Interior Chinatown: A Novel (National Book Award Winner) by Charles Yu (English)

Description: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu SOON TO BE A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • "A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood" (Vanity Fair) and a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.Willis Wu doesnt perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: hes 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. Hes 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 hes 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 Yus most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Author Biography CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundations 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents. Review NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • A National Endowment for the Arts Big ReadONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER • NPR • TIME • THE WASHINGTON POST • THE ATLANTIC • VANITY FAIR • VULTURE • THRILLIST • SHELF AWARENESS • SOUTHERN LIVING • INSIDEHOOK • KIRKUS REVIEWS • THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY • THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY"Fresh and beautiful. . . . Interior Chinatown represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition." —The New York Times Book Review"[A] sharply observed, darkly humorous evocation of the Asian American experience." —Entertainment Weekly"Satire at its best, a shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood . . . presented, perfectly, in the sharply hewed format of a screenplay. . . . Peeling back caricatures to paint vivid individual portraits, Yu eviscerates generalizations with the devastatingly specific." —Vanity Fair"Bold, even groundbreaking. . . . Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation." —San Francisco Chronicle"Interior Chinatown . . . recalls the humorous and heartfelt short stories of George Saunders, the metafictional high jinks of Mark Leyner, and films like The Truman Show." —The New York Times"An inventive satire about racial stereotyping." —Maureen Corrigan, NPR"Meticulously crafted. . . . Yu tells us about ourselves with his haunting depictions of the immigrant experience, familial relationships, and the abiding desire to break from the pressures of conformity and live an authentic life." —Los Angeles Review of Books"Part novel, part screenplay, part screed, and part sociology, this National Book Award winner is always funny and pretty savage."—Vulture"Yu has a devilish good time poking fun at the racially blinkered ways of Hollywood. . . . [Interior Chinatown is] rollicking fun, and its reclamation of Asian American history, with all its attendant sorrows and hopes, holds out the possibility of a new, true story ahead."—New York Journal of Books"Honest, funny, sad, and necessary satire."—Thrillist"Like nothing youve read before—a moving and transportive work abounding with risks that pay off."—InsideHook"Passionate and clever. . . . A caustic, absurd, and endearing exploration of Asian American stereotypes, police procedurals, and the immigrant experience." —Shelf Awareness"A stunning novel about identity, race, societal expectations, and crippling anxiety told with humor and affection and a deep understanding of human nature." —The Washington Independent Review of Books"Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic thats both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary." —Booklist (starred review) Review Quote ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR TIME * THE WASHINGTON POST * THRILLIST * KIRKUS REVIEWS "[A] sharply observed, darkly humorous evocation of the Asian American experience." -- Entertainment Weekly "Bold, even groundbreaking. . . . Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation." -- San Francisco Chronicle " Interior Chinatown . . . recalls the humorous and heartfelt short stories of George Saunders, the metafictional high jinks of Mark Leyner, and films like The Truman Show ." -- The New York Times "Meticulously crafted. . . . Yu tells us about ourselves with his haunting depictions of the immigrant experience, familial relationships, and the abiding desire to break from the pressures of conformity and live an authentic life." -- Los Angeles Review of Books "Yu has a devilish good time poking fun at the racially blinkered ways of Hollywood. . . . [ Interior Chinatown is] rollicking fun, and its reclamation of Asian American history, with all its attendant sorrows and hopes, holds out the possibility of a new, true story ahead." -- New York Journal of Books "Honest, funny, sad, and necessary satire." -- Thrillist "Passionate and clever. . . . A caustic, absurd, and endearing exploration of Asian American stereotypes, police procedurals, and the immigrant experience." -- Shelf Awareness "A stunning novel about identity, race, societal expectations, and crippling anxiety told with humor and affection and a deep understanding of human nature." -- The Washington Independent Review of Books "Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic