“Interior Chinatown” was never going to be an easy adaptation. The novel’s success — which was considerable, including a National Book Award in 2020 — flowed from how seamlessly its author, Charles Yu, deployed the metafictional device at the book’s heart. His gimmick was simple enough in outline, but it was hard to see how it would work onscreen (even though it was, in part, about television).
The adaptation is now here, in a 10-part mini-series that premiered Tuesday on Hulu, and it was overseen by Yu, who is both a novelist and a TV writer; he served as showrunner and wrote the first and last episodes. To keep his concept alive, he has stretched and twisted it to the breaking point — the onscreen “Interior Chinatown” is recognizable as an expansion of the book, and at the same time a completely different story and experience.
It is an adroit and polished response to the different expectations of the screen-watching and book-reading audiences (and to a nearly seven-hour running time). It improves on the book in some ways, but in other, more obvious ways, it inherits the book’s problems. Overall, it reinforces the apparent difficulty of lifting Asian American characters out of the ghetto of good intentions and achingly familiar situations.
In his novel, Yu gave a spin to a typical story of Asian American anxiety — Willis Wu, the son of immigrant parents, works in a Chinese restaurant while seething over his invisibility in mainstream America — by combining it with a satirical take on a “Law & Order”-like TV crime drama, written in screenplay format. (The title puns on “interior” as a screenwriting term.) Wu is a bit player, Generic Asian Man, in both the TV show and in his “real” life, which exist on different fictional planes but are cleverly intermingled. They are suffused in each other with such thoroughness that Yu, and Wu, barely need to move between them; the story is often in both worlds at the same time.
Allegory is a tougher sell in the more literal world of the actual TV screen, however, and Yu has adjusted. The show takes the somewhat nebulous events of the book and, while still trafficking in plenty of flashy self-referential effects, presents a more conventional, linear plot with a jokey, sardonic style that replaces the book’s wistfulness. Most noticeably, the ethnic family drama has been condensed, while the cop-show component has grown to the point that it effectively takes over.
The story’s two worlds now exist on the same plane: The restaurant worker Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) worms his way into the police department in order to investigate the death of his older brother, taking on Asian-accessible roles like tech guy and interrogation interpreter that the cops literally do not see.
On the home front, there are few surprises. Wu falls for a young mixed-race detective (Chloe Bennet) while ignoring the nice, smart Chinese American woman (Annie Chang) that his mother (Diana Lin) prefers. At the same time, he yearns for the love and approval of his immigrant father (Tzi Ma).
Yu compensates in the relentlessly eventful crime plot, pushing it in the direction of Big Brother conspiracy and “Mr. Robot”-style surveillance noir. Without the leeway for delicate balancing that he had in the book, Yu breaks his own fourth wall, literalizing his ideas — we are all playing roles in stories we did not write — as a gang called the Painted Faces sets off bombs around Chinatown and the camera-ready cops wonder why their cases seem to solve themselves.
In its early episodes, before the angsty meta-crime drama takes over, “Interior Chinatown” plays more like a comic mystery — “Only Murders in the Ethnic Enclave” — with magical realist touches. There is a lot of charm in these episodes because Yu has added humor, an element only subtly present in the novel, and cast a pair of accomplished comic actors, Yang and Ronny Chieng, in the main roles.
Chieng plays Fatty Choi, Wu’s best friend and fellow waiter, and he is often the best reason to watch the show. He and Yang have a great rapport, and he gives his character a bumptious, defensive innocence that is reliably entertaining; a subplot in which Fatty accidentally takes on a crowd-pleasing, Edsel Fung-style mean-waiter persona is the only outcropping of humor in the later episodes.
There are other winning performances in “Interior Chinatown,” including those of Chang; Lin; Chau Long as a wide-eyed busboy; Archie Kao as the uncle who owns the restaurant; and Sullivan Jones and Lisa Gilroy as the lead detectives in what becomes the cop-show-within-the-show, “Black & White.” And the show often looks great, especially in the Chinatown scenes, filmed on warm, colorful, crowded sets.
Those are things “Interior Chinatown” gains in its move to the screen. But there are losses, too. In the novel, neither of the worlds Yu presents needs to stand up as an entirely real creation. The focus is on the drama of ideas, of Asian American aspiration and frustration, that take place where they intersect. Onscreen, the burden is greater. The family drama needs to feel new and specific, even when it is idealized. The police investigation needs to play as real crime drama, even as it is being satirized. Fail in either case and you have dead space.
That is what happens too often in “Interior Chinatown.” It is especially true in the crime plot, whose thinness and repetitiveness render long stretches of the series’ second half hard to watch. (Whatever points are being scored against the oppressive shallowness of the entertainment-industrial complex are not worth the tedium.)
And the presentation of Wu’s family and of the community in their Chinatown apartment building, while well observed and sometimes touching, has its own deadness: the dull undertow of things seen before; the autocratic father and the neglected second son; gentrification and cultural appropriation, dressed up with disarming humor and postmodern flourishes but, as drama, the same old same old. The new story still has not arrived.
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