Vintage Contemporaries / Interior Chinatown
A Novel
(Sprache: Englisch)
LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD
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...
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...
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LONGLISTED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARDWillis 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.
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INT. GOLDEN PALACEEver since you were a boy, you ve dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.
You are still not Kung Fu Guy.
You are currently Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy. Your kung fu is B, B-plus on a good day, and Sifu once proclaimed your drunken monkey to be nearly at a level of competence that he could perhaps at some point in the future imagine not being completely embarrassed of you. Which, if you know him, well, that s a pretty big deal.
To be honest though it can sometimes be hard to tell with Sifu, who is famously inscrutable. If you could only show him what you ve become. All you want is for him to make that face, the one that looks like internal distress possibly of a gastrointestinal nature but actually indicates something closer to Deeply Repressed Secret Pride Honorable Father Has for His Young but Promising Son; means Deliciously Bittersweet Pain That Comes from Knowing Honorable Teacher Is No Longer Needed. That s how you see it in your head: he would make that face, smile, you d smile back. Credits roll and you d walk off, arm in arm, to the horizon.
OLD ASIAN MAN
These days he is mostly Old Asian Man. No longer Sifu, with the pants and the muscles and the look in his eye. All of that is gone now, but when did it happen? Over years and overnight.
The day you first noticed. You d shown up a few minutes early for weekly lesson. Maybe that s what threw him off. When he answered the door, it took him a moment to recognize you. Two seconds, or twenty, a frozen eternity then, as he regained himself, his familiar scowl, barking your name
WILLIS WU!
half-exclamation, half-confirmation, as if verifying for both you and himself that he hadn t forgotten. Willis Wu, he said again, well come on, what are you doing, don t just stand there in the doorway like a dum-dum, come in, son, let s get started.
He was fine for the rest of the day, mostly, but
... mehr
you couldn t stop thinking about the look he gave you, oblivion or terror, and for the first time you noticed the mess his room had become, not unusual for any other man his age living alone, but for Sifu, who taught and valued order and simplicity in all things, to have allowed his dwelling to reach this state of disorganization should have been a warning sign to all. Maybe not the first, but the first one that came to your attention.
Fatty Choy went around telling everyone that Sifu was on food stamps, saying how gullible can you be ( You idiots think being Wizened Chinaman pays well? Are you crazy? Why do you think he fishes bottles and cans out of the trash? ) but no one wanted to believe it. At least in public.
In private, the thought did occur. Sifu never had the lights on. Said it was to train the senses. He saved everything: disposable chopsticks, free glossy calendars from East-West Bank ( good for wrapping fish or fruit ), packets of soy sauce and chili paste from the dollar Chinese down the street. He d patched his old fake leather couch so many times there were cracks on the patches. Which of course he also patched. The Formica two-top he ate on was the first and only kitchen table he d ever bought, purchased for seven dollars and fifty cents from the salvage bin at the old restaurant supply warehouse down on Jackson and Eighth, that place long gone now (converted to INT. RAVE/GRIMY CLUB SCENE) but the table still there in the kitchen. An artifact of the previous century, it had worn down to a smoothness so comforting and cool it felt soft to the touch, the patterns of use, hundreds, thousands of meals together in the corner of that small, low-ceilinged room, the surface preserving the teachings of Sifu, wisdom over time recorded in the warp and wear, in the markings of t
Fatty Choy went around telling everyone that Sifu was on food stamps, saying how gullible can you be ( You idiots think being Wizened Chinaman pays well? Are you crazy? Why do you think he fishes bottles and cans out of the trash? ) but no one wanted to believe it. At least in public.
In private, the thought did occur. Sifu never had the lights on. Said it was to train the senses. He saved everything: disposable chopsticks, free glossy calendars from East-West Bank ( good for wrapping fish or fruit ), packets of soy sauce and chili paste from the dollar Chinese down the street. He d patched his old fake leather couch so many times there were cracks on the patches. Which of course he also patched. The Formica two-top he ate on was the first and only kitchen table he d ever bought, purchased for seven dollars and fifty cents from the salvage bin at the old restaurant supply warehouse down on Jackson and Eighth, that place long gone now (converted to INT. RAVE/GRIMY CLUB SCENE) but the table still there in the kitchen. An artifact of the previous century, it had worn down to a smoothness so comforting and cool it felt soft to the touch, the patterns of use, hundreds, thousands of meals together in the corner of that small, low-ceilinged room, the surface preserving the teachings of Sifu, wisdom over time recorded in the warp and wear, in the markings of t
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Autoren-Porträt von Charles Yu
CHARLES YU is the author of four books, including Interior Chinatown (the winner of the 2020 National Book Award for fiction), and the novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (a New York Times Notable Book and a Time magazine best book of the year). He received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was nominated for two Writers Guild of America Awards for his work on the HBO series, Westworld. He has also written for shows on FX, AMC, and HBO. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired, among other publications. Together with TaiwaneseAmerican.org, he established the Betty L. Yu and Jin C. Yu Writing Prizes, in honor of his parents.