thats both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary." -- Booklist (starred review) Excerpt from Book INT. GOLDEN PALACE Ever since you were a boy, youve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy. You are still not Kung Fu Guy. You are currently Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy. Your kung fu is B, B-plus on a good day, and Sifu once proclaimed your drunken monkey to be nearly at a level of competence that he could perhaps at some point in the future imagine not being completely embarrassed of you. Which, if you know him, well, thats a pretty big deal. To be honest though it can sometimes be hard to tell with Sifu, who is famously inscrutable. If you could only show him what youve become. All you want is for him to make that face, the one that looks like internal distress possibly of a gastrointestinal nature but actually indicates something closer to Deeply Repressed Secret Pride Honorable Father Has for His Young but Promising Son; means Deliciously Bittersweet Pain That Comes from Knowing Honorable Teacher Is No Longer Needed. Thats how you see it in your head: he would make that face, smile, youd smile back. Credits roll and youd walk off, arm in arm, to the horizon. OLD ASIAN MAN These days he is mostly Old Asian Man. No longer Sifu, with the pants and the muscles and the look in his eye. All of that is gone now, but when did it happen? Over years and overnight. The day you first noticed. Youd shown up a few minutes early for weekly lesson. Maybe thats what threw him off. When he answered the door, it took him a moment to recognize you. Two seconds, or twenty, a frozen eternity--then, as he regained himself, his familiar scowl, barking your name WILLIS WU! half-exclamation, half-confirmation, as if verifying for both you and himself that he hadnt forgotten. Willis Wu, he said again, well come on, what are you doing, dont just stand there in the doorway like a dum-dum, come in, son, lets get started. He was fine for the rest of the day, mostly, but you couldnt stop thinking about the look he gave you, oblivion or terror, and for the first time you noticed the mess his room had become, not unusual for any other man his age living alone, but for Sifu, who taught and valued order and simplicity in all things, to have allowed his dwelling to reach this state of disorganization should have been a warning sign to all. Maybe not the first, but the first one that came to your attention. Fatty Choy went around telling everyone that Sifu was on food stamps, saying how gullible can you be ("You idiots think being Wizened Chinaman pays well? Are you crazy? Why do you think he fishes bottles and cans out of the trash?") but no one wanted to believe it. At least in public. In private, the thought did occur. Sifu never had the lights on. Said it was to train the senses. He saved everything: disposable chopsticks, free glossy calendars from East-West Bank ("good for wrapping fish or fruit"), packets of soy sauce and chili paste from the dollar Chinese down the street. Hed patched his old fake leather couch so many times there were cracks on the patches. Which of course he also patched. The Formica two-top he ate on was the first and only kitchen table hed ever bought, purchased for seven dollars and fifty cents from the salvage bin at the old restaurant supply warehouse down on Jackson and Eighth, that place long gone now (converted to INT. RAVE/GRIMY CLUB SCENE) but the table still there in the kitchen. An artifact of the previous century, it had worn down to a smoothness so comforting and cool it felt soft to the touch, the patterns of use, hundreds, thousands of meals together in the corner of that small, low-ceilinged room, the surface preserving the teachings of Sifu, wisdom over time recorded in the warp and wear, in the markings of the modest table itself. Come to think of it, Fatty Choy, despite the fact that he was and had always been a total gasbag, a mostly insufferable close-talking blowhard (made all the more insufferable by the fact that he was not infrequently right about things), was simply stating what you all knew but didnt want to admit: Sifu had gotten old. It was easy to lie to yourself about it. Although naively you believed he had by some miracle of genetics and sheer follicular willpower managed to reach his seventh decade without a single hair turning gray, in hindsight you remember once seeing an empty box of natural seaweed coloring in his wastebasket, Sifu emerging from his room with the occasional smear where hed gotten a little careless and ended up painting the top edge of his forehead a swath of kelpish green. And even if he could still break a cinder block with three fingers, that was nothing compared to back in the day, his younger self, when he could do it with just one--a single powerful blow of any digit. You pick! You couldnt bear to watch, peeking through your fingers when you were little, and as you got older still wincing in expectation of painful failure. But young Sifu never failed. He always found the necessary reserves of qi, was able to summon forth from whatever