How Satire Reveals the Truth in “Interior Chinatown”

In the first scene of Interior Chinatown—the television series based on the novel of the same name—Willis Wu longs for nothing more than his desire to be a witness. A witness to a crime scene, sure, but a witness nonetheless. To Willis, this is the only path toward relevance possible for an Asian American like himself. “Nothing ever changes,” he complains to his coworker in the back of a Chinatown restaurant. “Sometimes I just feel like there’s a whole world out there that I never get to see, as long as I’m trapped here in Chinatown… I feel like I’m a background character in someone else’s story.” 

Willis’s relegation to the background is what anchors Charles Yu’s National Book Award-winning novel, Interior Chinatown. The story follows Taiwanese American actor Willis Wu as he strives to break out of roles such as “Generic Asian Man Number One” and “Background Oriental Male,” and toward something grander: the cherished role of “Kung Fu Guy.” Through precise metafiction and darkly funny prose, Yu satirizes the racist stereotypes thrusted onto Asians and Asian Americans. Written entirely in screenplay format, the novel also critiques Hollywood’s stifling, unimaginative representation by turning the genre of the screenplay on its head.

Four years after Interior Chinatown’s publication, Yu turns this screenplay-turned-novel back toward the screen as the showrunner for its TV adaptation, which just released earlier this week on Hulu. As a fellow Angeleno disenchanted by the limitations of media representation, I jumped at the opportunity to meet with Yu over Zoom. We discussed the narrative strengths of prose vs. television, how both Interior Chinatowns are in conversation with one another, and why satire is often the right approach when it comes to confronting difficult subjects.

Jalen Giovanni Jones: I know you’re a writer of many hats. You write short stories, novels, non-fiction, and for TV. I’m wondering—is your process much different when you write for the page, versus when you’re writing for the screen?

Charles Yu: Good question. Well, yes and no. I think from the outside they probably both look like me wincing in pain, walking around my house, eating things, my family afraid to talk to me. On a practical level, for prose I feel I’m much more comfortable doing that. Not to say I’m any better at it, but I just feel like I know how ideas will come, and how to gestate them. I’ve just had enough things that either worked or didn’t work, and so I have a better sense with how that goes. With TV and film, I’m relatively new to it. I’ve only been doing it for about 10 years, and so I rely much more on other people. For Interior Chinatown (the show), I had a bunch of writers and producers and executives who gave me notes. With prose, the unit, the constituent unit, is the sentence—or the word, even. I think in sentences, and I really had to learn how to think in images. I had to understand that sitting at the computer writing a TV pilot or feature script is not really necessarily the same—you’re not producing language for people to read. You’re thinking about a blueprint, a series of visuals that a director, a production designer, camera people, will have to translate. That is a really different activity.

JGJ: I’m sure the novel version of Interior Chinatown really lent itself pretty well to being turned into a TV series. Did you always have it in mind for this to go to TV?

CY: You know, it’s funny. I came up with this format while I was in the writers room for a show I was working on. I was on the staff of the first season of Westworld on HBO, which was an amazing experience. It was my first job in TV, and I’m so grateful to that job for many reasons—one being that it helped me crack the form of this book. I had been struggling with it for years, and so when I started to think of writing Willis as a background actor, I asked: “What does that look like?” And it said, “Well, maybe it looks like him trying to sneak into a script.” That’s really how it started. It wasn’t that I wanted to adapt something, or that I was going to sell this. 

Hulu and many others rightfully wondered: How would you show this idea of Willis in this liminal space? There’s a picture, or like a fish tank, of the world that is the cop show, and Willis is not in the tank at the beginning. He’s outside, in the margin; on the side of the stage. To show that, we really had to give the feeling of a police procedural, as if it’s going on all around you, and show how you can’t get into that world. So, the short answer of the question is, in theory it seems like it lends itself well, but in practice, it was actually quite hard to figure out.

