Some 18 months ago, I noticed and wrote about the surge of Asian-American cinema in Hollywood. Crazy Rich Asians was the breakout movie, but Everything Everywhere All at Once made the movie subgenre mainstream, dominating the 95th Academy Awards and cementing the careers of many of its actors. The success and momentum have inspired producers, directors, and screenwriters—and casting directors—to top into stories of the Asian-American experience, beyond the tropes and simplistic stereotypes of yesteryear.
Interior Chinatown is both the name of a book published in early 2020 by Charles Yu, and the Hulu TV series adaptation released in late 2024 with the author as an executive producer. Sure, books have been turned into shows and movies for a very long time now, but Interior Chinatown is a novel that’s particularly suited for cinematic screens—the book’s hook is its use of a Hollywood-style screenplay to tell its story1, that of the lives of people who live in Chinatown. The narrative centers around a character called Willis Wu, labeled “Generic Asian Man,” fated to be an extra lost in the backdrop of a Low & Order-type cop detective show cheekily named Black & White. The story names a bunch of other tropes of Asians in Hollywood: the “Kung Fu Guy” forever typecast to be a sidekick who literally fights the bad guys but always falls short of a leading role, an old wizened grandpa figure “Sifu” to pass on ancient wisdom, and of course, the Asian women that are either beautiful restaurant hostesses or Oriental Flowers or Dragon Ladies.
The book uses Hollywood’s rigid casting norms to amplify its social commentary on Asians in American society, the “othering” that echoes the Chinese Exclusion Act and Japanese internment camps earlier in our history. It details lives in single-room occupancy housing (SRO)—where tenants live inside tiny rooms with shared bathroom and kitchen areas—and the communities around that environment. The overriding issue is that all of this nuance is ably swept under the rug by the likes of Black & White and thus the reader, reduced to a backdrop of seediness and ethnic crimes.
I didn’t enjoy reading Interior Chinatown all that much—though maybe that was the point. The screenplay framing technique is clever, but as the chapters continued it felt more like a narrative device used to drive home the core concepts of Asian-American poverty, racism, and the implications of being treated as a model minority. The narrative comes across as heavy-headed, exaggerated for effect and grievance. I’ve known people who’ve lived this lifestyle for parts of their lives, plus extended relatives who fit the mold of working menial jobs in Asian restaurants as their main careers for the lack of anything better, and while their lives weren’t easy it’s also not as if they’re consumed by continuous despair and melancholy like what the author suggests.
Which brings us to the mini-series adaptation. The timing here is revealing: the book came out at the start of the 2020s and was able to accurately frame the story in the screenplay format, criticizing Hollywood for typecasting Asians into a handful of bland stereotypes. But the aforementioned success of Asian-American cinema has raised the profile of Asian actors, with that progress coming in the form of a wider set of roles in shows and movies that don’t feature a predominantly Asian cast—Simu Liu in Barbie, Hiroyuki Sanada and Donnie Yen in John Wick 4, or Michelle Yeoh in Star Trek: Discovery. Asian characters are no longer just NPCs (non-player characters), Generic Asian Men or Dragon Ladies serving as plot devices for the protagonist to further their story.
So the show makes use of the characters and the settings set up in the book, but takes it in a direction that hits on some of the same themes, but ends up in a different place altogether. With the novel being a short read, the miniseries expands the cast quite a bit—the protagonist’s parents get more of a backstory, the Black & White detectives get a narrative arc, the best friend is featured more prominently, and they write in another detective to add to the character dynamics2. It plays around with its idea of being a show within a show, and the cinematography breaks the fourth wall on occasion for effect. The central plot line starts with Generic Asian Man yearning to become Kung Fu Guy so he can ascend beyond Chinatown, but quickly evolves into a detective mystery about Willis’s missing brother.
And if that sounds like a lot is going on, it is. The show tries to do a bit too much, and the early episodes are particularly confusing and scattershot. It’s trying to capture the hopelessness and oppressiveness from the books, but simultaneously wants to set up a detective story with a trail of clues, while hinting at the show-within-a-show construct. Eventually, it hits its stride in the later episodes, but does so by offloading the social commentary to the side stories, the added character arcs that are a bit predictable but pad the running time and at least get resolved by the end.
I have mixed feelings about Interior Chinatown. As mentioned above, I didn’t like reading the book, and the show suffers from a meandering start but does find its footing eventually. I do appreciate the accuracy in portraying the lives of Asian immigrants in America—the mixed use of languages, the unifying function of restaurants and food, the aspirational careers of its citizens intermixed with the scrappiness of living in an unstable environment—which is still pretty rare for television produced in America. Maybe the positive takeaway is that the distance between the novel and its adaptation represents how far Asian-American cinema has progressed these past few years.
It would not be at all surprising if Charles wrote his book intending to get it adopted; some authors readily admit to the kitsch strategy.↩
The actress who plays her is Chloe Bennet, who changed her last name from Wang because she was unable to land parts due to that surname.↩