Bibliographische Angaben
- Autor: Charles Yu
- 2020, 288 Seiten, Maße: 13,1 x 20 cm, Kartoniert (TB), Englisch
- Verlag: Penguin Random House
- ISBN-10: 0307948471
- ISBN-13: 9780307948472
- Erscheinungsdatum: 25.11.2020
Sprache:
Englisch
Pressezitat
A National Endowment for the Arts Big Read ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER NPR TIME THE WASHINGTON POST THE ATLANTIC VANITY FAIR VULTURE THRILLIST SHELF AWARENESS SOUTHERN LIVING INSIDEHOOK KIRKUS REVIEWS THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY THE CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY"Fresh and beautiful. . . . Interior Chinatown represents yet another stellar destination in the journey of a sui generis author of seemingly limitless skill and ambition. The New York Times Book Review
[A] sharply observed, darkly humorous evocation of the Asian American experience.
Entertainment Weekly
Satire at its best, a shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood . . . presented, perfectly, in the sharply hewed format of a screenplay. . . . Peeling back caricatures to paint vivid individual portraits, Yu eviscerates generalizations with the devastatingly specific.
Vanity Fair
Bold, even groundbreaking. . . . Interior Chinatown solders together mordant wit and melancholic whimsy to produce a moving exploration of race and assimilation.
San Francisco Chronicle
Interior Chinatown . . . recalls the humorous and heartfelt short stories of George Saunders, the metafictional high jinks of Mark Leyner, and films like The Truman Show.
The New York Times
An inventive satire about racial stereotyping.
Maureen Corrigan, NPR
Meticulously crafted. . . . Yu tells us about ourselves with his haunting depictions of the immigrant experience, familial relationships, and the abiding desire to break from the pressures of conformity and live an authentic life.
Los Angeles Review of Books
Part novel, part screenplay, part screed, and part sociology, this National Book Award winner is always funny and pretty savage.
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Vulture
Yu has a devilish good time poking fun at the racially blinkered ways of Hollywood. . . . [Interior Chinatown is] rollicking fun, and its reclamation of Asian American history, with all its attendant sorrows and hopes, holds out the possibility of a new, true story ahead.
New York Journal of Books
Honest, funny, sad, and necessary satire.
Thrillist
Like nothing you ve read before a moving and transportive work abounding with risks that pay off.
InsideHook
Passionate and clever. . . . A caustic, absurd, and endearing exploration of Asian American stereotypes, police procedurals, and the immigrant experience.
Shelf Awareness
A stunning novel about identity, race, societal expectations, and crippling anxiety told with humor and affection and a deep understanding of human nature.
The Washington Independent Review of Books
Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic that s both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary.
Booklist (starred review)
Vulture
Yu has a devilish good time poking fun at the racially blinkered ways of Hollywood. . . . [Interior Chinatown is] rollicking fun, and its reclamation of Asian American history, with all its attendant sorrows and hopes, holds out the possibility of a new, true story ahead.
New York Journal of Books
Honest, funny, sad, and necessary satire.
Thrillist
Like nothing you ve read before a moving and transportive work abounding with risks that pay off.
InsideHook
Passionate and clever. . . . A caustic, absurd, and endearing exploration of Asian American stereotypes, police procedurals, and the immigrant experience.
Shelf Awareness
A stunning novel about identity, race, societal expectations, and crippling anxiety told with humor and affection and a deep understanding of human nature.
The Washington Independent Review of Books
Conflates history, sociology, and ethnography with the timeless evils of racism, sexism, and elitism in a multigenerational epic that s both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary.
Booklist (starred review)
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