Interior Chinatown: Charles Yu on the pressure of bringing his book to the screen

Interior Chinatown follows Willis Wu (left), who works as a nameless character in the Golden Palace restaurant.

Charles Yu won acclaim for his novel satirising Hollywood cliches. Four years later, with the new miniseries adaptation of Interior Chinatown - executive produced by Taika Waititi, who also directs the first episode - Yu is the one writing the scripts.

Four years ago, Charles Yu published Interior Chinatown, a satire of Hollywood stereotypes and the angst of representation. Today, he’s the one in charge of writing the scripts, as showrunner of the new TV series based on the novel.

It’s a funny situation, he acknowledged when we spoke this month. “That’s something I’ve wrestled with, to be honest,” Yu said. “It’s not even necessarily a matter of selling out or not. It’s: How do you tell the story in a way that still stays true to the original impulse – while staying current with the times, adapting it for a different platform, working within a big company like Hulu and Disney, but also having the resources of that?” (All 10 episodes arrived on Hulu this week.)

The novel, which won the National Book Award in 2020, follows Willis Wu, a “Background Oriental Male” whose greatest ambition is to become, like his father before him, “Kung Fu Guy”. Willis works as a nameless character in the Golden Palace restaurant – which is somehow both a real place and the setting of a police serial, Black and White – hoping for a shot at the spotlight, or just a line of dialogue to call his own. Riffing on the format of a teleplay, the story becomes a surrealist tour of racial cliches. It works, on the surface, as a straightforward piece of cultural critique. Beneath that, though, it’s a wistful exploration of how the desire for recognition – the dream of one day being cast in “the perfect role” – can flatten our aspirations for our lives.

Interior Chinatown had been hard for Yu to write, so much so that he nearly abandoned it altogether. At that point in his career, he felt stymied by the need to produce something that “felt more serious and weighty”, he said, “and whenever I put on that serious-writer hat, it squeezes my head, and no thoughts come out”.

But making the story work on-screen might have been even harder. “A novel takes us places that can’t necessarily be literalised,” Yu said. The question of how to depict Willis’ neighbourhood as a physical place and a place in the cultural imagination, and also a personal, subjective space where he feels trapped by his own psychology, “broke our brains a bit”, he said. The book maintains the ambiguity of Golden Palace’s status – is it “real”? a theatrical backdrop? – for as long as possible.

The book deals in a similar ambiguity with its characters, who waver between intentionally flat archetypes and fully imagined people. The show resolves that particular uncertainty, giving the characters more elaborate story arcs and more spelled-out emotional lives. Willis (played by Jimmy O. Yang) now has a mystery to solve: What happened to his older brother, who disappeared years ago? The surrounding characters have their own side plots. Willis’ mother, Lily (Diana Lin), takes up a career as a real estate agent. His best friend and restaurant co-worker, Fatty Choi (Ronny Chieng), unexpectedly becomes the main attraction for white customers at the restaurant, who flock there to experience his rude, unco-operative style of table service.

We also learn a lot more about Willis’ love interest, Lana Lee (played by Chloe Bennet) – a rookie detective on Black and White who gets appointed as the “Chinatown expert” because of her Asian ancestry. (Thai? Korean? Willis’ friends are unsure but speculate freely.)

“Things that are barriers to Willis are not barriers to Lana,” Yu said. “And is it because she is hapa, multi-racial? Is it because she’s a woman as opposed to an Asian-American man? Is it something else altogether?”

Willis’ love interest Lana Lee is a rookie detective on Black and White who gets appointed as the “Chinatown expert”.

Lana appears, at the start, to have more status than Willis, and more freedom and mobility in the narrative – but over time, as he secures a place in the police precinct, first by delivering food then by becoming “Tech Guy”, it’s clear she also feels more precarious than he does.

The pop culture landscape has shifted since Interior Chinatown was published. The last few years yielded a bumper crop of TV and movies exploring the Asian-American immigrant experience. Several even share his project’s surrealist, genre-hopping sensibility, like American Born Chinese, based on the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang, and Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won seven Oscars in 2023.

Yu said these developments gave him and his collaborators more confidence that their show - executive produced by Kiwi creative dynamo Taikai Waitti - would find a receptive audience. The public conversation had moved past “the mere fact” of representation, opening a space for more challenging narratives. “We could go deep and go weird, and people would be into it,” he said. “That, of course, ups the pressure, too. I do think in some ways, it’s a very high bar to clear.”

Another thing that’s changed since he wrote the novel? Yu’s children are now teenagers, with their own takes on what makes for good storytelling. “I constantly worry about being cringy or behind,” he said. “Or, you know, that they’ll be like, ‘Why are you saying that? That’s so basic.’”

Interior Chinatown is streaming now on Disney+.