Interior Chinatown, by Charles Yu

Winner of this year’s National Book Award. The novel, arranged in seven “acts,” is confusing at first, which is intentional. Willis Wu, the protagonist, lives in a single room above the Golden Palace, a generic Chinese restaurant whose large laminated menu lists the usual suspects. He works downstairs. But wait, there are actual suspects – someone has been murdered in the Golden Palace and the case is being investigated by Miles Turner, a Black man from a family of cops who left law practice to honor his father’s wish, and Sarah Green, an attractive and up-and-coming white detective. They banter as they stand over the dead Asian guy on the floor. They are all actors in a well-known TV drama “Black and White,” and the Golden Palace serves as the stage set in the series. Willis, and his parents, estranged and also living in separate rooms in the same building, are or have been actors in the series. There is a hierarchy to the parts available to them, from Generic Asian Man or Pretty Oriental Flower, up to the pinnacle, Kung Fu Guy, a position once held by Willis’s father, and to which he aspires. The tricky structure of the book slowly reveals the theme that Asians, the “model minority,” individually and as a group are not regarded as American, no matter how long ago their immigration from any Asian country may have been. As Isabel Wilkerson discusses in her book “Caste,” Asians lack the history of slavery oppression of African-Americans, the inborn privileges of being white, and the opportunity to “become white,” rising from the bottom ranks of society, as recent immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and eastern European countries have done. Asians tend to be viewed monolithically, no matter their background, and remain somehow “other.” It’s also a memoir-like exploration of what it is like to come to grips with the “interior Chinatown” that Willis cannot seem to escape. “Interior Chinatown” is funny, sad, and will make the reader reassess their own biases. 270 pp.