![]() ![]() ![]() I had to really think about the interplay between the two storylines, because ultimately, that’s part of what’s going on with him. That was probably the single hardest thing to write-figuring out how those levels work, the mixing between the show and Willis’s story. What is the significance of these two narratives merging? Once I thought about that framework, it seemed like I had to do part of it as a screenplay.Īs you get deeper into the book, Willis’s internal monologue becomes more deeply intertwined with the Black and White crime drama, to the point where it’s hard to differentiate what he’s thinking from what’s actually happening. Watching the story go by and just wondering if you’re going to be part of the story. Not quite in the center of things, but having a view into the center of things. My parents from Taiwan and sometimes I still feel now-as a middle aged dad, thinking about how my wife and I raise our kids-this feeling of being slightly at the margin. When I hit on Willis, who plays Asian characters on this TV show, I felt like that captured something about what it felt like to grow up as a child of immigrants. Like, will it take people out of the story? “Oh, am I reading a screenplay now? What is this?” it ultimately felt like a natural product of the character. ![]() I did go back and forth a little bit on that. What made you decide to write the story in the form of a screenplay? I spoke to Yu, author of the 2010 novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe and writer for shows like Westworld and Legion, about the novel’s dizzying structure and how he came to write the story he was meant to tell. Written as a novel-in-a-screenplay, Charles Yu’s fourth book Interior Chinatown is both a biting satire of Hollywood stereotypes and a tender reflection on family, immigration, and what it means to be American. On the crime procedural drama Black and White, in which two police officers-a black man and white woman-fight increasingly ludicrous crimes, Wu has worked his way up to the role of Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy, but his ultimate goal of playing Kung Fu Guy, the pinnacle of Asian cinema, is just out of reach. This is the predicament that narrator Willis Wu, a restaurant worker living in a dingy Chinatown SRO, finds himself in. Limited to one-dimensional roles like Egg Roll Cook, Young Dragon Lady, and Striving Immigrant, there’s no way to advance beyond the exoticism or “perpetual foreigner” status that comes with existing in the margins of America. In the world of Interior Chinatown, Asian Americans don’t get to play the dashing leads in TV shows. ![]()
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