In the Golden Palace restaurant where Black and White is in perpetual production, Asian actors are relegated to the background, their identities reduced to stereotypes: the “Pretty Oriental Flower,” the “Egg Roll Cook,” the “Oriental Guy Making a Weird Face.” In the seven floors above the Golden Palace, however, there exists a vibrant world. It’s “honest, funny, sad, and necessary…” ( Thrillist).Īs a bit player on the set of a police procedural, Black and White, Willis Wu dreams of one day playing Kung Fu Guy, “…the ceiling, the terminal, ultimate, exalted position for any Asian working in this world” (p. The novel “recalls the humorous and heartfelt short stories of George Saunders, the metafictional high jinks of Mark Leyner, and films like The Truman Show” ( New York Times).
Consigned to bit roles in the background of a procedural cop show, he dreams of playing Kung Fu Guy, the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain-or so he has always been told. It tells the story of Willis Wu, who has only ever been cast as the Generic Asian Man. Winner of the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, the novel is "a moving exploration of race and assimilation" ( San Francisco Chronicle), "both rollicking entertainment and scathing commentary" ( Booklist), and "a parable for outcasts feeling invisible in this fast-moving world" ( Kirkus Reviews). Charles Yu’s critically acclaimed second novel Interior Chinatown is “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” ( Vanity Fair).
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