In his metafictional novel, Charles Yu maps a Chinatown state of mind

American writer Charles Yu clinched the National Book Award in November for Interior Chinatown. PHOTOS: TINA CHIOU, VINTAGE

Ever since he was a boy, Willis Wu has dreamt of being Kung Fu Guy.

Unfortunately, he is currently stuck as Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he is Dead Asian Man, Delivery Guy or even Guy Who Runs In And Gets Kicked In The Face.

Such are the roles available to a young Chinese man in the world of Interior Chinatown, a neighbourhood that is both a real place and a state of mind.

American writer Charles Yu clinched the National Book Award last November for Interior Chinatown, his fourth book. Yu, also a screenwriter for hit television shows like Westworld (2016 to present), wrote much of the novel in the style of a screenplay, examining the stereotypes entrenched in the Asian-American experience.

The Chinatown of the novel is both an "amalgam of multiple physical Chinatowns, but also an imaginary place in the cultural imagination", says Yu, 45, over Skype from Irvine, California, where he lives with his wife and two children, 11 and 13.

"It's what I project to be the mental enclave - or ghetto, even - of feeling like an Asian-American, to feel like I'm trapped inside of a role, whether it's me or someone else doing the trapping."

Which is not to say it was not confusing. "I got questions from my editor like, 'What is this? Is it real? Is he on a TV set? How are we supposed to understand what Willis' reality is like? When he's walking from point A to point B, is there anything in between?' And so we went around in circles for the better part of two years trying to figure it out."

Willis' Chinatown serves as the archetypal backdrop to police procedural Black And White, which was inspired by the countless late nights Yu spent watching Law And Order (1990 to 2010) while trying to get his babies to go to sleep.

"There's very much a template to it, which is extremely successful for a reason," he says of the show. "So that was burned into my brain."

Willis, like most of Chinatown's population, is a calefare on shows like Black And White, though he tries to rise through the ranks.

His mother was once a Pretty Oriental Flower and Asiatic Seductress in the Golden Palace Restaurant, where much of the action takes place; his father was Sifu, the legendary gongfu master. Now in their dotage, they are Old Asian Man and Woman, wizened and fading into the background.

Parent-child relationships form the backbone of much of Yu's work. In his 2010 debut novel, How To Live Safely In A Science Fictional Universe, a time travel technician - also called Charles Yu - repairs the time machines of people who have tried to fix the past, while looking for his missing father.

Yu was so stunned by his National Book Award win that he forgot to thank his family in his acceptance speech.

"My mum let me know pretty quickly," he says wryly. "She said, 'Hey, you didn't thank your wife.' And of course my wife was sitting right next to me, and she suffered through six or seven years of me writing that book, and just generally suffers me as a writer.

"And I realised I hadn't thanked any of them. It felt pretty awful. But they forgave me," he adds. "I'll keep trying to make it up to them."

Yu was born in Los Angeles, the elder son of Taiwanese immigrants. He loved science fiction as a kid and started writing poetry in fourth grade, but wound up going to law school. He was still a lawyer, writing at night, when his first short story collection Third Class Superhero (2006) got published.

The strength of the collection led National Book Award-winning novelist Richard Powers to name Yu one of the National Book Foundation's Five Under 35 most promising writers in America in 2007.

In 2014, two years after Yu published his second collection Sorry Please Thank You, he got a call from HBO about writing for Westworld. He quit his job as a lawyer and began writing full time for TV, including for the AMC comedy-drama Lodge 49 (2018 to 2019).

"It felt like I was at a fantasy camp for adults, living out my dreams and that sooner or later, this would end," he recalls of his time in Hollywood.

Interior Chinatown was published in the wake of the 2018 film Crazy Rich Asians, which many hailed as a watershed moment for Asian representation in Hollywood and has spurred the likes of recent reality TV hit Bling Empire.

"It seems like there's an openness, both commercially and just in terms of mindset, to the possibility of more Asian-American stories," says Yu. He remains cautiously optimistic, however, as to how big a step of inclusivity this really is.

"Crazy Rich Asians is both a huge breakthrough and also an example of something where it's in a category of one. How many more things could there be like that, you know? Unless somebody wants to make Boring Middle-class Asians as a movie, which I don't think they do. That'll be when I think there's real progress."

That said, he is already working to adapt Interior Chinatown as a Hulu TV series. Asked if he has a dream cast, he demurs.

"The book is about Asians in the background who aren't out there already, and I think it'd be really cool to find someone who literally played a bunch of background Asians and now gets to be the star. That'd be neat."

Interior Chinatown ($27.82) is available here

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