On the Same Page 2022: Interior Chinatown

The UC Berkeley On the Same Page program gives new students (and everyone else!) at Cal something to talk about.  This year, we're all on the same page reading Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, which won the National Book Award in 2020. Learn more about the novel and the author, special events and courses relating to the theme. 

"Arranged in acts and told in the second person in the form of a screenplay, “Interior Chinatown” is bold, even groundbreaking, in its form. It’s full of clever wordplay and in-jokes about the Chinese American experience. It detours through China’s recent history and America’s exclusionary immigration laws, building to a climax that marries earnest, vaguely Socratic dialogue with the Queen of Hearts’ loopy trial for tart theft in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”"

 --San Francisco Chronicle

E-books and Audio book through Overdrive 

E-book through ProQuest

Print book through the UCB Library.

Translated into Chinese

This book may also be available from your public library.

There are two ways to connect to library resources from off-campus using the new library proxy:

1. Links to online resources on library websites, such as UC Library Search, will allow you to login with CalNet directly.
2. To access library resources found via non-UCB sites, such as Google or Google Scholar, you can add the EZproxy bookmarklet to your browser. Then, whenever you land on a licensed library resource, select your EZproxy bookmarklet to enable CalNet login.

More information is on the EZproxy guide.

The campus VPN provides an alternate method for off-campus access.

Interior Chinatown Book Reviews and in the News:

• New York Times
• Washington Post
• Kirkus Reviews
• New Yorker (Briefly Noted)
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Los Angeles Review of Books

For more: Charles Yu website and twitter feed

Please note that scholarly journal articles take a long time to be written, peer-reviewed and published, and there will be relatively few scholarly journal articles about a work that was published recently.  Search for scholarly. journal articles about the author's earlier works if necessary.

Use UC Library Search to find books, scholarly and popular articles, manuscripts, videos, and much more for all ten UC campuses.  UC Library Search is also searchable from the Library home page. More about UC Library Search.

Sample searches:

"interior chinatown"

"charles yu"

"asian american literature" AND criticism

advanced search

pull down the "any field" menu to "subject".       chinatown

pull down the "any field" menu to "subject".        fiction

quotes keep two or more words together

* = wildcard/truncation (child* = child childs children childish childhood...)

AND - join two concepts with an AND