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

Symbols & Motifs

Scripted Scenes

Willis sees his entire life as the fulfillment of roles that other people assign to him. As a result, his narrative’s structure is unusual. He tells his story as a series of scenes from a screenplay. Not only do many of the chapters have titles that correspond to his assigned film roles, but he talks about his family as if they were little more than the film roles they play. He often refers to his father as Sifu (kung fu master) or Old Asian Man—and to his mother as Old Asian Woman.

The book doesn’t follow the usual conventions of a novel in which two characters have a dialog and one character’s quoted line is followed by another’s quoted response. Willis tags each speaker’s lines with the role they’re playing, as if they’re running lines from a film script. In addition, Willis relates the backstories of his parents as if from a 1950s film, with each character speaking the lines one might associate with the romantic leads in a movie.

Willis deviates from this convention on several occasions. He goes off-script while shooting Black and White to indulge in snide comments to Turner and also occasionally breaks into an internal monologue unrelated to the actions around him. This serves to disorient the reader so that we feel the same confusion that Willis himself feels in trying to understand his life.

A scripted format is rigid. It tags the speaker as an actor and feeds that actor lines that the actor must parrot back for the camera. By using this device, the author conveys the lack of spontaneity and confinement of an actor’s role and of the lives of Willis and the other people in Chinatown.

Black and White

Willis and his friends are part of the cast of Black and White. The police drama seems to spend an inordinate amount of time shooting its scenes in Chinatown and, more specifically, in and around the Golden Palace restaurant. Most extras in the film have day jobs there as cooks and waiters, which blurs the line between film roles and real-life roles even more.

Although the production employs Asian people as part of the cast, their roles are generic. Willis often bemoans the fate of people who participate in a script but will never be the lead actors in the drama. Black and White symbolizes a reassuring duality. Aside from the superficial duality of pairing white and Black detectives, the crime drama itself is also black and white in the conventional sense of something easy to understand. It simplifies reality and solves a crime within a one-hour format. Willis describes this humdrum formula while noting how successfully it attracts viewers:

There’s a pattern, a form, a certain shape to it all. The idea that any problem, no matter how messy and blood-spattered, from EXT. STREET to INT. OFFICE or INT. CRIME LAB or INT. CHINESE RESTAURANT, any blight or societal ill, any crime of hate or intolerance, can be wrapped into the template (38).

Willis concludes that this template is comforting to the average viewer. He believes that its polarity is easier for Americans to accept. Once Asian people are in the mix, life (and TV) becomes complicated. Asian people seem mysterious and foreign even if they’ve lived in the US their entire lives. Willis adds, “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” (39).

Chinatown

Willis, his family, and his friends all live in Chinatown—but the novel doesn’t depict Chinatown as simply a geographic location. It is a mythic construction by white city planners who have created a space that exemplifies everything they believe about Asian people. The Golden Palace restaurant has changed names and owners many times yet always retains the same atmosphere. It caters to Western expectations of what a Chinese restaurant should look like. The people who inhabit Chinatown have also constructed a façade for the benefit of Americans. They dress, act, and speak in a way that is stereotypical but also inoffensive to Caucasian and Black people. Older Brother articulates this conscious reinforcement of cultural stereotypes. He says:

Give them what they feel is right, is safe. Make it fit their ideas of what is out there. Don’t threaten them. 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 (238-39).

The problem with living a piece of performance art is that the players can become trapped in their roles. Chinatown is a stage, and the people who inhabit it are actors who perform the roles that Western culture assigns to them. The most dangerous aspect of this behavior is the degree to which the player psychologically internalizes the role. Both Older Brother and Willis refer to something they call “Interior Chinatown.” While these words can refer to a stage direction—the location where Black and White will be shooting that day—they also describe the values, beliefs, and aspirations of Asian people trying to make a life for themselves in the US. At the beginning of the story, Willis’s greatest ambition is to become Kung Fu Guy, as his father was for years. While this role exists only within the cinematic world of Hollywood, it’s also part of Interior Chinatown. Fortunately, by the novel’s end, Willis breaks free of both the location and the mindset he calls Chinatown.