My family didn’t have cable when I was growing up. What we did have was a DVD player into which my parents fed offerings from the local Blockbuster. Our fare consisted mostly of kung fu movies: the Once Upon a Time in China series, Iron Monkey, Twin Warriors, Drunken Master. The stars of these movies—Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and Jackie Chan—were household heroes, embodying characters that were deadly but fiercely principled. And they looked like me.
As a teenager, my world felt small for the four walls of my room, the doldrums of homework, the rigor of piano lessons—but huge, too, for the potential of a world beyond all this. Martial arts movies offered a peek into that world. Every night, I would hoist my leg atop my bookcase and stretch toward it like a ballerina at the barre. If I could just improve my flexibility, I thought, I would be on my way to being a martial arts master and escaping the mundane everyday of our quiet suburb. If I could be like my kung fu heroes, I could be something more than me.
My family didn’t have cable when I was growing up. What we did have was a DVD player into which my parents fed offerings from the local Blockbuster. Our fare consisted mostly of kung fu movies: the Once Upon a Time in China series, Iron Monkey, Twin Warriors, Drunken Master. The stars of these movies—Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Michelle Yeoh, and Jackie Chan—were household heroes, embodying characters that were deadly but fiercely principled. And they looked like me.
As a teenager, my world felt small for the four walls of my room, the doldrums of homework, the rigor of piano lessons—but huge, too, for the potential of a world beyond all this. Martial arts movies offered a peek into that world. Every night, I would hoist my leg atop my bookcase and stretch toward it like a ballerina at the barre. If I could just improve my flexibility, I thought, I would be on my way to being a martial arts master and escaping the mundane everyday of our quiet suburb. If I could be like my kung fu heroes, I could be something more than me.
Such is the dream that Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), the protagonist of Hulu’s Interior Chinatown, has for himself. Willis works at Golden Palace, a Chinese restaurant in the Chinatown of a fictional city called Port Harbor. He spends his days in the role of “Generic Asian Man,” folding cloth napkins, arranging tableware, and goofing off with his best friend Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng), but yearns for something more. “I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story,” he tells Fatty. “I think that’s called being a loser,” Fatty replies.
Willis wants to be a bigger character—a main character, even. He wants to follow in the footsteps of his older brother Jonny (Chris Pang), who ascended from “Generic Asian Man” to “Kung Fu Guy” through his work with the Port Harbor police department before going missing years ago. One evening, after Willis witnesses a kidnapping, a detective assigned to the case, Lana Lee (Chloe Bennet), asks a reluctant Willis for help. Perhaps, she suggests, there is a way to solve the mystery of his brother’s disappearance, too. This is it: Willis’ chance to break out from the background. Unsure, he goes to his father for counsel, asking who he is supposed to be. His father tells him: “Be more.”
The 10-episode series, which premiered on Nov. 19, is an adaptation of Charles Yu’s 2020 National Book Award-winning novel of the same name. Yu served as the showrunner and writer of the first and last episodes, with Taika Waititi directing the pilot.
In the novel, Willis is actually an actor on a fictional Law & Order-style procedural called Black & White, where he plays roles like “Background Oriental Male,” “Dead Asian Man,” and “Generic Asian Male Number Three/Delivery Guy.” It is a clear commentary on the barriers for Asian Americans in Hollywood and in Western society. Yu, who moonlights as a television writer, cleverly chose to style the novel as a script—which adds to the novel’s thesis.
At one point, Willis’ dialogue is formatted in the margins, while that of the lead detectives is centered in the page, offering a subtle but damning critique: Asian Americans are constantly assigned background roles, their development (if any) taking place literally off the page. Time, place, and characters bleed together to tell not just the story of Willis Wu, but of a Chinese American—perpetually outcast, miscast, and typecast.
One would think that the format of the novel would make it easy to adapt for the screen. However, the book is full of internal dialogue, shifting points of view, meta-narratives, asides, and in-jokes. Such devices work wonderfully on the page, but this magic is hard to recreate faithfully in television, something that Yu has acknowledged: “I should have been more mindful of the fact that literally everyone was like, this is going to be really hard. I didn’t fully understand how hard it would be to crack it until I started doing it.”
In the television adaptation, Willis sheds his role of “Generic Asian Man” and leaves Chinatown to help Lana with the investigation. They join forces with detectives Miles Turner (Sullivan Jones) and Sarah Green (Lisa Gilroy) of Port Harbor’s “Impossible Crimes Unit.” But whereas the book tells the story of a young man trying to make it in Hollywood, the show takes a different turn: The characters are unknowingly trapped in Black & White, a show-within-a-show. Turner and Green are the stars, and we spend much of the series watching them investigate the lurid crimes of Chinatown.
