Interior Chinatown

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Download PDF

Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 3 Summary: “Act III: Ethnic Recurring”

Willis works his way up to a role as a special guest star on Black and White. The plot involves the death of an Asian man, and Willis is acting as an insider who speaks the language and can help the detectives with their investigation. Reality bleeds into the script on numerous occasions since most extras at the Golden Palace are Willis’s friends and neighbors. At one point, he speaks to his father, who is still in character as Old Asian Man. Mr. Willis seems disappointed that his son, a straight-A student, is mimicking a broken accent for the role. Seeing his father’s status saddens Willis. “Thousands of hours of work at something and then in a moment, the work gone. Kung fu master to fry cook, the easiest transition in the world. Change wardrobe, hair, a career forgotten. A lifetime repurposed” (89).

Willis makes snide comments to the black actor who plays Detective Turner about how difficult it is to find film work as an Asian person. They nearly get into a fight over which minority has it worse before the white female actress who plays Detective Green breaks it up. The script calls for them to follow clues to a gambling den where one of Willis’s friends plays the shady casino owner. During the interrogation scene, a fight breaks out. Following the script, Willis uses some fast kung fu moves to save Turner’s life and makes the acquaintance of a stunning Asian actress. He begins to dream of an expanded role as resident martial arts expert.

It is then that Willis notices he’s been shot. The script calls for him to die. When he sees Karen Lee, the beautiful actress, for the first time, he fixates on her looks and notices that her race and ethnicity are hard to pin down. She tries to comfort him with the notion that they’ll work together again somewhere else someday. Willis thinks bitterly, “It won’t be somewhere else. It will be here, again, in Chinatown, next year, same place. To be yellow in America. A special guest star, forever the guest” (120).

Chapter 4 Summary: “Act IV: Striving Immigrant”

After Willis’s character is killed off on Black and White, he’s unable to take another role for 45 days. As he explains, “Why forty-five days? It’s the minimum length necessary, just long enough for everyone to forget you existed” (129). While he waits to be reinstated, Willis amuses himself and the reader by telling the backstory of his parents. He starts with his mother, whose real name is Dorothy.

Dorothy is one of nine siblings growing up in Taipei. She comes to America, where she finds work as a nurses’ assistant in an Alabama hospital in 1969 and lives with her sister and brother-in-law. Dorothy’s sister soon sends her packing to live with another sibling in Ohio and charges her room and board for the time she spent in Alabama. Eventually, Dorothy moves to Chinatown in Los Angeles, where she finds film work as a generic Young Asian Woman. She meets Mr. Wu while on set.

Willis switches to narrating his father’s background. Ming-Chen Wu’s story is more tragic than his wife’s. He grows up in Taiwan amid civil unrest, and soldiers kill his father during the period of martial law in 1947. He arrives in Mississippi as a graduate student in 1965. There, he witnesses racial violence against fellow foreign students. After graduation, he can’t find academic work because he doesn’t have a foreign accent. He eventually drifts westward and finds himself in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, where he takes film roles and aspires to be Kung Fu Guy.

Here, the storylines of Ming-Chen Wu and Dorothy intersect. They fall in love, get married, move into an SRO apartment together, and have their only son, Willis. Eventually, Mr. Wu achieves the pinnacle of success by becoming the Kung Fu master, Sifu. His acting skills are in demand, but he gets lost in the role. Willis says:

Cold, perfectionist. Inscrutable. No descriptors, anymore, no age or build, just a role, a name, a shell where he used to be. His features taken away and replaced by archetypes, even his face hollowing out. This is how he became Sifu. This is how she lost her husband. How you lost your dad (160).

Eventually, Mr. Wu becomes too old to play this role and dwindles into playing a generic Old Asian Man. Willis’s parents drift apart and take separate apartments.

Willis returns to his story in the present as he continues to wait for his hiatus from filming to end. He hangs around the Black and White set and meets the attractive Karen Lee again. They strike up a conversation during which Willis admires Karen’s exotic looks because she can pass for several ethnicities. For her part, Karen points out Willis’s self-pitying belief that he will always be typecast as a generic Asian Man.

