Background Image for Header:
2022-23 Campus Read
Interior Chinatown
About the book
A New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Winner, “Interior Chinatown” is a deeply personal, moving, humorous novel about race, stereotypes, and, ultimately, the limitations of the American Dream.
Using the form of the screenplay for a cop show, “Interior Chinatown” uses the tropes of popular culture to critique the way Asian Americans experience American society and culture. The screenplay format allows the novel to present an almost collective experience, one in which the characters can best show the feeling as if they are invisible to the larger culture.
In the metafictional world Yu creates, his main character, Willis Wu, both a young American man and the son of immigrants, yearns to live a fulfilling life in a country that refuses to let him be anything more than “Generic Asian Man.”
about charles yu
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 Foundation's 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.