JGJ: With your experience of Interior Chinatown as both a novel and a TV show, I’m wondering what narrative strengths you think books might have that TV shows don’t, and vice versa.

CY: Interiority, subjectivity, that is so much of it for me. [In a book] you can drop a reader right into the character’s mind. You can tell and show in ways that are much harder to get to [in TV]. For me, what you’re doing when you’re writing prose is you’re activating the imagination of the reader. You’re collaborating with them in that way. [Writing prose] is also a solo activity. So that, to me, is the strength—the singularity of the voice, the consistency of tone, it’s easier to maintain for [prose]. 

In TV especially, I think more so than in film, is a very collaborative thing. That’s its strength, but it’s also one of its challenges. How do you blend so many different writer’s input, creativity, and ideas into something? That was really a learning curve for me. Even from the writing phase in a writer’s room, I’m there with ten, eleven other people that have got ideas I would never have come up with in 100 years by myself. Then, once we all get together, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. For me, that’s the strength and the joy of that kind of creation.

JGJ: That is so cool. I write prose too, and I’ve never thought about prose writing as also being a collaborative process in that way. We really are collaborating with the reader’s imagination. 

How is it switching between writing prose and screenwriting, given how different they are in their processes? Do you find the shift more jarring, or fruitful for you as a writer?

CY: It can be jarring, to be honest. Sometimes I carry too much, like I’m stuck in my “prose writer” hat, and I’ll be obsessively fussing with the language of the action line, when in reality no one will ever see that—[the action line is] a direction to a camera person or to a production designer. It’s not like anyone will care about your poetry there. One of my bosses had said that. At my first [screenwriting] job, she was like “Yeah, this is lovely. But we can’t really film this tone poem.” It sounds meaner when I say it like that, but it was basically… that. [laughs]

JGJ: Sometimes you just have to hear it! 

One thing I found super resonant, in both the book and the TV version, is how they’re both so confrontational when it comes to critiquing Asian American stereotypes and tropes. What made you realize that confronting these archetypes head on, through satire, was the right approach?

CY: I have to credit this one reader. I was in Brookline in Massachusetts, doing a reading, and after my reading they came up to me. He was like “I think you write about racial identity and ethnic identity, but you do it in a coded way.” This was before Interior Chinatown. That comment was so direct, it came right at me, and I remember being spun out and kind of wrestling with that. In the moment I think I tried to play it off a little bit, but I am really grateful to that [reader]. I don’t know if that person will ever hear this, but if they are out there: Thank you. Because that actually sent me down a years-long rabbit hole of wondering why I would shy away from writing explicitly about these characters and their racial backgrounds, and about their parents being immigrants. I would only hint at it before. With this book, I wanted to be almost uncomfortably direct and on the nose. 

Some of this, to be honest, was in the shadow of the 2016 election, when Trump had come to office with a wave of xenophobia and anti-immigrant sentiment. And here we are again, eight years later, so I feel it’s still relevant. Wanting to name it and then go from there, rather than be coy about it—that’s also part of what Willis’s journey is. He’s been taught by his dad, both in the show and in the book, to play it safe. To learn to play by the rules and be invisible, be in the background—that’s your strategy for survival. In some ways, I was doing that same thing until I wrote this book.

JGJ: What I love about these stories is how they blur the line between what’s real and what’s absurd or unreal. It makes me think about our current political climate, and how absurd even day-to-day life can feel. Big question, but how do you think satire and absurdism helps us better reckon with these hard times?

CY: I love political satire. I feel like it’s an easier way in toward very difficult times. Often, there’s this kind of truth that can be said in humor that’s not just more entertaining, but more insightful. I feel like humor is going at it from a different part of the brain. It’s not just hitting the logical part of the brain, it’s stirring up something. To me, that’s what I hope the show can do. The show hopefully is funny—we’ve got some very funny people in it—but it’s a satire. Through this story we’re looking at the world, not from how a political writer or an essayist would look at it, but from the inside out. From the perspective of Willis or other characters, who are trying to find their way into the narrative, who are trying to find their place in the world. I hope that’s a different angle. You know, that’s not the same angle as we always see.

