October 5
Location and Format TBD

A $4,999 Quick Grant is supporting Connecticut College’s One Book One Region program. The chosen book is Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu which won the National Book Award for Fiction. Yu will discuss his work at the October 5th event. In the book, he tackles on-screen Asian representation by taking on Hollywood’s Asian tropes.

In a January 8, 2021, NY Times article, Yu explains, “The original thing that got me excited to tell the story this way was to give life — interior life, subjective consciousness — to someone who normally doesn’t get that treatment.”

“Willis is an Asian American, and specifically an Asian American man. For most of my life, growing up, you didn’t see a whole lot of that kind of person on the screen. And if you did, it was usually in one of these very few proscribed roles, and they were often as props. They were a punchline or fulfilling a very specific role, like ‘Here’s your food.’ So writing a character like that starting from the inside was very exciting.”

Please check the One Book One Region website for venue information closer to the date.