Yu is known for writing meta and complex work. He said his goal is to find a way to translate the novel’s unusual form to the screen while telling a story in a way “that will shake people out of patterns of thinking in a way I was trying to do with the book.” Hulu is currently developing “Interior Chinatown” as a series and Yu is adapting his own work. “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,” he said. 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. “It just gave it such a new urgency it made me think, I have to be bolder about what I’m trying to say.” “It was absolutely tied to the election of Donald Trump as president,” he said, noting that his own family’s experiences helped inspire the narrative. Yu tried to write the book that would become “Interior Chinatown” for many years and said its current version didn’t take shape until 2017. “How much does it do to your psyche to say, I don’t see myself and other people don’t see me as somebody who could be in this kind of story or this kind of life? You can’t be the main character if you’re in the story at all it’s a very specific kind of role or really as background or furniture, and that kind of takes away your personhood.” “The invisibility of Asians in the stories I consumed was speaking to me on a level I probably didn’t process until I wrote the book,” said Yu, who was raised by Taiwanese immigrant parents in Los Angeles along with his younger brother, Kelvin Yu, an Emmy-winning writer and actor. Wu, who dreams of one day becoming “Kung Fu Guy,” struggles to figure out where he belongs on screen, in life and in America’s Black-white binary paradigm of race. Set in a fictional Chinatown, the humorous and sometimes heartbreaking Hollywood satire follows Willis Wu, a Taiwanese American actor relegated to background roles such as “Generic Asian Man,” “Silent Henchman,” and “Delivery Guy,” on a police procedural called “Black and White” that films at Golden Palace, a Chinese restaurant where the television show is perpetually in production. “I think I’ll always do best and feel best when I’m standing in the corner observing and reading other people's books.” “I still look at literature with this sense of reverence, and maybe it’s also part of the psychology of growing up feeling like I’m not supposed to be on the stage, so I’m very uncomfortable with it,” he said. 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. Thirteen years ago, the National Book Foundation first recognized Yu as a "Five Under 35" honoree for his debut short story collection “Third Class Superhero.”
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