Charles Yu’s ‘Interior Chinatown’ wins US National Book Award for fiction
- The satirical novel is a send-up of Chinese stereotypes and of the immigrants’ conflict between wanting to assimilate and asserting their true selves
- Other winning works include Don Mee Choi’s ‘DMZ Colony’, Yu Miri’s ‘Tokyo Ueno Station’ and Tamara and Les Payne’s Malcolm X biography
Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, a satirical, cinematic novel written in the form of a screenplay, has won the National Book Award for fiction.
The book is a send-up of Chinese stereotypes and of the immigrants’ conflict between wanting to assimilate and asserting their true selves.
Politics helped inspire Yu, whose previous books include the story collections Third Class Superhero and Sorry Please Thank You. He had struggled with Interior Chinatown, wondering if there was a reason to tell an immigration story, until the surprise victory of Donald Trump in 2016.
“Before then, I felt it lacked a real reason for being,” Yu told Associated Press in a recent interview. “It seemed that reference to things in the past like the Chinese Exclusion Act (a racist law passed in 1882) had relevance. I started thinking, ‘This does still matter. This is a story you should try to tell.’”
The poetry prize went to Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony, while Malcolm X biography The Dead Are Arising, by Tamara Payne and her father the late Les Payne, was cited for nonfiction. Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies won for young people’s literature. and Yu Miri’s Tokyo Ueno Station, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles, took the prize for best translated work.