How To Academy Podcast

Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown

Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy.
A coruscating satire of race, assimilation and Hollywood, Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown is both a groundbreaking experimental novel and a deeply personal and affecting family story heralded as one of the best books of 2020. A New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2020 National Book Award, the novel confirms Yu as one of America's most exciting young authors.
In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, he explores the history of Chinese culture in the US, how his personal experiences as a first generation Taiwanese-American shaped the narrative, and what his own time in Hollywood has taught him about the art of storytelling.
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How To Academy is London's home of big thinking. From Nobel laureates to Pulitzer Prize winners, we invite the world’s most influential voices to share new ideas for changing ourselves, our communities, and the world. Our biweekly podcast is your chance to hear in-depth from the most exciting thinkers in global culture.