Vintage Contemporaries / Interior Chinatown

INT. GOLDEN PALACE
 
Ever since you were a boy, you ve 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, that s 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 you ve 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. That s how you see it in your head: he would make that face, smile, you d smile back. Credits roll and you d 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. You d shown up a few minutes early for weekly lesson. Maybe that s 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 hadn t forgotten. Willis Wu, he said again, well come on, what are you doing, don t just stand there in the doorway like a dum-dum, come in, son, let s get started.
 
He was fine for the rest of the day, mostly, but

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.

A National Endowment for the Arts Big Read ONE 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.