“Interior Chinatown” - Charles Yu

This novel is clever, passionate, heartbreaking, and humorous. It’s a quick read and enjoyable. Willis Wu is an aspiring actor who views himself as a bit character (Generic Asian Man) in the story of his own life, much as Hollywood casting directors view Asian actors. Wu deftly blurs the lines between Hollywood and the real experience of Asian Americans, and covers every trope we’re regularly bombarded with onscreen. Yu’s satirical spin of Hollywood as a microcosm of the Asian-American experience, was particularly inventive. The narrative is funny because it’s true, and when we’re not busy chuckling, we’re shaking our heads, dismayed at how little things have changed.

“Somehow, in two hundred years, every wave, every new boatload of Asians, still as fresh, as alien to this land as the first. ... The real history of yellow people in America. Two hundred years of being perpetual foreigners.”

This “perpetual foreigner” status that Yu alludes to, is strikingly similar to the treatment of Korean Japanese I recently read about in “Pachinko”.