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Bezig met laden... Interior Chinatowndoor Charles Yu
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. good. soooooooo good! i had no idea what to expect when i started reading this book. it was funny, i had to ask myself why i thought it was funny though. it was also dark. and sad. but it was also transformative and so original! “In the world of Black and White, everyone starts out as Generic Asian Man. Everyone who looks like you, anyway. Unless you’re a woman, in which case you start out as Pretty Asian Woman". “You all work at Golden Palace, formally Jade Palace, formally Palace of Good Fortune. There’s an aquarium in the front and cloudy tanks of rock crabs and two-pound lobsters crawling over each other in the back. Laminated menus offer the lunch special, which comes with a bowl of fluffy white rice and choice of soup, egg drop or hot and sour”. "You wear the uniform: white shirt, black pants. Black slipperlike shoes that have no traction whatsoever. Your haircut is not good, to say the least”. the writing in this book is sharper than any knife i have in my house and the stylist format and metaphors are powerful. the jokes were funny, but it’s the heartfelt warmth and tenderness for humanity that moved me most. there's plenty of enjoyable laughs balanced with insightful seriousness which was well balanced. Charles Yu opened up a can of worms, while letting the cat out of the bag at the same time. “You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country”! This book is essentially written as a script where the characters are mainly Asian Americans acting as bit players in a cop show, the main protagonist dreaming of being Kung Fu Guy, but usually playing Generic Asian Man or Background Oriental. As the book proceeds this situation increasingly leaks into his real life and family. Its a clever way to look at topics of racism, stereotypes and expectations.
Charles Yu’s funny and surreal new novel, Interior Chinatown, hijacks the leaden tropes of Hollywood and the bare form of screenwriting to excavate the inner life of an Asian American man struggling to repudiate the hard-baked boundaries of marginalization.... Willis embodies the ambient anxiety of lacking an explicit identity—Asian Americans take up what Cathy Park Hong calls “apologetic space”—which Yu gestures toward humorously in these ironic naming choices. Willis’s mother once was a Pretty Oriental Flower and a Restaurant Hostess, his father a Kung Fu Master and an Egg Roll Cook....Getting cast as Kung Fu Guy was never the challenge Willis made it out to be. What actually eludes him—and his family, friends, and neighbors who populate Interior Chinatown—is real, emotional freedom.... there are a few places where we catch its glimmers: a karaoke song performed while intoxicated, a love that has forgiving margins, an identity that asserts itself without performance. On the surface, Yu’s title refers to a location setting, in this case a generic Chinese restaurant in a generic Chinatown in a fictional police series entitled White and Black. The protagonist Willis Wu, a veteran of bit parts ranging from Disgraced Son to Striving Immigrant, finds himself at a murder scene in a family restaurant playing yet another variation of Generic Asian Man.... Yu freely weaves satire with social commentary, speculative fiction with identity politics. Without leaving its fantasy world, the story often turns bracingly real. Though much of his protagonist’s insecurities are narrowly focused—not just Asian, but specifically Asian American—his accumulation of concerns becomes surprisingly and relatably inclusive. CHARLES YU SPECIALIZES in ferreting out that peculiar angle, that spark of the unexpected, that re-illumination of an otherwise age-old narrative, and then taking that fantastical story element and spreading it horizontally until it coats the entirety of his writing’s universe. In other words, he writes in conceit.... It’s speculative in its surreal setting. It’s family drama in the centrality of family relationships. It’s satire in its political and social commentary. It’s comedic. It’s literary. It’s weird and experimental. It’s an identity story couched in a kind of a fantasy setting, a kind of a George Saundersesque alternate reality. It’s all of those things, but maybe mostly, it’s allegory. And Yu does allegory as well as anybody, taking an outrageous concept and using it to communicate the dire mundanity and the resonant emotional struggles of the human experience. An acid indictment of Asian stereotypes and a parable for outcasts feeling invisible in this fast-moving world. PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Een zeer persoonlijke roman over ras, popcultuur en ontsnappen aan de rollen die we moeten spelen. Willis Wu, een Aziatische man, is een figurant in een politieserie. Hij droomt ervan 'Kung Fu Guy' te zijn, het beste wat iemand met zijn uiterlijk kan bereiken. Dat is hem keer op keer verteld, behalve door zijn moeder ... Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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Which gets to how this novel is not just about how America treats and has historically treated Asian-Americans, it's about how Asian-Americans navigate and behave in this reality. How people perform the role expected of them, to what degree they are forced into doing it ("No one will hire you because you don't have an accent. It's weird.") and to what degree they choose it themselves. The main character's marriage falls apart evidently because he can't let go of that role that's expected of him as an Asian-American, and later watching his daughter he reflects on the choice he's made and how he hopes she'll be different:
It's a powerful and inventive novel, well worth its win of the National Book Award. ( )