The two go out for coffee and then on proper dates. Once Willis is reinstated on Black and White, their romance grows. Both actors get better roles and begin to earn more money. After Karen announces she’s pregnant, she and Willis get married and move into an SRO apartment on the eighth floor.

Both begin to flourish in their careers. Willis receives a promise from his director that he’ll soon be promoted to Kung Fu Guy. Karen achieves even more. She receives an offer for her own show with a part in it for Willis. He balks at the idea because he’s still holding out for his promised promotion.

Karen takes their baby daughter, Phoebe, and moves out of the city so that she can be close to her film set, but Willis stays in Chinatown. A year later, he finally achieves his dream: He becomes a recurring character on Black and White—Kung Fu Guy. However, Willis’s victory is bitter. He thinks, “Karen was right: you are trapped. Doing well is the trap. A different kind, but still a trap. Because you’re still in a show that doesn’t have a role for you” (180). It takes Willis five years to realize how hollow his success really is. He feels the need to escape. When the script calls for Kung Fu Guy to escape with the detectives’ car, Willis uses the plot point as a segue to his own escape from the role that he once wanted but now constricts him. He hotwires the detectives’ car and flees.

Chapters 3-4 Analysis

Chapter 3 represents a collision of the Black and White script and Willis’s internal world. At several points, the reader isn’t sure which world is being described. For example, Willis and the actor who plays Turner get into a debate about which minority has it worse; however, both men have gone off-script to have this dialog.

Similarly, as Willis and the two detectives make their way through the kitchen of the Golden Palace, Willis pauses to talk briefly with his father. Again, this activity is off-script because his father is still in character as Old Asian Man, but Willis isn’t. Even more confusing is the interaction that takes place in the gambling casino. Willis speaks with the actors, who are also his neighbors at the SRO apartment where he lives. These conversations are also not part of the Black and White script.

Even more off-script is Willis’s strong personal reaction when he first meets Karen Lee. She plays an investigator on the show, but Willis is falling in love with her in the real world. At the same time, he believes he’s on the verge of landing the role of Kung Fu Guy when he performs some impressive martial arts moves on the set. However, the narrative cuts these real-world dreams short by killing his character in the scene. In addition, he gloomily predicts that he’ll receive the same short-lived roles forever.

This chapter strongly emphasizes the theme of racial identity. Willis gets into an argument with Turner about the lack of substantive roles for Asian actors, and Turner reminds Willis that he isn’t the only one who has it rough. Willis fixates on Karen’s looks when he first sees her, partly because her race and ethnicity are hard to pin down. He finds this trait appealing, as he believes that his own Asian features define and doom him.

In Chapter 4, Willis focuses on parallel stories of romance. He begins with the backstories of his parents and how both drifted into film work out West after they failed to make a life anywhere else in the country. They meet and marry at the Golden Palace, sometimes working at the restaurant and sometimes working as actors in projects filmed in Chinatown. After Mr. Wu reaches the pinnacle of acting success as Kung Fu Guy, he loses himself in the role—and in the process, also loses his real-life connection to his wife and son.

The second part of the Chapter 4 turns to Willis’s budding romance with Karen. They build successful acting careers, get married, and have a daughter. A pivotal change in the story occurs when Karen gets her own show and a chance to get out of Chinatown. Willis balks at the idea since he’s been promised the role of Kung Fu Guy at long last. Even though Willis is painfully aware of how the role destroyed his father and his parents’ marriage, he can’t see any other role for himself in life. Karen leaves with Phoebe while Willis lives out his dream of success. However, after five years he realizes how hollow that success really is and uses a plot point of hot-wiring the detectives’ car as a segue to his own escape from the role that he once wanted but now constricts him.

Up to this point, the romances run in parallel. Willis is living out the same future as his parents once did. He even allows himself to become lost in the role that consumed his father. This part of the narrative strongly foregrounds the theme of a typecast life, and Willis finally begins to understand the implications for himself when he says, “You stop to consider what you are doing. Still playing a part that was handed to you, written for Asian Man. You understand: you’ve made a mistake. The biggest mistake of your life. You screwed up. You need to go find your family” (182). For the first time in the novel, Willis is making a choice that lies outside Chinatown.