JGJ: Looking at it from these different angles. That comment reminds me of what Cathy Park Hong had written in Minor Feelings, about how people of color look sideways [at childhood]. 

It’s interesting to witness Interior Chinatown in this new context of our time. There’s been a lot of new Asian representation since 2020, when the novel was released. Films like Everything Everywhere All At Once, American Born Chinese, Dìdi, Minari, have offered us more representation. I’m wondering how you find the themes of Interior Chinatown operating differently, four years later?

CY: I’m glad you brought up Dìdi. I saw that with my wife and kids when it came out in theaters. To state the obvious, there’s just more representation than there was when I started writing this book, around 2013. In the many years it took to write the book, and then in the few years that it took to make this series, a lot of things had changed. Things have gotten better in terms of representation of underrepresented groups on screen. But to me, the question doesn’t go away. It just gets a little bit more complicated in terms of how we sustain that. How do you make sure you’re telling stories that continue to deepen and broaden perspectives? As you break through and get to tell more kinds of stories from different viewpoints, audiences want more specificity. They want to hear and see different aspects of a community’s experience. To me that’s the challenge, but it’s also the opportunity. Now we don’t have to start from zero. We can start from a place where there’s assumed knowledge, or assumed empathy. You watch Dìdi, for example, and it’s a coming of age story. It’s just a classic, beautiful, hilarious, coming of age story that’s visually inventive—and the kid is Taiwanese American. That’s incredible. 

Same with American Born Chinese. Full disclosure, that’s my brother’s show, and Kelvin Yu created that show based on Gene Luen Yang’s amazing graphic novel, American Born Chinese. A classic. [The show] blends mythology, family drama, teen romance, surrealism, and all these amazing things together. To get to do that on a big platform like Disney+ is pretty amazing.

JGJ: Were there any changes between the novel and the TV show iterations of Interior Chinatown that you found particularly exciting?

CY: A big one that comes to mind is Ronnie Chieng’s character. His name is Fatty Choi, and in the book he’s really a very minor character, just mentioned in passing a couple of times. But the idea of Willis having a best friend was very appealing. We were able to show not only that friendship between two guys who had grown up together in Chinatown, but also how their paths diverged throughout the season. One tries to assimilate—Willis’s path is to leave Chinatown, leave home, and try to enter the world of “Black and White,” where he has to make his own space and make his own role. Fatty, on the other hand, because Willis is gone, gets to step up into Willis’s shoes. He’s almost like Willis’s understudy, and he gets to take on the role of Willis, in a way. I won’t spoil it, but to me that was fun. Also, just getting to work with Ronnie, because I’ve been a fan of his for so long—he’s so talented and funny, and just watching him breathe light. From the book to the screen, that was one big change.

JGJ: What do you hope audiences will gain from watching this series? And what’s something new that you hope readers of the novel will gain from watching its TV adaptation? 

CY: One, I want people to be entertained more than anything. I want to tell a good story. And two, if there’s a takeaway, I don’t want to reduce it to any one message or larger theme, because I think there’s a bunch of things. But they all come back to the idea of people being real. 

If the book has a thesis, and if the show has a thesis, it’s that in all moments we are potentially either kind of wearing a mask, or letting the mask slip off a little bit. There’s moments throughout the story where, through that lens—even through all the craziness and surrealism going on—you can see that ultimately, these people are all just trying to figure out who they are. There’s ways we can do that in the literal sense, asking ourselves questions like “Am I a detective, or am I a waiter?” But that questioning is trying to get into a different version of asking: “What is real, and what matters to me? How do I authentically connect, or show somebody else my true self? How do I see past somebody else’s costume, and into their true self?” That’s what I hope people gain. And that feeds into the second half of your question too. Because they are different, I hope the two are in conversation with each other going forward.