One of Jimmy O. Yang’s first TV roles was Asian Teenager No. 2, in a 2013 episode of “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“The part was for someone who could speak Cantonese; I think that’s why I got it,” he said in a recent interview. He remembers the constant competition back then among Asian actors for roles with one or two lines, “an episode of something shooting in Chinatown,” he said, “or a part in the background at a community college.”
Such work might sound like small potatoes. But in an industry that has historically struggled to put Asian actors and characters in the foreground, every rung of the ladder counts.
Now Yang, who was born in Hong Kong and came to the United States when he was 13, is at the center of a limited series that turns the struggle into mind-swirling metafiction. “Interior Chinatown,” adapted by the showrunner Charles Yu from his own 2020 novel, is a TV series based on a book about a life unfolding inside a TV series.
“The elevator pitch is that it’s ‘Law & Order’ meets ‘The Truman Show,’” Yu said. “It starts as a straightforward mystery and gets into something weirder, a metaphysical mystery hopefully.”
“Interior Chinatown,” premiering with all 10 episodes Tuesday on Hulu, is also an affectionate sendup of the police procedural, and a sly piece of media criticism about Asian stereotypes in entertainment.
“I feel like I’m a background character in somebody else’s story,” Yang’s Willis Wu tells his friend and Chinatown restaurant colleague, Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng), early in the series. As it turns out, that is exactly what he is.
When Willis witnesses an abduction outside the restaurant, he begins to toggle between two worlds. One is his humdrum restaurant routine. The other is a “Law & Order”-style procedural series called “Black & White,” starring Sullivan Jones as Detective Turner (he’s Black) and Lisa Gilroy as Detective Green (she’s white).
The series and the series-within-the-series are lit differently, and the police precinct, in fictional Port Harbour, is presented as a backlot set. Every now and then the camera pulls back and shows Willis on an old television, watched by an invisible viewer. The festive, TV-friendly bar that Willis visits in the first episode with a sympathetic detective (Chloe Bennet) turns out to be the set for a hard seltzer commercial.
“Interior Chinatown” uses such postmodern strokes to wrestle with the collision of race and authenticity. Willis is both a background character — think Asian Teenager No. 2 — and, outside the world of his restaurant, the Asian guy, standing out in a crowd. He’s like the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s novel “Invisible Man,” imperceptible but impossible not to see.
“We’re building off of work that others have done in other traditions, Ellison being the best example,” said Yu, whose parents emigrated from Taiwan before he was born. “The show and the book are really about being an authentic self, and what that means, and how we piece that together both for ourselves and for other people. Hopefully we came up with some fun and entertaining ways to explore that idea.”
Yu started hashing out the novel, which is written in the form of a screenplay, when he was working in the writers’ room of the HBO series “Westworld.”
“I was part of the big machinery of making a TV show and seeing how the sausage was made from the inside,” he said. “And I’ve always been really interested in roles and performance, and how we are or are not trying to project a certain impression of ourselves at potentially any moment.”
The novel, which won the National Book Award, rang true to Asian actors who are often confined to the background.
“This book speaks to every single Asian actor in Hollywood,” said Chieng, born in Malaysia and raised in New Hampshire and Singapore, whose character, Fatty, gains a cult following when he becomes the rudest waiter imaginable. (The tourists love being insulted.) “Asian actors were always comedic relief, maybe the villain, maybe the henchman, maybe the best friend.”
“When you see that in the book,” Chieng added, “you recognize it.”
Bennet, who was a regular on “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” when Yang played his bit part, has her own personal connection to the series’s exploration of Asian performers in Hollywood. Born in Chicago to a Chinese father and a white mother, her real name is Chloe Wang; she moved to China when she was 15 to pursue a singing career, then to Los Angeles to become an actor.
She recalled what a casting director told her during an early audition: “You’re not Asian enough to play the best friend, but you’re not white enough to play the lead. That’s tricky.” She soon changed her stage name to Bennet, her father’s first name. “And I booked the first part I auditioned for,” she said.
The work has continued to flow, but Bennet’s feelings about changing a part of herself in order to succeed in Hollywood remain complex. “There’s real psychological danger, because it’s a form of internalized racism,” she said.
She sees the police procedural genre as a perfect way to tackle such thorny issues. “It’s so classically American,” she said. “It’s in your home every day, every week. It’s telling you what you think of yourself. I know I watched ‘Law and Order’ all the time as a kid.”
Yu is particularly partial to “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.” (In the series-within-the-series, Turner and Green lead the Impossible Crimes Unit).
“It’s comforting, the idea that you can package a story and solve a crime in 42 minutes,” Yu said. And yes, “Law & Order” episodes often have Asian characters in the background (and occasionally even in the foreground: Rachel Lin is a regular on “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” as Detective Victoria Cho).
“Interior Chinatown” plays with the idea of Willis stepping up and becoming a star on the series and in his own life. In his daily reality, he has always taken a back seat to his missing older brother (Chris Pang), who, in the “Black & White” world, goes by the generic Asian movie name of Kung Fu Guy. The novel offers a list of the roles Willis and, by extension, other Asian actors have historically played. Among them: Disgraced Son; Delivery Guy; and of course, Generic Asian Man.
“Willis doesn’t know he’s trapped in this show,” Yang said. “He just wants to get out of Chinatown, make a better life for himself and his family, and all that stuff is very relatable to everyone. You don’t need to know about acting or getting a SAG card or central casting.”
This relatability also helped Yang navigate the series’s many layers and find Willis’s core. “He’s someone who’s been stuck in a rut, stuck in a restaurant, and he feels like he’s been stuck in a loop,” he said.
There’s another main character in “Interior Chinatown,” hiding right in the title. The series takes a tongue-in-cheek-approach to depicting Chinatown as a place of dark mystery and perceived exoticism, an idea that has long persisted in the American imagination. Think Roman Polanski’s bleak 1974 neo-noir and its famous final words: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.” It’s where outsiders don’t want to ask too many questions.
In researching the novel, Yu leaned heavily on the Bonnie Tsui book “American Chinatown,” which gives a historical overview of five different Chinatowns (including those in New York and Los Angeles). Yu quoted it for his novel’s opening epigraph: “If a film needed an exotic backdrop … Chinatown could be made to represent itself or any other Chinatown in the world. Even today, it stands in for the ambiguous Asian anywhere.”
But Chinatowns, including the one in Los Angeles, where many exteriors in “Interior Chinatown” were shot, are also specific places where real people live and work. And they have historically functioned as vital entry points for immigrants arriving to America.
For Yu, this dichotomy was a perfect match for the story’s metafictional world.
“Is this a Chinatown of Willis’s mind, or is it an actual place?” Yu asked. “I don’t know that there’s a simple answer. It’s both a set and a mind-set, a physical space and an imaginary cultural space. We got to film that paradox. That was what was really fun.”
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