Interior Chinatown

“Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the light. They’re the heroes. They get hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Designed to hit White’s face just right, anyway.”

Willis is acutely aware of racial differences; in fact, he’s obsessed with the subject. This quote refers to the stage lighting that shows the stars to their best advantage. Asian people don’t get hero lighting because they never get to be the show’s heroes. The scripts relegate them to the visual shadows on the periphery of the set—as well as the metaphorical shadows of never being the center of the story. 

“He’d aged out of his role and into the next one, his life force depleting with every exertion. Wisdom and power leaking from him with each passing day and night. He’d played his role for so long he’d lost himself in it.”

This is the first of many ominous observations that Willis makes about his father. He doesn’t overtly mention the parallel that is beginning to form: His father became lost in his role; Willis is in great danger of doing the same thing. 

“But the old parts are always underneath. Layers upon layers, accumulating. Which was the problem. No one in Chinatown able to separate the past from the present, always seeing in him (and in each other, in yourselves), all of his former incarnations, the characters he’d played in your minds long after the parts had ended.”

While this comment again refers to his father, Willis has expanded the critique to include everyone else in Chinatown. By holding onto past roles, they prevent themselves from ever moving forward. New starts are impossible if the future is nothing more than an instant replay of the past. 

“His kung fu was too pure, too special to be used the way that everyone knew it would be: flashy, stupid shit, the same moves everyone had seen a million times and yet still wanted him to trot out for every wedding and lunar new year celebration. Better that fame had never happened on him, to preserve his claim for posterity. Better to be a legend than a star.”

Willis is talking about Older Brother, the neighborhood hero. Unlike every other actor in Chinatown, Older Brother didn’t want to become Kung Fu Guy. He walked away. Only later in the novel do readers learn that he also walked away from the tyranny of the Interior Chinatown in his own head. Older Brother has liberated himself from everyone else’s expectations and made his life his own.

“There’s just something about Asians that makes reality a little too real, overcomplicates the clarity, the duality, the clean elegance of BLACK and WHITE, the proven template and so the decision is made not in some overarching conspiracy to exclude Asians but because it’s just easier to keep it how we have it.”

Willis is still externalizing the problem in this quote. He believes that Asian people complicate the simple polarity of Black and White. He says that the film industry wants to maintain the status quo because it’s easier. At this point, he doesn’t recognize that everybody in Chinatown is doing the same thing by living the Asian stereotype. 

“The idea was you came here, your parents and their parents and their parents, and you always seem to have just arrived and yet never seem to have actually arrived.”

Willis is making a distinction between Asian and other immigrant groups. Because of the striking physical difference between races, it becomes difficult for his people to assimilate seamlessly into the fabric of society. Of course, he’s overemphasizing racial contrast by being hypersensitive to his own appearance. His daughter, Phoebe, later teaches him to discard this self-consciousness. 

“By the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.”

Willis is describing his father singing karaoke. Sifu’s longing for home will never be fulfilled because he’s trapped himself in a mythical version of being Chinese in America. Thus, he’s caught between two worlds and can’t feel at home in either one.  

“How much fun they’re having. How little they care. An Asian guy is dead, and these two are flirting. It’s easy to squander your lines when you know there will always be more tomorrow. And the next day, and the day after that.”

The two detectives are playing out a scene from the show. Both the actors and their script seem to diminish the significance of a dead Asian person. Willis focuses on the importance of words. Not only are Asian actors deprived of agency by being cast as murder victims, but living Asian actors generally don’t get speaking parts. Words express identity, and Willis feels that he doesn’t have one.

“There we go. The two words: Asian Guy. Even now, as Special Guest Star, even here, in your own neighborhood. Two words that define you, flatten you, trap you and keep you here. Who you are. All you are.”

Whereas the previous quote alludes to the power of words as an expression of identity, this quote shows the use of words to suppress identity. The script has the detectives referring to Willis as “Asian Guy.” This descriptor reduces him to a collection of physical features and nothing more. Worse still, his character must speak broken English, which limits his self-expression even further.

“China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.”

Like the preceding quote, this one emphasizes another descriptor for Asian people that is equally limiting. Willis’s obsession with how others define him is obscuring the real issue. His desire for acceptance by mainstream culture is preventing him from focusing on self-definition. 

“In this place? This is no place for a romance. This is a place for the police to find dead bodies. This is a place where day and night are interchangeable, where we don’t know who we are allowed to be, from one day to the next. How do we have a love story in a place like this?”

Dorothy is telling Sifu how unlikely their love story is. It takes place in the Golden Palace during filming. Of course, her words have broader implications for any Asian couple trying to make a life for themselves while conforming to the Chinese stereotype. 

“LOVE STORY FOR A GENERIC ASIAN MAN??? They’re rare, for your kind, but if you’re lucky, in a lifetime, you might get one good one. Make it count.”

This segment of the story shows a parallel between the romance of Dorothy and Sifu and that of Willis and Karen. Willis echoes his mother’s disbelief that love is possible for an Asian person in Chinatown. However, both mother and son are willing to take a chance and believe the impossible.

