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. 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.

"This is really a book about roles and how we play them," Yu said. "Sometimes they are fundamental to who we are, but they can also be very limiting or reductive. 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 it doesn't fit them perfectly. And we, hopefully, see the ways in which the person underneath peeks out and can't be fully covered by what's there. In those moments, when the mask slips and you talk out of character, real connection can come about."

Listen to the episode and read a transcript on news.berkeley.edu.

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Music by Blue Dot Sessions.

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