Interior Chinatown

by Charles Yu

Do you feel like a side character in your own life? This book is for you.

Only 278 pages long, typeset like a screenplay, one can breeze through the book in a few hours, especially those who read at the speed of sound. For those who take notes, a little bit longer.

Paperback

2021, fifth printing

Book design and cover illustration by Emanuele Ragnisco.

Read: 08th October 2025

First published in 2020.

For whomsoever it may concern (those who read only award-wining books), this book won the 2020 National Book Award (maybe this might urge you to pick it up).

Thoughts

A man’s search for identity, while being burdened with achieving the multi-generational aspiration of belonging in a society which will always be foreign. This is quite a dramatic hook, for a book that is itself quite light in its rendition of the theme.

Reminds me of The Seven Ages of Man by William Shakespeare which begins with the lines –

All the world’s a stage,

And all men and women merely players;

They have their exits and entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages.

If you prefer the screen over the book

There is a 10-episode-long show based on this book (by the same name) on Hotstar!

It is of course, as all adaptations go, not particularly faithful to the page-by-page plot but made with liberal artistic liberties which make for an overall engaging and enjoyable experience.

P.S. (for those of you who have watched the show Silicon Valley): Willis Wu (the main character of Interior Chinatown) is played by the same actor who plays Jian Yang in Silicon Valley. Flawless English here!

You’ll like this book if

• You like theatre, screenplay, and script writing

• You like Kung fu and martial arts

• You like something off-beat (you possibly, occasionally find yourself as an outlier on the bell curve of reading preferences)

• You like exploring political satire and demographical commentary

• You like type-written typefaces like Courier (this post is written in Courier New to give you an immersive experience of what it would be like to read this book, although I didn’t play around with the formatting as much)

• You are in search of your identity

• You need a reality check

• You deeply identify with being at complete and total loss in life and need to feel less lonely about your situation (yes, you are not alone); there is also a glimmer of hope and a life full of possibilities for those who prefer that

• You are fiercely aspirational but your situation is not

• You believe in life

• You find yourself gravitating towards immigrant-struggle books

• You are empathetic

• You can relate to an Asian upbringing

• You feel like a side character in your own life

Not-so quick vocab booster

• Inscrutable: impossible to understand or interpret

• Obviate: remove (a need or difficulty), avoid or prevent something undesirable

• Dotage: the period of life in which one is old and weak

• Inchoate: just begun and not full developed or formed; rudimentary

• Posterity: all future generations

• Antsy: agitated, impatient,, or restless

• SRO: Self-regulatory organisations; these are usually non-government organisations that are formed with the aim of creating rules (regulating) to promote order among business and organisations

• Eaves: the part of the roof that meets or overhangs the walls of a building

• Cornice: an ornamental moulding round the wall of a room just below the ceiling

• Physiognomy: a person’s facial features or expression, especially when regarded as indicative of character or ethnic origin

• Probable cause: is the legal standard by which police authorities have reason to obtain a warrant for the arrest of a suspected criminal and for the court’s issuing of a search warrant

• Craps: is a dice game in which the players bet on the outcomes of the roll of a pair of dice

• Sordid: involving immoral or dishonourable actions and motives; arousing moral distaste and contempt

• Epithet: an adjective or phrase expressing a quality or attribute regarded as characteristic of the person or thing mentioned (or a word used as a term of abuse; a racial epithet)

• Bailiff: an official in a court of law who keeps order, looks after prisoners, etc.

• Grandstanding: the action of behaving in a showy or ostentatious Manner in an attempt to attract favourable attention from the spectators or the media

• Epigraph: 1) an inscription on a building, statue, or coin; 2) a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter intended to suggest it’s theme

Some screenplay lingo

• INT. : abbreviation for Interior, indicating that the scene takes place inside a building, room, or an enclosed space.

• logline: (not LONGline, LOGline) is a brief (usually one sentence) summary of a TV program, film or short film, or book, that states the central conflict of the story, often providing both a synopsis of the story’s plot, and an emotional “hook” to stimulate interest.

