Literary Fiction · LightWillis Wu plays Generic Asian Man in a TV cop show and wants to become Kung Fu Guy
Interior Chinatown
by Charles Yu
An actor who plays Generic Asian Man in a TV show dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy
Willis Wu is an actor in a TV show called Black and White. His part is Generic Asian Man, a background role. He wants to move up to Kung Fu Guy. The novel is written partly as a screenplay, and it is a comedy about the parts the show hands out.
More about this book
Who
Willis Wu, an actor whose character in the TV show Black and White is called Generic Asian Man.
World
The set of a TV show called Black and White, laid out in the style of a script.
What makes it different
Much of the book is in screenplay format. It was influenced by Paul Beatty's The Sellout and by the film Groundhog Day.
Feel
Playful and fast. It won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and was made into a Hulu series in 2024.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- Interior ChinatownWikipedia