Interior Chinatown — “Generic Asian Man” – Episode 101 — A Chinatown waiter finds himself in a … [+]
(Photo by: Mike Taing/Hulu)“Oh, I do, I love Law & Order,” admits Charles Yu.
Apparently, Yu loved the procedural so much that he used the series as a jumping off point for a book, which has now been adapted, by Yu, into a television series.
Interior Chinatown follows the story of Willis Wu, a background character trapped in a police procedural entitled Black & White.
Relegated to the background, Willis goes through the motions of his on-screen job, waiting tables, while dreaming about the world beyond Chinatown. When he inadvertently becomes a witness to a crime, Willis begins to unravel a criminal web in Chinatown, his family’s buried history, and what it feels like to be in the spotlight.
“I grew up watching TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I just never saw Asians on TV,” explains Yu. “It’s as if they didn’t exist. They existed in real life when I’d go outside, but they weren’t somehow in my screen. So, that sort of shaped me in wanting to tell this story. It comes from the idea of ‘How come I’m not part of this story?’”
However, he adds that the show isn’t just an ‘Asian’ story, saying, “I think what’s exciting about the show is that it explores in all of their characters that anyone can feel like they’re not the main character of a story. It’s about feeling not authentic sometimes, that you have to maybe hide some part of yourself, and how we do that and when we do that.”
As for marrying Willis’ life with what’s happening when he’s on Black & White, Yu explains, “Going into in the writers’ room early on, [we asked ourselves]‘how do you create a world within a world? And how do we show that?’ In prose fiction, I can use words to suggest it to the reader, who then does all the work for me with their imagination. In TV, it’s color, it’s light, it’s sound, it’s all these ways to differentiate the worlds.”
In using a procedural as part of the narrative, Yu points out that, “You have to have some plausibility, but obviously, it does take an imaginative leap to try to buy into the idea of the waiter guy in the back of a sort of Law & Order episode is suddenly on Law & Order. That’s part of the buy-in, for sure.”
Jimmy O. Yang, who plays Willis says that the character’s journey mirrors his own a bit. “It’s so interesting because [in the series] this guy is a background actor, and then he moves on to be kind of like a guest star, and then the tech guy [on the series]which, of course, I’ve played before. So it really drew a lot of parallels to my own career.”
He adds that, “Charlie did such a great job writing this. It’s such a great metaphor for what it means to be Asian-American in this country. But at the same time, it’s a universal story of somebody who wants more from their life.”
‘Interior Chinatown’ is available for streaming on Hulu.