"I've always written about family and relationships. (Submitted by Charles Yu) My lived experience "That was the psychological foundation and what I was trying to explore."Ī wedding photo of the parents of American author Charles Yu. It's being acutely aware of being the only Asian in the room sometimes, and thinking, 'Why am I thinking about this? Are other people thinking about this?' ![]() Not knowing exactly when I'm performing and when I'm not is something that I have personally thought about in my life. ![]() "Regardless of whether it's external or internal, Willis definitely feels like he's the 'other.' That self-consciousness is what I'm writing about, the sense of having to perform to fit in. One thing he doesn't totally know is how much of it is in his own head - how much has he internalized the idea that people perceive him as the 'other'? It's being acutely aware of being the only Asian in the room sometimes, and thinking, 'Why am I thinking about this? Are other people thinking about this?' "Willis, through the course of the book, is struggling with how he's perceived. "It's literally the place where he lives and works - there's a Chinese restaurant where he's a waiter - but it's also a composite where it's the cultural Chinatown as we understand it through TV and movies." The burden of representation The story takes place through the eyes of a character named Willis Wu. Willis tries to escape, or at least to understand the rules of this place. It is both a mental and physical place. "It's a bit like The Twilight Zone or maybe Black Mirror, in that this place is kind of a bubble. That's the Chinatown that I was writing about, which is a kind of TV reality. ![]() There's a Chinatown within that where you do the special 'Chinatown episode.' Once a season, the story finds its way into this ethnic ghetto, where they tell a story about the people of Chinatown. "Willis exists in a police procedural and he has to live by the rules of that. But Law & Order is what I think of as the original, the one that created a whole industry of these TV shows. In the U.S., the most famous TV procedural is Law & Order, or maybe CSI. "The story takes place through the eyes of a character named Willis Wu. Yu spoke with Eleanor Wachtel from his home in Irvine, Calif. His fiction often conjures alternate realities, as in his acclaimed first novel How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and his short story collection Sorry Please Thank You. ![]() He is a two-time Writers Guild of America nominee for his work on HBO's Westworld. By turns surprising, entertaining and enlightening, the book probes questions about representation and racism as it follows Willis in his pursuit of a leading role, in show business and in his own life.īorn in Los Angeles to Taiwanese parents, Yu is also a television writer. Written loosely in the form of a screenplay, Interior Chinatown centres on Willis, an Asian American actor who performs background roles - such as "Generic Asian Man" - in a Hollywood TV cop show set largely in Chinatown. National Book Award for fiction, the jury described it as "a bright, bold, gut punch of a novel." When Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown was awarded the 2020 U.S.
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