• SMASH TO BLACK: this signifies an abrupt, jarring cut to a black screen, often after a shocking or tense moment, to separate scenes (or end the film)

  ‘SMASH’ indicates a very sudden change

• O. C.: Off Camera; indicating that the character is part of the scene but not seen on the camera at the moment

• O.S.: Off Screen; indicating that a character dialogue is heard but the character is not visible on the screen because they are in a different room, behind a door, or at another physical location

• (re: ____): is used to clarify what a line of dialogue refers to or is in reaction to

A free flowing exploration of facts, lexicology, and semantics

TV dinners are frozen foods, pre-packaged meals-for-one, that require only heating when served. 
Further reading for the intellectual and curious: A Brief History of the TV Dinner (a Smithsonian magazine article).

Born out of necessity in the 1950s to address a singular challenge which led to solving more problems than it intended, and creating some others.

On a side note, typing the lines above led me to think about word usage and I was wondering whether the correct word to use is ‘discovery’ or is it ‘invention’ and what’s the difference between the two. While it may seem obvious to some, I needed an answer, so here it is – 

Discovery is finding something that already exists in nature, e.g., a new species, a scientific law.

An invention, on the other hand, is creating something new that has never existed before, e.g., the telephone, vaccines, etc.

Annnnnd, to add to the mix – ‘innovation’!

Innovation is the process of applying a new idea, such as a discovery or invention, to create value, often by improving upon an existing product or process.

Soooo, to re-assess, TV dinners are best described as an innovation because frozen-food technology already existed back then. It was leveraged to create a value-adding product.

Which brings me to a book recommendation for the non-fiction enthusiasts who enjoy a good story: Inventology by Pagan Kennedy. It’s a good one.

P.S. (for the uninitiated): 1) lexicology is study of words, 2) semantics is the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning.

Some fun lines from the book (subject to confirmation bias and personal preference, but quite free from spoilers)

Take what you can get. Try to build a life. A life at the margin made from bit parts.

The trick was learning what not to say.

The reality being that they’d lost the plot somewhere along the way…

But the widest gulf in the world is the distance between getting by and not quite getting by. Crossing that gap can happen in a hundred ways, almost all by accident.

Cross that gap and everything changes. Being on this side of it means that time becomes your enemy. You don’t grind the day – the day grinds you.

That’s what you tell yourself anyway. The truth being that if each of you had done a little, together it might have been enough.

…the ideal mix of assimilated and authentic.

The decision is made but it’s not a decision at all, it’s the opposite. It’s the way things are.

You wonder: Can you change it? Can you be the one who actually breaks through?

You should be a better son. For a moment. But it won’t be a moment. It’ll be more. It will be guilt and that heavy feeling, it will be a deep sigh, it will be heavy and unspoken and you don’t know if you can do that right now.

You repeat it, for effect.

It’s the only thing worse than anger: advice.

Be more.

Frustration boils into indignation which condenses into something like, how funny is this shit? Because at some point, this shit kind is funny.

You drift off for a little while, only realising you were asleep at the exact moment you wake…

A simple action, done carefully, turns into something more.

Details are everything.

Recapping is important. People like to be sure of where they are.

Working your way up the system doesn’t mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It’s what the system depends upon.

“Hope you know what you’re doing.”

“Me too.”

She’d once dreamed of being more.

…and shakes her head as if to say, I can’t believe you did that, but also to say, I understand why you did that.

Your brain forgets sometimes. But then your face reminds you.

You really noticed me? You want to ask her but you don’t. You just let that fact sit with you – she saw you back there, not in the light, even when you weren’t able to see yourself, and that fact changes everything.

You try not to ruin this. She doesn’t let you ruin it. It’s going well. It keeps going well until the point where it normally stops going well and seem like it’s going to start going less well, but then it gets to that point and it doesn’t stop going well.

The country is geographically unique and logically impossible.

The thing about building a castle in the air is it’s easy. You build up. It’s like a ladder, then you start building a castle in the air. Then, you destroy the ladder. And your castle is floating.

A glorious, perfectly weird weirdo. Like all kids before they forget how to be exactly how weird they really are. Into whatever they’re into, pure. Before knowing. Before learning from others how to act. Before they learn about all the things they are and about all the things they will never be.

Your oppression is so second class.

…thus a navigational misunderstanding of the world becomes the justification for a legally binding category.

I finally got my shot. And when I did, you know what? I thought: I wonder why I wanted this so bad.

And the most hard-hitting sentence in the book (not a spoiler, just really really hard-hitting):

…and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads”, try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama”, you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.