intangible reservoir the required force to smash through it, and everyone gathered around would clap and shout their praise at the latest demonstration of Sifus mind over matter, mental and physical, an impossible feat right there in the alley behind the kitchen in the middle of a Tuesday. At the sound of the exploding energy you would uncover your eyes and exhale with relief, proud and grateful that he had done it once again, hadnt mangled his hand, and also slightly ashamed by your lack of faith, when everyone else, the assembled friends and strangers, had never doubted him in the slightest. Your earliest memories of him as a young dragon, a rising star, thick straight hair the color of night combed slowly and carefully straight back in a lustrous wave. Forearms like steel barrels lifting you out of the makeshift playpen in the corner of the room and flying you around up above his head, almost crashing into the bed and the lamp and the ceiling as you laughed and laughed until your mother said sio sim, sio sim, thats enough, Ming, please, stop before he gets sick, and hed do one more revolution before setting you down safely, your feet back on solid ground, the world still spinning. Whether we admitted to it or not, and sometimes you did admit it to yourself, right before falling asleep, in the way thoughts like this come to you: your first, best, and only real master, the source of all your kung fu knowledge, was no longer himself. Hed aged out of his role and into the next one, his life force depleting with every exertion. Wisdom and power leaking from him with each passing day and night. Hed played his role for so long hed lost himself in it, before some separation that happened gradually over decades and then you waking one day to feel it, some distance that had crept in overnight. Some formal space you could no longer cross. Hed always be Your Father, but somehow was no longer your dad. No longer running up walls, no more leaping from the curved roof eaves of the Bank of America pagoda. More often found nodding off during a meal, eaten alone, in front of the six oclock news. Long after youd graduated into an adult role, you still continued coming to him for these weekly lessons, but the lessons had turned into a flimsy pretense layered atop their real purpose: your delivery of provisions on which your old man depended. A few groceries, toilet paper, his various prescriptions. Putting things out so theyd be easy for him to access, wiping the floor as best you could. There was only so much time. Checking for dampness on his mattress pad, changing it if necessary, picking up laundry, sweeping from his nightstand the accumulation of balled-up napkins enclosing clots of dried phlegm and blood. More napkins behind the nightstand and all around, a half-eaten pear under the Formica table, there since the day after your last visit, having dropped and rolled to a stop right in that very spot, left to slowly rot, the gentle descent into squalor not a function of sloth but simple, physical inability. Im sorry. I cant reach. Its okay, Ba. I got it. The apologies, the true sign--that this was not the man you once knew, a man who would never have uttered that word to his son, sorry, and in English, no less. Not because he thought himself infallible, but because of his belief that a family should never have to say sorry, or please, or thank you, for that matter, these things being redundant, being contradictory to the parent-son relationship, needing to remain unstated always, these things being the invisible fabric of what a family is. You did what you could despite being generally ignored. Sifu-now-Old-Asian-Man having forgotten not just his kung fu technique but also his most loyal student, regarding you with a blank if slightly wary amiability, as one might endure an overbearing but helpful stranger. Your relationship having turned into a pantomime, a series of gestures in a well-worn scene, played out again and again, any underlying feeling having long since been obviated by emotional muscle memory, learning how to make the right faces, strike the right poses, not out of apathy or lack of sincerity, rather a need to preserve what was left of his pride. The trick was learning what not to say. To enter the theater of his dotage quietly, sit there in the dark and not ask him any question, however simple, that might cause momentary confusion, might turn your rote interactions into something too raw, remind yourselves or each other o Details ISBN0307948471 Author Charles Yu Short Title Interior Chinatown Pages 288 Series Vintage Contemporaries Language English Year 2020 ISBN-10 0307948471 ISBN-13 9780307948472 Format Paperback Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2020-11-17 NZ Release Date 2020-11-17 US Release Date 2020-11-17 Place of Publication New York UK Release Date 1900-01-01 Publisher Random House USA Inc Publication Date 2020-11-17 Imprint Vintage Books DEWEY 813.6 Audience General Subtitle A Novel (National Book Award Winner) We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. 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