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A review by book_concierge
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
3.0
Digital audiobook performed by Joel de la Fuente
From the book jacket: 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, 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 production. He’s a bit player here, 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 his mother. Who says to him: Be more..
My reactions:
Yu’s inventive novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020. I suspect this is because of the very unusual way in which it is written; he uses a second-person narrative voice and writes as if this were a screenplay. Also of note, Yu includes some serious social issues regarding racism, stereotyping in film/television, and personal goals vs family obligations.
Personally, I found the structure off-putting. This was probably exacerbated by my listening to it rather than reading the text. It seemed to me that Yu was trying too hard to be clever. And referencing the characters as “Generic Asian Man” or “Old Kung Fu Master” or “Young Asian Beauty” rather than by their names made it more difficult – for me at least – to connect to the characters and care about them. Be that as it may, he had a pretty good story to tell, and eventually I came to appreciate his message.
Joel de la Fuente does a very good job of the audio, but the structure of the writing really does not lend itself well to audio. I am also puzzled, given the underlying message re racism in the performing arts, why the narrator was not Asian.
From the book jacket: 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, 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 production. He’s a bit player here, 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 his mother. Who says to him: Be more..
My reactions:
Yu’s inventive novel won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020. I suspect this is because of the very unusual way in which it is written; he uses a second-person narrative voice and writes as if this were a screenplay. Also of note, Yu includes some serious social issues regarding racism, stereotyping in film/television, and personal goals vs family obligations.
Personally, I found the structure off-putting. This was probably exacerbated by my listening to it rather than reading the text. It seemed to me that Yu was trying too hard to be clever. And referencing the characters as “Generic Asian Man” or “Old Kung Fu Master” or “Young Asian Beauty” rather than by their names made it more difficult – for me at least – to connect to the characters and care about them. Be that as it may, he had a pretty good story to tell, and eventually I came to appreciate his message.
Joel de la Fuente does a very good job of the audio, but the structure of the writing really does not lend itself well to audio. I am also puzzled, given the underlying message re racism in the performing arts, why the narrator was not Asian.