You can also submit your own questions for Charles Yu on our Google form. Learn more about the book club here.īelow are questions to help guide your discussions as you read the book over the next month.

They can watch the news, and they can ask, are we real Americans? You know, is there a qualifier in front of that? And so positioned between them, as this sort of middle aged writer, I wanted to write a book about what it's like from all of their perspectives.Our February 2021 pick for Now Read This, the PBS NewsHour’s book club with The New York Times, is Charles Yu’s “Interior Chinatown.” Become a member of the Now Read This book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up to our newsletter. And my my own kids are reaching an age, too, where they're asking questions. And they've been in America for decades, more than 50 years. But I'm also reaching age where my own parents are, you know, aging. This story to me came at a time in my life when, yes, I'd been working in TV for a couple of years. And yet, at least from my perspective, there can be still a feeling of, it doesn't seem to add up. Chinese Americans and Taiwanese Americans and other Asian American groups have excelled in various fields. And I wanted to tell a story about that guy.'īook Reviews Experimental Fiction At Its Finest - And Funniestįor me - and that really gets at the impetus for writing the book, and writing it this way - I think what I was trying to get at with telling the story this way was capturing something about the feeling of what it's like to be not the center of the action. And you have the two leads and they're in the foreground and it's their story, and way in the background, almost out of focus, is a guy unloading a van. 'We've all seen Law & Order, and every few seasons it seems like they do an episode set in Chinatown. Yu says Willis lives a kind of marginal existence. But for now, he's the star of Interior Chinatown, the new novel from Charles Yu, an award-winning writer for Westworld and other shows. Willis hopes one day to be a Kung Fu Guy on movie screens around the world.

You kind of know the show: She's an accomplished young detective, he's a third-generation cop, together they are Black and White, and they solve impossible cases. Willis Wu is often seen as a generic Asian Man in a restaurant or the background of a crime scene on a television drama called Black and White. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Interior Chinatown Author Charles Yu

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