He’s a screenwriter for TV and film and he’s the author of several books, including the 2020 novel, Interior Chinatown, for which he won the National Book Award for Fiction.

He graduated in 1997 with a major in molecular and cell biology and a minor in creative writing. Narration: Charlie is a Berkeley alumnus. And so, you have both sides - not seeing it, and then seeing very infrequent portrayals would put a lot of pressure on those portrayals, and so, there’s that experience. Like, I was a heavy, heavy consumer of television as a kid, and probably, the invisibility did as much to affect me as the visibility. Narration: Most of the time when he saw Asians or Asian Americans on TV, they were playing stereotypical or flat characters, sometimes offensive, sometimes not.Ĭharlie Yu: But largely, it was just an absence. But Bruce Lee was sort of universally known and universally cool. There were no, like, real actors or professional athletes or other public figures, you know, in the consciousness.

That was one of the few universally positive role models that an Asian American kid of that generation would have had. His favorite was the 1972 film, Fist of Fury.Ĭharlie Yu: One of the few ways that you could interface with Asians or Asian Americans in U.S. A child of Taiwanese immigrants, Charlie especially loved shows and movies starring famed martial artist Bruce Lee. Narration: As a kid growing up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ‘80s, Charlie Yu watched a lot of TV. This year, all incoming first-year and transfer students read the novel as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters and Science. In those moments … real connection can come about.”Ĭharles Yu is the author of the 2020 book, Interior Chinatown. “And we, hopefully, see the ways in which the person underneath peeks out and can’t be fully covered by what’s there. “I hope that people can see that, in one way or another, all the characters in this book are wearing a mask and a costume, to some extent, and they don’t fit them perfectly,” said Yu. Incoming UC Berkeley students read the book over the summer as part of On The Same Page, a program from the College of Letters and Science, so they’d have something in common to talk about throughout the year - socially, in classes and at events designed to explore the book’s themes. In this episode of Berkeley Voices, Charles Yu discusses his 2020 book, Interior Chinatown, which goes inside the mind of a young Asian American man trying to make it in Hollywood. Follow Berkeley Voices, a Berkeley News podcast about the people and research that makes UC Berkeley the world-changing place that it is.

Charles yu