If you’ve been keeping up with the latest Hulu original shows, you may have seen trailers for the series Interior Chinatown, starring Silicon Valley‘s Jimmy O. Yang. The series, which drops on Nov. 19, has already garnered a lot of buzz for its off-the-walls narrative, humorous presentation and highlighting of talented Asian performers. Early on in the trailer for Interior Chinatown, a police press conference is held, which highlights an investigation into a missing woman and connections to an impending gang war. This, and other factors presented in the trailer, led many fans to feverishly research the new show, questioning if it was based on a true story. While we can confirm that Interior Chinatown is not actually based on any one true story, the project does take inspiration from a wide array of human interest tales, making certain moments feel quite true to life.
First and foremost, Interior Chinatown is based on a 2020 novel of the same name, written by revered American author Charles Yu. While the characters and situations presented in the text and adapted for the screen do not depict real people, Yu has explained that he was inspired by many Asian Americans, including his personal experiences. To get a full picture of this inspiration and its effect on Yu’s work, we’ll have to dive into the narrative of Interior Chinatown and fully unpack the characters, themes, and central concepts at play. If you haven’t had the chance to read the novel or watch the series just yet, don’t worry, as the following write-up will be entirely spoiler free. Of course, if you want to go into Interior Chinatown as blind as possible, be sure to bookmark this page and return after streaming the new hit show.
What Happens in ‘Interior Chinatown’?
The plot of the 2020 Interior Chinatown novel centers on an unremarkable Asian-American man named Willis Wu. While navigating the basic encounters of his everyday life, Wu feels constantly marginalized by societal structures all around him. The book utilizes a humorous screenplay-style format to center Wu as a “Generic Asian Man,” which explains why his racial identity precludes him from taking center stage, even in his own life. Instead, he is relegated to imaginary roles such as “Delivery Guy” and “Background Oriental Male,” in a poignant satire of typical Hollywood casting. All the while, Willis Wu longs to fulfill a role like “Kung Fu Guy,” which he believes to be the highest honor an Asian person can achieve on the screen. As the narrative kicks into high gear, Wu travels down a path that changes his life, elevates him to a central force and enlightens his perception.
The televised version of Interior Chinatown follows a mostly faithful path to the novel, though it does offer a few significant deviations from the text. For starters, the show does away with the screenplay format, which obviously wouldn’t work in a visual medium. Instead, Willis Wu is reimagined as a struggling character actor, who routinely fails to get work beyond the generic roles often offered to Asian American talent. While hunting for a big break, Wu supplements his income by working at a restaurant in Chinatown. As Jimmy O. Yang’s Willis remarks at the start of the show’s trailer, “In Chinatown, nothing ever changes… I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.” This all shifts for the series’ protagonist when he witnesses a crime and becomes enlisted to serve as an undercover accomplice in a police investigation.
What Inspired the Themes of ‘Interior Chinatown’?
As stated, Interior Chinatown has many sources of inspiration, including hundreds of tales of Asian Americans who have struggled to rise the ladder in industries such as film and television. Both the book and the show serve as a scathing indictment of Asian stereotypes and the characterization of Asians as a monolith. Even in the show’s trailer, a few characters argue over the nationality of an Asian woman on television, causing The Daily Show‘s Ronny Cheng to quip, “Dude, she’s clearly Korean. Know your Asians!” While this moment serves as a funny aside, it also speaks to the suppression of Asian voices in media. The woman in question reports on a dangerous and escalating violent situation on the streets of Chinatown, and nobody is listening to her because they’d rather speculate on her race.
The narrative of the show turns the streets of Chinatown into its own real-life police procedural, complete with background characters who are assigned no real agency unless they factor into the ongoing investigation. As Charles Yu explained in a 2022 interview with UC Berkeley News, “You could think of Interior Chinatown as kind of like a movie set, but also like a mindset, as well. We’re in a psychological landscape to try to portray what it’s like to be marginalized in the way Willis and his family and the other people in his community feel.” In the same interview, Yu spoke at length about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which is also highlighted and explained within the text of the original novel. This real-life event looms large over actual Asian Americans today and serves as a major inspiration for the Interior Chinatown narrative.
Unpacking the Chinese Exclusion Act
While it may seem like quite a leap to go from a centuries-old immigration law to a contemporary story about Asian representation in cinema, the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act looms quite large over Interior Chinatown. Yu claims that he first learned about the act while studying American history in college and that the historical significance of the law stuck with him for quite some time. For those who aren’t aware, the act put limitations – and for many periods – full restrictions, on Chinese immigrants entering the United States. It served as the longest-running and most strict exclusionary law regarding immigration in American history, rivaled only by the proposed laws expected to be put into place during the second Trump administration. It was only fully phased out in 1965, meaning large swaths of the Asian American community still have not-so-distant memories of grappling with the exclusionary system.
As Yu points out in the UC Berkeley interview, this immigration law has had a profound impact on Asian American populations over the last hundred years. Specifically, he explained, “We’re really only two or maybe three generations out from the huge change that happened post ‘65 – my parents are post-‘65 immigrants – and that continues to shape a lot of things that are happening now in ways that I don’t pretend to understand fully.” In the narrative, this explains why Willis is discounted not only by his white American peers but in his worldview. His concept that an unnamed “Kung Fu Guy” is the highest honor an Asian can achieve displays his own internalized decision to buy into a system that marginalizes him, even in the rare instances when it seems to be rewarding him.
Additional Influences On The Story
In addition to historical tales of migrant suppression, Interior Chinatown was influenced by groundbreaking works of fiction such as the 1993 film Groundhog Day and Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel The Sellout. Yu confirmed these influences during a 2020 chat with Hyphen Magazine’s Timothy Tau. Groundhog Day and similar “time loop” narratives helped to inspire the cyclical nature of Chinatown, where characters like Willis Wu feel that each day is identical to the last. Conversely, The Sellout helped to inspire some of the themes of systemic racism and suppression of identity, as the novel tackles similar themes concerning the Black community within the United States.
The author-turned-showrunner explained in his Hyphen interview that his entire childhood was mired with a general lack of Asian representation, arguing, “I grew up for a lot of years never seeing any Asian faces or Asian American faces specifically on screen, except for when I would watch Fist of Fury or something… Every few years, there would be an ‘Asian thing of the decade,’ and you think, okay, maybe we’ll start seeing more things now – and then they would go away… I think increasingly, even now, there is a sense of ‘we’re still a perpetual foreigner’ or a ‘not-quite assimilated group’ on many levels because it may be easy to separate us out.” Luckily, Yu does feel that the tides are changing, as he continued, “You see people in roles now, not just in Crazy Rich Asians, but you see Asian American leads on things now and it’s great.”
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