
Interior Chinatown
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Joel de la Fuente
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By:
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Charles Yu
About this listen
A 2020 National Book Award Winner
"One of the funniest books of the year...a delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire." (The Washington Post)
From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always 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. He’s 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. At least that’s what he has been told, time and time again. Except by one person, his mother. Who says to him: Be more.
Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes, Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterly novel yet.
"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)
©2020 Charles Yu (P)2020 Random House AudioCritic reviews
"I’m a big fan of Charles Yu’s writing because of his wit and inventiveness. These talents are front and center in the brilliant and hilarious Interior Chinatown, which satirizes the racist imagination and brings us deep into the humanity of those who suffer from - and struggle against - dehumanization." (Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer)
"Interior Chinatown is wrenching, hilarious, sharp, surreal, and above all, original. This is an extraordinary book by an immensely talented writer." (Emily St. John Mandel, National Book Award finalist and author of The Glass Hotel)
"Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic that’s both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary.... Ingeniously draws on real-life Hollywood.... [The book’s] sobering reality will resonate with savvy readers." (Terry Hong, Booklist, starred review)
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If you have ever, for any reason, been curious about Asian American struggle, or Chinatown, or false stereotypes or racism or all the things that still get oft unsaid because people are too callous or too ignorant or too afraid…
This will help you.
This will heal the scars you may not have known you had.
Everything good you’ve heard about this book is true
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Glad I stuck with it
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Interesting weaving of various elements.
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Just what this Filipina-American needed at this moment
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Stick with it
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The premise of the book is fairly meta, but not in an obnoxious way. It's played for laughs but also cerebrally, forcing us to think about the ways we perform our identities versus what reality might say otherwise.
Funny, insightful, and absolutely heartwrenching
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Love love love this book
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The emotional ties the characters had to being Chinese.
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Quintessential American story from a certain point of view
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