Charles Yu

"From the infinitely inventive author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe comes a deeply personal novel about race, pop culture, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play."--

Interior Chinatown

you dont understand how obsessed i am with this book

Stas

You wear the uniform: white shirt, black pants. Black slipperlike shoes that have notraction whatsoever. Your haircut is not good, to say the least. 

Black and White always looks good. A lot of it has to do with the light. They're the heroes. They get hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Designed to hit White's face just right, anyway. 

Your relationship having turned into a pantomime, a series of gestures in a well-worn scene, played out again and again, any underlying feeling having long since been obviated by emotional muscle memory, learning how to make the right faces, strike the right poses, not out of apathy or lack of sincerity, rather a need to preserve what was left of his pride.

It's raining inside your bedroom. You hope Old Fong is enjoying his nap.

Your mother weeps, and dies. Weeps and dies. Weeps and doesn't die. Just weeps. Because now, your father is no longer a person, no longer a human. Just some mystical Eastern force, some Wizened Chinaman. Her husband is gone, Wu is gone, even Young Asian Man is gone. They took him away from her. He is lost now, in his work, in who they made him. 

There's too much tension in the courtrom. It's way too sexy in here. 

Alex

Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.

God how that fucking hits. But like opposite, bc ~mommy issues~

When she was dead, she got to be your mother.

We lose ourselves and each other to what everyone wants us to be, the perfect capitalist worker bees and we have to fight to stay true to even the smallest bits of ourselves, to not lose who we are to each other.

He is lost now, in his work, in who they made him. Distant. Cold, perfectionist. Inscrutable. No descriptors, anymore, no age or build, just a role, a name, a shell where he used it be. His features taken away and replaced by archetypes, even his face hollowing out. 

This is how he became Sifu. This is how she lost her husband. How you lost your dad.

What the hell is happening? This is not the way things are supposed to go. This is supposed to be when things fall apart but instead they are doing the opposite.

Are you sure you’re not looking for something that you feel entitled to? Isn’t this a kind of narcissism?

Interior Chinatown quotes

Join the club