“You like how she is self-aware without being overly self-conscious, how she says what she means and does what she believes in. Your whole life you’ve wanted to be Kung Fu Guy, to be something you are not, and here is this person who is whatever she is at all times.”

Willis has begun his romance with Karen. He admires her self-awareness because it contrasts so sharply with his own self-consciousness. He attributes her confidence to her ethnically ambiguous features. In reality, Karen is confident because she doesn’t let race get in the way of defining herself, as so often happens to Willis.

“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.”

Willis makes this comment after he’s achieved his lifelong ambition of becoming Kung Fu Guy. In the process, he realizes, he’s lost his wife and daughter because he couldn’t let go of the coveted role that everybody in his world wanted. Willis is still not the star of the show. He will eventually dwindle into a carbon copy of his father if he remains on this destructive career course. 

“Watching her is like finding old letters, of things you knew thirty years ago and haven’t thought of since. How to feel, how to be yourself. Not how to perform or act. How to be.”

Once Willis reconnects with his family, he begins to develop some clarity about his own life. His daughter, Phoebe, doesn’t carry the same racial sensitivity as her father. She just is. For the first time, Willis snaps himself out of the belief that he must play an assigned role to get by in life. 

“She lives here, without history, unaware of all that came before, and who are you to say that this isn’t the end point, this wasn’t the goal all along, that Chinese Railroad Worker and Opium Den Dragon Lady and Kimono Girl and Striving Immigrant and Honorable Dead Asian Guy and Kung Fu Guy weren’t all leading to Xie Mei Mei? To this dream of assimilation, a dream finally realized, a real American girl.”

In observing his daughter’s behavior, Willis realizes that she carries none of his baggage. Her assimilation into American culture is complete. Significantly, Karen has raised her in the suburbs of Los Angeles, away from the cultural influence of Chinatown. Phoebe doesn’t have an Interior Chinatown that pressures her to conform. Because of her, Willis learns to shed his Interior Chinatown as well. 

“I never left. Not really. Not in the way that counts—inside. In my mind. Another part of me is in a different place now. Interior Chinatown isn’t the whole world anymore.”

In this quote, Older Brother articulates the central message of the book. Being an Asian alien is a state of mind more than a set of racially distinctive physical features. After discarding the limiting mindset of Interior Chinatown, one is free to define one’s own life. 

“That despite all of that, you somehow feel that your oppression, because it does not include the original American sin—of slavery—that it will never add up to something equivalent […] Your oppression is second-class.”

Older Brother is arguing Willis’s case in court. He’s trying to point out the isolation of the Asian experience. Asian people can’t claim solidarity with Black people in their oppression because they’ve been victimized in a different way. This leaves them without allies, either among the power elite or the oppressed masses. 

“Chinatown and indeed being Chinese is and always has been, from the very beginning, a construction, a performance of features, gestures, culture, and exoticism. An invention, a reinvention, a stylization […] To watch the mainstream, find out what kind of fiction they are telling themselves, find a bit part in it. Be appealing and acceptable, be what they want to see.”

Throughout the novel, Willis bemoans his fate as a bit player. In this quote, Older Brother is describing the degree to which the Chinese people have cast themselves in that role. Because the identity of Chinese people in America is nothing more than a fictional construction, we can rewrite the script. Willis is finally beginning to realize his own power to change how people perceive him. 

“I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people.”

Willis’s courtroom speech is his epiphany. He’s made assumptions about Black and white people that are every bit as stereotypical as those directed at him as an Asian person. He’s on the verge of ending his destructive tendency to judge people by their external features. By looking inward instead of out, he has a chance to escape his self-imposed prison. 

“We’re trapped as guest stars in a small ghetto on a very special episode. Minor characters locked into a story that doesn’t quite know what to do with us. After two centuries here, why are we still not Americans? Why do we keep falling out of the story?”

Willis raises the question of who gets to be an American. Although this quote seems to revert to his earlier self-pitying comments, it’s also a challenge to Asian people who have enabled that lack of acceptance to continue. Those who maintain the status quo by reinforcing racial stereotypes make real change impossible. They haven’t simply fallen out of the story; they’ve removed themselves from it.

“You are not Kung Fu Guy. You are Willis Wu, dad. Maybe husband. Your dad skills are B, B-plus on a good day. But you’ve been practicing. You say the words. Take what you can get. Try to build a life.”

Willis has walked away from film work to redefine himself as something more. The words he uses to describe his new roles as father and husband are tentative. He’s unsure of his competence because he’s now acting outside the Chinatown world. In addition, this quote conveys his willingness to face change and see where it takes him. 

“This place preserved as if in amber. Like a museum, a presentation of a time and place that always exist, and never did. A holding cell, purgatory, a vestibule, the anteroom, the waiting room. It’s in the United States, but not quite America. Some trick of geography. The story doesn’t need to change, doesn’t need to evolve. Because it never existed. Better if it doesn’t.”

Willis goes to visit his father at the Golden Palace. He perceives the place as purgatory—an eternal waiting room. It becomes exactly that for Asian people like his father, who never step out of their assigned roles. They continue to reconstruct the fictional Chinese story and never take the chance of building an identity of their own. Fortunately, Willis has made a different choice.