28 min
Charles Yu Art Works Podcast
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- Arts
Charles Yu’s novel (and National Book Award winner) Interior Chinatown is an insightful, searing, and inventive exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture. Written in the form of a television screenplay, Interior Chinatown tells the story of actor Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White.” But the series is a metauniverse, forever in production, dictating the roles of everyone in the book based on their race, gender and age. Our hero Willis Wu wants more—he wants a story of a story of his own: he wants to be Kung Fu guy. In this podcast, Charles Yu talks about writing Interior Chinatown as a screenplay, his desire to give a story to the “generic Asian man” we see in the background on TV series, the impact of Asian-American stereotypes in an omnipresent popular culture, and his own time spent in a writers’ room on a television series.
Charles Yu’s novel (and National Book Award winner) Interior Chinatown is an insightful, searing, and inventive exploration of Asian-American identity and representation in popular culture. Written in the form of a television screenplay, Interior Chinatown tells the story of actor Willis Wu who is doomed to play various generic Asian characters in a TV procedural called “Black and White.” But the series is a metauniverse, forever in production, dictating the roles of everyone in the book based on their race, gender and age. Our hero Willis Wu wants more—he wants a story of a story of his own: he wants to be Kung Fu guy. In this podcast, Charles Yu talks about writing Interior Chinatown as a screenplay, his desire to give a story to the “generic Asian man” we see in the background on TV series, the impact of Asian-American stereotypes in an omnipresent popular culture, and his own time spent in a writers’ room on a television series.
28 min