Charles Yu, whose novel Interior Chinatown just won the 2020 National Book Award for fiction, is interviewed by host Richard Wolinsky.
Interior Chinatown takes place in a meta-world in which Hollywood’s Chinese stereotypes are portrayed by Asian immigrants and second-generation Asian Americans in films and TV shows. The book uses tropes from screenplays as well as prose fiction to illuminate these tropes, switching between narrative, entertainment history, and polemic in a highly original way.
Charles Yu is the author of two previous short-story collections and one novel, has worked as an attorney, and also has worked in the writers’ room of several television shows, most notably during the first season of HBO’s Westworld.