NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and 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 the protagonist 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 always he is 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. Or is it? After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.

While everyone enjoyed reading this surreal novel about the stereotypes of Chinese Americans and how they navigate them, there was a split in the group about how good the novel was overall. To start with, we all found the tone of Interior Chinatown great. The core idea that the protagonist's job was to move through stereotyped roles on his way from Generic Asian Man to Kung Fu Guy was funny and edgy, and the use of the police narrative as a core look at how those stereotypes affect other oppressed groups (women, Black Americans) was genius. Most of us thought the turn to the trial of the protagonist at the end was a great send up of the biased cultured expectations of the Chinese in America. What the novel definitely had going for it was that this tongue-in-cheek satire held up the entire way, and allowed Yu to both make fun of media and show how much more complex the real people were when we saw them in their apartments or saw what happened as they aged. However, NUBClub split over our take on the storyworld. About half of us left the novel confused, because we weren't exactly sure what Yu was doing. Was this the real world that Yu was describing in a very satirical way? Was this just a lens on LA? Or was Yu telling a fairy tale in a fantasy world where people actually could graduate from working in a restaurant to enforcing in an underground casino to becoming an action star? It really wasn't clear at all what the world was, and that left some of us unsure how to read it. No one disagreed with that confusion; everyone accepted that Yu's novel was not clearly in the real world or a fantasy one. The NUBClubbers who loved the novel just didn't think it mattered. They were happy to enjoy the ride without understanding exactly what the setting was. In the end, we decided this was a question of taste. There's no reason why Yu had to make a consistent and clear setting if his goal was to paint a certain satirical perspective. It's just that some of us needed a clear setting to get our heads around the novel. Overall, this is a fun an interesting novel with a very weird and innovative storyworld. Depending on your need for clear meaning, you might find the novel more or less satisfying in the end, but all of us agreed that the journey was fun.