Interior Chinatown is predominantly written in the form of a TV script. Accordingly, it casts its Asian characters in stereotypical Asian roles commonly seen in movies and TV shows. In his work on the police procedural show Black and White, Willis plays characters like “Background Oriental Male,” “Dead Asian Man,” and even “Generic Asian Man Number One,” which is only a bit part in the grander scheme of mainstream (white) Hollywood but, according to the novel, is actually a major accomplishment for Asian male actors. Hollywood, the book suggests, only grants true stardom to white actors. This, in turn, means that the best role male Asian actors can hope for is the role of Kung Fu Guy, a sort of Bruce Lee archetype; though highly coveted, the role’s prestige is still secondary to the stardom that white actors achieve in Hollywood. After all, Kung Fu guy is little more than “the default guy who gets trotted out whenever there’s kung fu to be done.” In effect, then, Kung Fu Guy is an idea and a plot device, not a robust character with a complex and meaningful inner life.
Throughout his internal musings, Willis expands on this point, suggesting that Hollywood’s pattern of casting Asian actors in stereotypical roles reflects—and exacerbates—mainstream society’s imposition of racial stereotypes on Asian people. Indeed, in a section that presents the (real) backstory of Willis’s Father, Ming-Chen Wu, the novel reveals that even supposedly well-meaning peers called him “Chinaman” when Wu attended graduate school in Mississippi. In doing so, they not only used a racial slur but also gave him a generic title that robbed him of his individuality, defining him merely by his gender and his ethnicity. This outlook failed to account for the many things that made Wu unique, including the trauma and loss he endured growing up in Taiwan under martial law.
With this in mind, Interior Chinatown draws parallels between the one-dimensional, racist roles that Hollywood assigns Asian actors and the stereotypes that mainstream society attaches to Asian people in general. The novel also juxtaposes these characters’ one-dimensional stories with the complex and often tragic details of their real lives. In this way, the narrative highlights the dehumanizing effects of racial stereotyping. Racial stereotypes, Interior Chinatown suggests, dehumanize people, stifling their individuality and invalidating their complex inner lives.
Stereotypes ThemeTracker
Stereotypes Quotes in Interior Chinatown
In the world of Black and White, everyone starts out as Generic Asian Man.
Black and White always look good. A lot of it has to do with the light. They’re the heroes. They get hero lighting, designed to hit their faces just right. Designed to hit White’s face just right, anyway.
Kung Fu Guy is not like the other slots in the hierarchy—there isn’t always someone occupying the position, as in whoever the top guy is at any given time, that’s the default guy who gets trotted out whenever there’s kung fu to be done. Only a very special Asian can be worthy of the title. It takes years of dedication and sacrifice, and after all that only a few have even a slim chance of making it. Despite the odds, you all grew up training for this and only this. All the scrawny yellow boys up and down the block dreaming the same dream.
He’d played his role for so long he’d lost himself in it, before some separation that happened gradually over decades and then you waking one day to feel it, some distance that had crept in overnight. Some formal space you could no longer cross.
Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.
Be more.
You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.
Maybe they make one of us Kung Fu Guy. Maybe a few good scenes. Maybe a poster, in the back, real small. And then what?
GREEN (turns to you) You speak English well.
GENERIC ASIAN MAN Thank you.
TURNER Really well. It’s almost like you don’t have an accent.
Shit. Right. You forgot to do the accent.
“I’m working with them now. This could be good.”
“Happy for you,” he says. He looks skeptical. Worried.
No. But you’re going along with it. Look where we are. Look what you made yourself into. Working your way up the system doesn’t mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It’s what the system depends on.
Are you doing the right thing? Something about this feels wrong.
But this is Black and White. They let you have a part. You can’t stop now.
You look at your dad. He shifts his eyes away, and you know in that moment that he is disappointed. But he won’t ever say it. You’ll never talk about it again. He’s gone, slipped back into Old Asian Man. He’s not going to make the choice for you. It’s your role to play.
When she was dead, she got to be your mother.
But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.
Your mother weeps, and dies. Weeps and dies. Weeps and doesn’t die. Just weeps. Because now, your father is no longer a person, no longer a human. Just some mystical Eastern force, some Wizened Chinaman. Her husband is gone, Wu is gone, even Young Asian Man is gone. They took him away from her. He is lost now, in his work, in who they made him. Distant. Cold, perfectionist. Inscrutable. No descriptors, anymore, no age or build, just a role, a name, a shell where he used to be. His features taken away and replaced by archetypes, even his face hollowing out.
This is how he became Sifu. This is how she lost her husband. How you lost your dad.
“Oh, boo hoo, I’m a poor helpless Asian Man. It’s so terrible being me.”
“I have to talk with an accent because no one can process what the hell to do with me. I’ve got the consciousness of a contemporary American. And the face of a Chinese farmer of five thousand years ago. Asian Man. It’s a fact. Look it up. No one likes us.”
“Not with that attitude they won’t. And by the way, I think I might like you. Maybe. A little.”
You survey the room: drawings, hair ties, notes to herself. Seemingly every species of stuffed animal or creature, real or imagined, lined up like a royal court along the walls on the floors. Her friends, her audience. Her off-screen voices. She seems both more resourceful and yet more childlike at the same time—how she’s invented a world, stylized, so that its roles and scenery, its characters and rules, its truths and dangers, all fit within one room. How small it is, and overstuffed, and ready for expansion. How bright it is, how messy. This whole place, the objects in it, all from her.
The words coming out of your mouth, you can feel it happening, how you’re softening, changing into a different person. You were a bit player in the world of Black and White, but here and now, in her world, you’re more. Not the star of the show, something better. The star’s dad. Somehow you were lucky enough to end up in her story.
PHOEBE Can you tell me a story?
KUNG FU DAD I don’t know how. No one’s ever asked me to.
KAREN You wanted them to find you.
KUNG FU DAD I wanted them to find us.
But at the same time, I’m guilty, too. Guilty of playing this role. Letting it define me. Internalizing the role so completely that I’ve lost track of where reality starts and the performance begins. And letting that define how I see other people. I’m as guilty of it as anyone. Fetishizing Black people and their coolness. Romanticizing White women. Wishing I were a White man. Putting myself into this category.
“Hey,” Turner says. Off-script.
“I can’t do this anymore,” you say.
Turner smiles. “Yeah, man. I know.”
Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll teach you. If she can move freely between worlds, why can’t you?