NEA Big Read: Interior Chinatown Discussion and Writing Workshop
April 26, 2025, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
The Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) presents its 2024-25 NEA Big Read initiative, featuring Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, a National Book Award winner.
This April, join us for an engaging discussion and writing workshop led by MOCA educator Alice Fung. This interactive program will explore literary appreciation and feature a dynamic writing activity inspired by the novel. Participants will discuss themes of family history, the immigrant experience, and storytelling as a means of addressing real-world challenges. All attendees will receive a FREE copy of Interior Chinatown. This event is open to all, and no prior writing experience is required.
Centered around the theme Where We Live, MOCA has been hosting a series of free, multidisciplinary public programs including talks and community events with artists, performers, and scholars. NEA Big Read is a program of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with Arts Midwest.
About Interior Chinatown
Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?
After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
About Charles Yu
Photo Credit: Tina Chiou
Charles Yu is the author of four books, including his latest, Interior Chinatown, which won the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction, was shortlisted for the Le Prix Médicis étranger, and longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. He has received the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Award, been nominated for two Writers Guild of America awards for his work on the HBO series Westworld, and has also written for shows on FX, AMC, Facebook Watch, and Adult Swim. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in a number of publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine, the Atlantic, Wired, Time and Ploughshares.