The brilliant novel Interior Chinatown captivated readers and won a National Book Award for its incredibly creative and incisive portrayal of the invisibility of average Asian Americans in the media. Now, author Charles Yu is also the showrunner leading an all-star cast of writers and actors in a TV adaptation of his novel, premiering on Hulu November 19. The show stars Jimmy O. Yang as the main character Willis Wu, along with his best friend “Fatty” played by Ronny Chieng, and rising detective Lana Lee played by Chloe Bennet. The producers include Dan Lin and Lindsey Liberatore for Rideback; Jeff Skoll, Miura Kite and Elsie Choi for Participant; Garrett Basch for Dive; John Lee; and Taika Waititi, who also directed the pilot.
We sat down with Charles Yu to learn more about the process of bringing this story to life. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Grace Hwang Lynch: Can you start us off by giving us an overview of your show Interior Chinatown and what it’s all about?
Charles Yu: It is based on a book that I wrote, and the story of Willis Wu and his family. Willis is basically a background actor, and he lives in a reality where there’s a police procedural in the style of Law and Order, and it’s called Black & White, and Willis does not have a role to play in Black & White. He’s just in the background. He’s a waiter at a Chinese restaurant. And the cops are often outside investigating crimes, and Willis is in the back. In the course of the story, Willis finds his way into a mystery, which turns out to be a plot line on the cop show. And the mystery is actually involving Willis’s own brother, who disappeared years ago. So he basically goes on this journey up through the ranks. He starts as a background actor, and he becomes very integral to the story,
Grace Hwang Lynch: So it’s part send-up of a 1980s or 90s cop show that we all are familiar with, a little bit of fantasy, and also has an element of critique of the way Asian Americans have been represented or not represented in media.
Charles Yu: I’m glad you said fantasy. It’s a big part of it, actually. In knowing what CAAM is focused on, this is a really exciting chance to sort of get a little deeper. But to talk specifically about representation and stereotyping and internalization of those stereotypes and roles, that’s really a lot about where the show starts, and it’s very much embedded into Willis’s story and of all the other character stories as well, which is: how do we negotiate our place in a larger kind of ecosystem? I sometimes describe the show as Law and Order meets Twilight Zone, or Law and Order meets The Truman Show, because it starts with this mystery, and the mystery kind of evolves over the course of the season. But what we’re really watching is Willis trying to assimilate. It’s the Chinese waiter, trying to become the leading man, the love interest, the hero. Can he get that role? There’s no space for Willis. He has to create his own role. And we watch him do that. I don’t want to spoil it, but we’re basically watching Willis trying to level up. And then the way it kind of ripples out, because when Willis leaves Chinatown, he leaves behind his best friend, Fatty, who’s played by Ronny Chieng and so Willis and Fatty’s paths diverge right from the beginning. And Ronnie’s character stays in Chinatown, and he plays the part of a waiter. He steps in, like Willis’s understudy. And so the idea of one brother or one friend leaving home, trying to assimilate into Black & White and the other one staying home and saying, No, stay with the community. But then he kind of goes through his own journey. And then you’ve got these other characters. Chloe Bennet plays Lana Lee, who is a woman, and she is hapa, and she, to me, is fascinating, because she gets to slip kind of between the worlds. She is a part of the cop show, and she is also tasked with entering Chinatown and sort of helping Willis navigate that. So her part is much more fluid between the boundaries of the world. And to me, that was a way to explore the idea of assimilation and passing, and how Willis as a man might have a different experience than Lana as a woman and as a hapa. As a multiracial person, Lana, you know, presents or can pass in ways that Willis cannot. I’m hopefully not making the show sound like a grad student essay, it’s still a fun show! I promise there are jokes.
Grace Hwang Lynch: That’s what I love about this show. It can be enjoyed on so many different levels. You know a person who just likes to watch crime procedurals can enjoy it like that. A person who likes sci-fi and fantasy can really appreciate that element of it, and even a person who really loves Asian American film and history, can pull out some tidbits of it. I found also myself being reminded of certain classic Asian American films and stories. Were you inspired by any particular other Asian American media in coming up with this idea?
Charles Yu: One is, I was inspired by Bruce Lee. I think the brother in the novel (and I won’t spoil anything in the show) but in the novel, he is almost this idealized avatar of the perfect Asian American kid. And he’s something that you aspire to, and maybe you go on a quest to search for that idea, and that’s what draws Willis out in the in the novel, from his world of Chinatown into this kind of coming of age story, trying to figure out who he is as he pursues this ideal. So the challenge with the show is to make that much more tangible. Willis misses his actual brother. And his brother was this kind of amazing, perfect golden child of Chinatown. And what we see in the pilot is a family. Willis’ family, Willis and his parents, Joe and Lily Wu, played by Tzi Ma and Diana Lin, who are really fantastic. Jimmy O. Yang is fantastic. I won’t gush about the whole cast, but they’re the Wu family, and we see a family that’s broken because the brother is missing. There’s a story underneath there too, about a kind of family that had dreams of a better life at one point, and then that narrative got kind of destroyed when they lost part of their family.
Grace Hwang Lynch: It’s a great metaphor for some of the hopes and dreams of immigrants and what happens when they come to America and start really navigating and working their way through life.
Charles Yu: I hope that comes across.
Grace Hwang Lynch: Tell us a little bit about adapting your own novel. It’s written in the form of a screenplay. Did you always know that you would like to see this on a screen? And what was that process like in turning your book into a show?
Charles Yu: I didn’t always know. In fact, honestly, when Hulu said, “Yes, let’s do it,” I was like, “How do we do this?” Because it was daunting. I knew, and I think everyone knew, including the smart people at Hulu, despite the fact that the book is written largely in the form of a of a script, there are many parts of the book’s interiority, subjectivity, sort of liminal nature that you’re going to have to have an invention just to translate it to the medium. There’s no kind of set way to do what you’re doing. This is not a historical romance. This is very much like a thing on its own. How do you translate that words to pictures? I was incredibly surprised, but also grateful for the opportunity to try. And then I also realized that I didn’t have to do it alone. I have many, many people, from writers to producers to executives to obviously, directors and crew and actors. So people had to create this world. I was a part of all of that. As the showrunner, I’m supposed to kind of be the final word on creative choices.
Grace Hwang Lynch: What’s your favorite part about the way the book has been adapted into the show?
Charles Yu: My favorite part is the parts that weren’t in the book. There are things in there that I could not have come up with, even if you put me in a room for 500 years, it’s just not my thing. Or the other writers in the room, they got to flesh out characters and deepen relationships that I only kind of hint at in the world. For instance, the cops Green and Turner, played by Lisa Gilroy and Sullivan Jones, who are really two very talented actors. In the book, they’re very flat, intentionally stereotypical. The idea was, in the book, to dimensionalize Willis and flatten who would normally be the leads, which is the attractive leads, white and Black leads. But in the show, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to give all of the characters the kind of dimension and show that there are these little moments where we let the mask slip and we stop sort of performing ourselves for a minute and be the real person underneath. Watching those moments happen on camera when you didn’t necessarily write it, that was really special, and something you can’t plan for exactly,
Watch Interior Chinatown on Hulu, beginning November 19.
