Charles Yu was once a lawyer. His novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe gave him notoriety as a author. He wrote for HBO television series Westworld, before going back to writing novels. He expressed to BBC via Zoom interview that he was struggling for years to get his book started. However, the major catalyst that got him going was the election of President Donald Trump in 2016.
"It's sometimes really dispiriting and challenging to still feel like a foreigner [in the US]. We're from here but here is the president basically doing all the stuff he's doing to stoke xenophobia and making some very sweeping generalizations about what's foreign and what's American," says Yu.
"I just felt much more of an urgency and desire to talk about immigrants and to share some of the stories of my parents. I realized I needed to write about it."
And that story was Interior Chinatown. He wrote it in screenplay format. The novel is also inspired by his author's experience as a son of Taiwanese immigrants. Here is his statement on that:
"I drew from my family, my parents came [from Taiwan] in the 1960s and I really wanted to capture things I've absorbed from their experience and the sacrifices they made over the years. The story of them being Americans, to me, is both inspirational and also really complicated."
On the topic of Hollywood, here is Charles Yu's statement on that:
"I think the industry is slowly moving forward. I think there's a real interest in authentic and diverse points of view in terms of sexuality, gender, types of stories," he says.
"To me, it [Crazy Rich Asians] was very positive progress in that it opened many doors for more Asian American storytellers, actors… I think we're at that place where it's hard not to see the positives."
Charles Yu, however, stated that the real milestone would be when you can have a character who is played by an Asian in Hollywood that isn't a feature of the story. Here is his statement on that:
"Certainly there can be valid stories where that is the point of the story, but to me, it would be really neat to see a part that could have been played by literally anybody, but they happen to cast an Asian."
Here is the goodreads' synopsis of Interior Chinatown:
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. 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 highest aspiration he can imagine for a Chinatown denizen. 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, and what that means for him, in today's America.
Playful but heartfelt, a send-up of Hollywood tropes and Asian stereotypes--Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu's most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
Source material: Yahoo.com