms, and the book's fluency in the industry's casting grammar is insider knowledge repurposed as indictment.
The 2024 Hulu series, with Jimmy O. Yang as Willis and Yu as showrunner, translated the conceit to the medium it satirises, closing the loop. The novel has settled onto syllabuses as the era's standard text on representation, the rare formal gimmick that is also the argument.