If you liked or loved this year’s Oscar-winning movie Everything Everywhere All at Once, the novel Interior Chinatown is its own kind of wonderful. It won a National Book Award back in 2021 and predates the movie, but reading it now made me appreciate the film—and rejoice at its many awards—all the more. Whereas Evelyn Wang (Everything…) is an overworked middle-aged wife and mother running a laundry business being audited by the I.R.S., Willis Wu (Interior Chinatown) is a young bit-part actor in a police procedural, working his way up from “Generic Asian Man” to what he believes is the ultimate role for somebody like him—“Kung Fu Guy.” The two plots are very different, particularly given Evelyn’s discovery that she can experience different lives simultaneously in a multiverse threatened by her estranged daughter. But what the movie and novel have in common is the Asian immigrant experience. It isn’t pretty, but it’s not without hope.
Interior Chinatown doesn’t read like other novels. It reads like a screenplay for a TV show, with added commentary by Willis Wu. Willis is the younger son of immigrant parents who both grew up poor in Taiwan and dreamed of better lives in the U.S. (Older son, with all the potential, is missing in action, but turns up as a future plot point.)
The main setting for the cop show “Black and White” is The Golden Palace restaurant, in Chinatown. The show stars a hunky black detective, Mike Turner, and his pretty white partner, Sarah Green. When we first meet Willis, he’s acting the role of “Generic Asian Man Number Three/Delivery Guy.” At night he retires to his SRO (Single Room Only) above the restaurant, which is where the restaurant workers who often double as bit-part actors also live. Willis routinely checks on his parents, who live on the second floor, before climbing up to his own room on eight. His father’s acting path included parts like “Guy in a Soiled T-Shirt” and “Egg Roll Cook,” but he briefly rose to the role of “Sifu, the Mysterious Kung Fu Master” before his inevitable downfall to “Old Asian Man.” His beautiful mother now plays “Old Asian Woman,” but she was once “Restaurant Hostess” and “Girl with the Almond Eyes.” Willis has fond memories of the time spent with his mom when he was a kid. His mantra was “Someday I’m going to be Bruce Lee.” One day, after he accidentally injures his mother practicing his moves, she doesn’t get angry. She says, “Don’t be Kung Fu Guy. Be more.”
And somehow, he does it. He flubs a line, forgets to speak with a Chinese accent, and suddenly he’s “Special Guest Star,” and then he’s ad-libbing lines and driving the plot of the show in a new direction. He meets a beautiful young actress on the show, who looks white but is one-quarter Taiwanese. He can’t believe it, but she seems to like him. Everywhere she goes, “people think I’m one of them,” she tells him. “They want to claim me for their tribe. . .I can be objectified by men of all races.” They marry, then she gets her own show and moves to the suburbs with their daughter, but he stays behind—temporarily he says, believing he’s so very close to landing the part of “Kung Fu Guy.”
By the end of the novel—or screenplay—the author Charles Yu has pulled off what seemed impossible at the outset. With an economy of words, he’s given us a story that’s fun as well as moving, scathing, informative and hopeful.
In her acceptance speech for Best Actress, Michelle Yeong, the star of Everything Everywhere All at Once, said, “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities.” Ms. Yeong, now 60, grew up in Malaysia and rose to fame doing action parts in Hong Kong films in the 1990s. She did her own stunts as the Bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies and in the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. She was 26 when she arrived in Hollywood, and she’s said people were surprised she could speak English. “You’re a minority,” she kept hearing, which surprised her. She’d grown up in Malaysia, a multi-racial society.
Charles Yu wrote a novel about someone who’s marginalized who makes his own story. The two Oscar-winning directors who also wrote the script for Everything, Daniel Kwan (Chinese) and Daniel Scheinert (American Caucasian), wrote the kind of story they wanted to tell. They initially wanted Jackie Chan for the lead, but he turned them down. Michelle Yeong was their next choice. No doubt this hard-working actress is feeling even better about her own story right now. And we, the grateful audience, get to sit back, enjoy, and applaud.