Charles Yu’s novel Interior Chinatown takes place in a satirical version of Hollywood, where Chinatown exists as a set for an eternal cop procedural, Black and White. Willis Wu plays Generic Asian Man day after day, falling into stereotypes and silent background roles like everyone else who lives in Chinatown, including his own withered parents who have nearly lost themselves in their past roles entirely. Willis dreams of becoming Kung Fu Guy, the legendary role that he thinks will make him a star and give him the chance at a better life. But to do so he needs to climb the ranks of a broken system that keeps him trapped.
Willis works hard to rise up in the crime show until eventually he is given a special guest starring role, where he is given lines and even departs from the script in order to gain more screen time. But his character is killed off, and he continues working until eventually he meets his future wife Karen. They marry, and have a daughter, but he leaves them behind to pursue the Ku Fu Guy role he has always dreamed of. But in pursuit of this role, Willis abandons everything in his real life that meant something to him. When Willis starts to choose his screen life over his real one, he finds himself dissatisfied, “The role of a lifetime is one you can never bring yourself to quit. Karen was right: you are trapped. Doing well is the trap. Because you’re still in a show that doesn’t have a role for you” (180). Willis seems to be getting what he always wanted, but he begins to realize that by achieving this mythic role, he’s actually just as trapped as he was before, and now he has something to lose. Miles Turner, one of the starring roles in Black and White gets into an argument with Willis, and tells him, “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.” (95). As a Black man, Miles sees that the show portrays him as a category to be filled, and he tries to convince Willis that he is a victim of the same warped reality. The more he tries to achieve this elusive ideal, the more Willis is feeding into a harmful system. He thinks he succeeds when he achieves the Kung Fu Guy role, but he succeeds in a false reality constructed by racist stereotypes and perpetuated by Hollywood.
It isn’t until the very end of the novel that Willis realizes the weight of his role, when he is found guilty by the Black and White sham court and Older Brother, who has been missing, comes to his defense. In his first monologue, Willis explains to the jury, “We’re all the same. Aren’t we? Generic Asian Man. Maybe I’m Kung Fu Guy at the moment, but I know as well as you all do…I’m about one flubbed line from being busted back down to the background pool. It sucks being Generic Asian Man” (245). As Willis says, at the end of the day every role is the same, and that being an Asian person in America means feeling like a foreigner, performing the same old tired routines every day, having to play pretend for everyone else. That is the true performance. But he says that he has been complicit in some respect, he continues, “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.” (246). By playing the roles, he himself is playing up racist and limiting stereotypes, while allowing himself, the real person behind the performance, to disappear beneath its facade.
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