Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu was our late winter book club choice.
Here is part of the NYT book club review 2020:
“Interior Chinatown” posits that we are reading a teleplay about Chinatown — specifically the Golden Palace restaurant, which is the setting for a cop show called “Black and White.” Through his protagonist, Willis Wu — who has a small part on the show — Yu explores in devastating (and darkly hilarious) fashion Hollywood’s penchant for promoting clichés about Asians and Asian-Americans. Wu has worked his way from “Background Oriental Male” to “Dead Asian Man” to “Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy” — a long way from “Kung Fu Guy,” which is where he wants to be.
Although the lacerating humor in “Interior Chinatown” never skips a beat, what makes the novel so compelling is its strong commitment to characterization, without which the pointed commentary would be less potent. Early on, we are given a meticulous portrait of Wu’s father, Sifu, once “a young dragon” and martial arts expert but now an “Old Asian Man” who would “always be your Father, but somehow was no longer your dad.” An undercurrent of anger and sadness fuels these scenes. It’s not so much that Wu is passive but that the author is so good at integrating his character’s point of view into what would be, in lesser hands, little more than scene description.