Interior Chinatown
"From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play."-- Every day Willis Wu 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-- and he sees his life as a script. After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he has ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family, and what that means for him in today's America -- from publisher's description.
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What you might want to know about Interior Chinatown
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Willis Wu has spent his career as Generic Asian Man on a procedural set in a single Chinatown SRO. The book, presented as his ongoing screenplay, walks him toward a different role and a different story.
Yes. Interior Chinatown won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Charles Yu is also the author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe.
Yes. Hulu released a 10-episode adaptation of Interior Chinatown in 2024, with Charles Yu as showrunner. The show preserves the novel's screenplay-formatted, meta-narrative structure.
Interior Chinatown was written by Charles Yu, published in 2020 by Vintage.
Interior Chinatown is 288 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Interior Chinatown takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Interior Chinatown is a standalone novel by Charles Yu, not part of a series.
Interior Chinatown is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.