National Book Award winner fuses humor with cultural critique

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“What I’m trying to talk about is that people, especially Asians, have been excluded, literally excluded, from being Americans for decades and they’re not the only group,” Charles Yu said while discussing his award-winning book, 'Interior Chinatown.’

When Charles Yu took home the National Book Award for fiction last week for his novel “Interior Chinatown,” he celebrated in an unconventional way: He changed out of the black suit he wore to the virtual ceremony back into the shorts he’s been wearing throughout the pandemic and shared a frozen pizza with his family.

Yu, 44, a former corporate lawyer, said he was “in shock” that he is the recipient of one of the country's most prestigious literary prizes, in company with authors such as William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison. Inventively written in the form of a screenplay and narrated in the second person, the immersive novel examines identity, Asian stereotypes and the roles we’re allowed to play on and off screen.

He added that while the novel has a comic tone to it, he doesn’t mean to take away from the weight of the issues it explores. “What I’m trying to talk about is that people, especially Asians, have been, literally excluded, from being Americans for decades, and they’re not the only group,” he said. A self-described awkward kid who loved reading and “tried hard with everything,” Yu was a pre-med student at University of California, Berkeley, when he came home one semester and told his parents he wanted to be a poet. “That didn’t go over super well,” said Yu, the son of an aerospace engineer father and a mother who worked as a school district accountant.

 

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