It’s a bold choice, and at times it works to demonstrate the series’ thesis: that we as Asian Americans are trapped in someone else’s story. But other times, the blurring between the real show and the show-within-a-show feels unwieldy, as if Interior Chinatown is confused about how to handle the weighty premise it promised.
As he searches for his missing brother, Willis finds himself embracing other background roles for his perceived benefit, including “Delivery Guy,” “Tech Guy,” and eventually “Lead Detective.” But even as a main character, he is playing a part dictated by someone else. It is an interesting examination of what it means to “make it” in America, and the tension between finding utility in playing a role assigned by society but compromising oneself in the process.
Willis is not the only character contending with pre-written roles and their limits. His mother, Lily, strives to become a successful real estate agent, but at the cost of selling out the residents of their family’s low-income housing building. His father, Joe, once dreamed of opening a kung fu school but has become a shell of his former self as he grieves the loss of his oldest son. Fatty is thrust into the spotlight as a popular “Mean Waiter” at the restaurant. Willis’s missing brother, Jonny, who was the first to realize that he was trapped in a show-within-a-show, was punished for trying to escape. Lana, who is multiracial, faces microaggressions and suspicion from Green, who constantly asks, “Where did she even come from?”
The show wants to argue that to break out of the roles society, culture, and history expect, one must become cognizant of the system and then write their own story. It’s a good message, but it takes a frustrating number of twists and turns to reach it. The show heroically blends the maximalism of Everything Everywhere All at Once with the time- and genre-hopping cleverness of shows such as Community and Futureman. However, in a show that seeks to bring its protagonist to the forefront, these bells and whistles overshadow his story rather than elevate it.
Perhaps the problem is the container in which the show operates. Watching episode eight, a series of cheeky in-universe commercials meant to show Willis’s disappointing life as a “main character,” one can’t help but think that the series needed to stretch its story in order to fulfill its 10-episode length requirement, diluting itself in the process.
Interior Chinatown is strongest when it leans into the humanity of its characters and their relationships with each other. Lily’s conflicted ascent through the real estate business is emotionally gripping and masterfully stewarded by Diana Lin; the relationship between Lily and Joe, played with tenderness by Tzi Ma, is heartbreaking and lovely. Even Ronny Chieng’s Fatty, who is not so discernable from Chieng’s stand-up persona, is best in quiet moments of self-reflection and vulnerability.
Near the series’ end, the writers seem to break the fourth wall, acknowledging the limits of the medium and industry in which they work. But the gesture feels somewhat empty. It’s almost as if the show has fallen into the trap that it seeks to critique: that a story about an Asian American’s journey toward self-acceptance and actualization cannot stand on its own; it will always be sidelined by other stories. In this case, the crime-mystery-thriller elements and frequent cuts to Black & White serve as a constant reminder of the show’s hesitation to let its main characters’ stories take center stage and be enough.
It’s difficult to view either version of Interior Chinatown as separate from the political context of the past four years. The novel was published in 2020, when I was working on my own novel, a story set against the backdrop of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It was also a time when then-U.S. President Donald Trump spread the phrases “Chinese virus” and “kung flu” in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, no doubt contributing to an uptick in anti-Asian violence across the country. I disappeared into my own roles: “Scared Asian” (I went out less), “Angry Asian” (I screamed into a pillow), and my version of “Kung Fu Guy” (I started martial arts training, desperate to give myself some power back).
As the United States prepares for another Trump presidency, how do we as Asian Americans become more than our assigned roles when increasingly strained relations between the United States and China will almost certainly add fuel to an already-burning Sinophobia, affecting anyone perceived, in the words of the show, as a “Generic Asian”? Over the past 200 years, we have been written into the American story with roles like “Yellow Peril,” “Perpetual Foreigner,” and “Model Minority.” It remains to be seen what our new roles will be, but we’ll have to find ways to write ourselves out of them.
I am glad Interior Chinatown exists. I am glad to see more Asians and Asian stories on screen. If you strip away the embellishments, the series is a smart and thoughtful meditation on what it means to be Asian in America. It does not shy away from calling out the invisibility, the stereotypes, and the microaggressions, but it is also full of hope, joy, humor, family, and care through community—all things integral to the Asian American experience.
“Ever since I was a boy,” Willis says in the pilot, “I’ve dreamt of being the hero, to be in the spotlight. But that’s hard if you look like me. People don’t see you that way—if they see you at all.” We see you, Willis Wu. That’s the problem: We want to see more of you, but other things keep getting in the way.
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