Interior Chinatown

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-2

Chapters 3-4

Chapters 5-7

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Character Analysis

Willis Wu

Willis is an aspiring young actor. At five feet eleven inches, he’s tall for an Asian person. Like the rest of his family, he works part-time as an actor but is frustrated by the limited roles offered to people of Asian descent. Ever since he was a child, Willis has aspired to win the pinnacle role that all Asian actors covet: Kung Fu Guy. He’s practiced martial arts from boyhood and wants to follow in his father’s footsteps.

As Willis narrates the story for the reader, his perspective shifts between the role he plays on the TV show Black and White and his identity in the real world. The lines grow so blurry at times that Willis can’t separate the two, and neither can the reader. His narration is disjointed, sometimes reporting external facts and sometimes staging a scene in his own head. Either way, Willis is playing a role rather than forging an authentic identity. His slippery narration indicates the psychological malaise he suffers as a native-born citizen who can’t find his place in the story or in his homeland. Only after Willis meets Karen and becomes Phoebe’s father does he begin to consider casting himself in a better life role than the one that Hollywood and America have given him.

Ming-Chen Wu

Mr. Wu is Willis’s father. He’s in his late seventies and in serious physical and mental decline. He was once Kung Fu Guy (“Sifu”) but over the years submerged himself in the role so fully that he lost touch with his identity as a husband and father. As Willis watches his father decay, he fears that he’s seeing his own future unfolding before his eyes.

In the story’s present moments, the narrative reduces Mr. Wu to playing the generic role of Old Asian Man. He accepts the situation with resignation, assuming that this is the way things will always be for Asian people in America. Ironically, he excels at singing karaoke songs about home. As Willis points outs, his father feels no connection to his lost home in China and doesn’t feel he belongs in his adopted country either. Home is a mythical place that he never expects to find in this life even though he likes to sing about it.

Karen Lee

Karen is an attractive Asian actress with whom Willis falls instantly in love. Her features are less distinctly Chinese than his, which makes it possible for her to slip into various ethnic and racial roles. Willis envies this fluidity because it may offer her more opportunities in film work and in life. For her part, Karen finds Willis’s attitude self-pitying. She tries to help him see that he’s not simply a victim of the system but has created his own limitations by believing that nothing more is possible.

Equal to her physical versatility is Karen’s psychological versatility in the face of life’s challenges, which Willis only dimly understands at the beginning of the novel. Karen and her daughter, Phoebe, are the catalysts that snap Willis out of his fatalistic mindset. By the end of the book, Willis returns to Karen and Phoebe rather than staying in the SRO, where his parents are living out their stereotypical destinies. The grounding that Karen provides is what Willis needs to make a fresh start and move beyond the role of generic Asian Man.

Detectives Green and Turner

Green is a white female detective, and Turner is a Black male detective. They are the stars of Black and White. Both are physically attractive and drawn to one another romantically, but they function as cliches for the purposes of their show and Interior Chinatown. They’re meant to illustrate a polarity that Willis believes is more comprehensible to the average American than his yellow skin is.

Willis uses these two characters to fuel his sense of inferiority about his race. He believes that white and Black people can both be accepted as Americans, while inscrutable Asian people—often referred to as “Oriental” in the book—are too hard to process for the rest of the country. (The book uses the term “oriental” liberally, likely a device to underscore objectification and stereotyping.) Turner challenges Willis’s assumptions on numerous occasions, but his objections fall on deaf ears. To Willis and the TV audience, Black and white skins are the only ones that count.

Both characters disappear from the novel when their show completes its location shooting in Chinatown. Their disappearance from the story parallels Willis’s emancipation from the Asian roles he’s no longer willing to accept either on TV or in life.