Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu

From Pantheon Books: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER 2020   “One of the funniest books of the year has arrived, a delicious, ambitious Hollywood satire.” —The Washington PostNamed a Most Anticipated Book by: Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine, The A.V. Club, Lit Hub, Woman’s Day, The Rumpus, and more.From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as a protagonist even in his own life: He’s merely Generic Asian man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but he is always relegated to a prop. Yet every day he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respec