A “meta” detective series in which a struggling Asian waiter becomes the unlikely hero of a police procedural-style criminal conspiracy, Interior Chinatown satirizes Hollywood’s stereotypical treatment of minorities — while also nodding to the progress the industry has belatedly made.
The new show, out on Disney-owned Hulu next Tuesday, is based on the critically adored novel by US author Charles Yu (游朝凱), who is of Taiwanese descent.
Yu’s 2020 bestseller delivered a humorous takedown of racism in US society through the adventures of Willis Wu, a Hollywood extra reduced to playing roles like “Background Oriental Male” but who dreams of one day being promoted to “Kung Fu Guy.”
Photo: AFP
Yu now serves as the TV series’ creator and showrunner.
“I grew up watching TV in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and I just never saw Asians on TV. It’s as if they didn’t exist,” he told a press conference in July. “They existed in real life when I’d go outside, but they weren’t somehow in my screen. And so, that sort of shaped me in wanting to tell this story.”
Even a decade ago, Yu’s literary creation would likely have been ignored by Hollywood.
Photo: AP
But in recent years, breakout successes for Asian American productions like Crazy Rich Asians and Everything Everywhere All At Once, not to mention South Korean hits Parasite and Squid Game, have proven the commercial appetite for diverse storytelling.
Hong Kong-born US actor Jimmy O. Yang (歐陽萬成), who appeared in Crazy Rich Asians, stars as Wu in Interior Chinatown.
Oscar-winning New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit) directs the pilot episode.
Photo: Bloomberg
‘METAPHOR’
Viewers are introduced to Wu as an ordinary waiter at a restaurant in Los Angeles’s Chinatown — but quickly find out that he also appears to reside within a police procedural.
In these scenes, Interior Chinatown adopts the visual codes and tropes of a TV cop drama. Wu is relegated to a background character role, as the series’ Black and white cop duo solve crimes.
Even more strangely, unexplained cameras are shown filming Wu and his colleagues, reminiscent of “The Truman Show.”
The distortion of reality echoes the premise of the original novel, which was itself written in the form of a television screenplay.
“It’s such a great metaphor for what it means to be Asian American in this country,” said Yang.
“But at the same time, it’s a universal story of someone longing to be more, someone finding themselves in their career.”
When Wu witnesses a kidnapping, twists and turns see this background actor take on increasingly important roles in the narrative of a criminal intrigue. “He moves on to be kind of like a guest star. And then the tech guy, which, of course, I played before. So it really drew a lot of parallels to my own career,” said Yang.
‘MIND BENDING’
The series blends English, Mandarin and Cantonese dialogue.
Among its characters is Lana Lee, a mixed-race novice cop, who is assigned a case in Chinatown by superiors who incorrectly assume that she must know her way around the Asian neighborhood.
The irony was not lost on actress Chloe Bennet, born Chloe Wang to a Chinese father and white American mother, who in real life had to change her last name in order to land roles in Hollywood.
“My journey through the industry is so meta for Lana,” she told the press conference. “I literally was told at the beginning of my career... ‘You’re just not white enough to be the lead, but you’re not Asian enough to be the Asian.’”
Wu’s best friend Fatty Choi, played by comedian Ronny Chieng (The Daily Show), provides a hilarious counterpoint to audiences’ pre-conceived notions of Asians as the “model minority.”
A video game-addicted stoner, Choi aggressively lectures the restaurant’s demanding white customers that they are “not the center of the universe.”
“To do something this cool, this meta, this mind-bending and smart — social commentary, but not hitting people over the head with it... this is the stuff that you only dream of being able to do,” he said.
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
RSS