Interior Chinatown: Act 1: Generic Asian Man Summary & Analysis

Willis struggles with his self-esteem and confidence because his kung fu isn’t that great. And in his world, kung fu skills—the skills that might lead to him scoring the coveted role of Kung Fu Guy—are the only way he can work his way up and achieve success and personal satisfaction, in his career and in his life in general.

Sifu’s identity changes based on the roles he’s cast in. Though once he was “Sifu, the Mysterious Kung Fu Master”—an identity that conveyed his success and set him apart from Asian actors stuck acting out generic roles—now in his old age he’s forced to give up his glory and become generic once more, the role of “Old Asian Man” more a designation of his ethnic background and age than an identity.

That Sifu has fallen into poverty in his old age suggests that the glory that being Kung Fu Guy brings is temporary and limited in its ability to provide meaning, personal fulfillment, and security.

This section sheds light on Willis’s relationship with his father. It’s clear from the way Willis describes Sifu in his youth that he is proud of his father and all his skills. It’s also clear that Willis’s desire to be Kung Fu Guy goes beyond a desire for fame and success—he wants to live up to his father’s image and make him proud. And yet, the fact that Willis continues to visit Sifu under the guise of taking lessons from him—even though both of them know the lessons are just a “pretense” for Willis to look after his ailing father—shows how Sifu’s past as Kung Fu Guy has hurt their relationship. Playing Kung Fu Guy for so long has effectively made Sifu become Kung Fu Guy to himself and to Willis. And this is why they must pretend that Willis is coming to Sifu for help with his kung fu skills rather than to take care of his ailing father.

That Sifu sees Willis as a “helpful stranger” suggests that he could be suffering from dementia in his old age. But symbolically, it suggests the degree to which acting and performing have colored both men’s sense of self and their relationship to each other. Each thinks of the other in terms of the tasks he performs rather than the person he is. Willis looks after his father, and so he’s a “helpful stranger.” If Willis deviates from the script—if he doesn’t say the right thing or asks too many questions—it throws everything off.

The new roles that Sifu has taken on—Old Asian Cook and Old Asian Guy Smoking—reinforce the idea that a person’s identity (and in the novel, this pertains to Asian people specifically) is determined by what they do or how the world sees them, not by who they are on the inside. Willis’s description of his separated parents as having “lost the plot” continues the theme of real life as performance. In the world of the novel, characters are stereotypes before they are people, and they follow scripts rather than speaking or behaving authentically.  

Willis emphasizes the lack of support his parents have received from their wider community, suggesting a sense of entrapment.  

Willis’s effusive praise of Older Brother reinforces his belief that being Kung Fu Guy is a positive thing that meaningfully improves one’s life. Even this early in the novel, it’s clear that Willis can’t really conceive of a life or value system beyond the confines of Chinatown—his priorities and hopes for the future are bound up in the stereotypical characters who inhabit that place.

Bruce Lee was a Hong Kong and American martial artist and pop culture icon who starred in a number of action films in the 1970s and is credited with changing the American entertainment industry’s portrayal of Asian people in films and challenging harmful stereotypes. When Willis claims that Lee “proved too much,” he’s suggesting that Lee is the exception to the rule—he might have proved mainstream white society wrong, but that just gave mainstream America a new flawed and unreal framework by which to judge Asian people. Ordinary Asian people are no more like Bruce Lee than they are like the exoticized Asian stereotypes Lee’s success challenged. 

Willis suggests that Older Brother’s success is predicated on mainstream (white) culture’s acceptance of him: he’s tall enough for white women to find him attractive, but he doesn’t so exceed the mainstream’s expectations for the height of an Asian person that they consider him a “freak” like Yao Ming (a famously tall basketball player). Also, note that Older Brother’s success relies on his perfection—suggesting that mainstream American (white) society might not accept him if he were just average. In this way, Willis’s assessment suggests that there are clear limits to an average Asian male’s ability to assimilate into mainstream American culture.

With the ridiculous suggestion that Older Brother does chin-ups as he waits to cross the street, Willis’s praise of Older Brother almost becomes comical. In this way, the book critically suggests that Asian people are expected to overperform and achieve extraordinary feats for mainstream (white) American society simply to accept them. This passage also gestures toward one of the conflicts that will plague Willis over the course of the novel: how to strike an appropriate balance between “assimilated and authentic.” When Willis suggests that Older Brother’s success at striking this balance is “mythical,” he’s getting at how difficult and perhaps impossible it is to truly inhabit both worlds.  

When Willis suggests that there are “limits to the dream of assimilation” and that Older Brother accomplished as much as he possibly could and hit the “ceiling,” he’s indicating that mainstream America will always see Older Brother’s connection to Asian culture as detracting from his Americanness.