Interior Chinatown: Act 2: Int. Golden Palace Summary & Analysis

When Willis suggests that Asian people disrupt Black and White’s straightforwardness, he’s suggesting that as neither Black nor white, Asian people resist the show’s overgeneralized and unnuanced view of society and social issues. By this logic, then, the book is gesturing toward the idea that Asian people complicate mainstream America’s view of privilege vs. oppression, with white people embodying the epitome of racial privilege and Black people the epitome of racial discrimination. Asian people are minorities in the United States, the book indicates, but society doesn’t believe that they experience discrimination equal to the discrimination that Black people experience.

In giving White Lady Cop a name, Sarah Green, it gives her the privilege of personhood. Even so, her character suggests the gender biases of the world in which she exists: though she’s a skilled and accomplished detective, ultimately her physical attractiveness is what stands out most about her character. 

While on the one hand Black and White purports to be a diverse and progressive show, featuring a woman and a person of color as its leads, it inadvertently reveals the limits of its progressivism by portraying Turner as a man of superhuman accomplishment, implicitly suggesting that in the world of Black and White, Black people have to work harder to deserve basic dignity.

Turner reveals his own bias when he assumes that Old Asian Man doesn’t speak English—then Old Asian Man, with his clear, unaccented English proves the illegitimacy of that bias. Readers may interpret the director’s instruction to cut as his disapproval of Old Asian Man challenging a stereotype, which the director perhaps thinks could make viewers uncomfortable. According to this view, it doesn’t work for Old Asian Man to speak in unaccented English because it’s not in the show’s script and therefore destabilizes the show’s view of Asian people’s status within mainstream American culture.   

SRO stands for single room occupancy—it’s a residential building, usually for lower-income people, where tenants live in private rooms and share communal facilities like a washroom with other tenants. Knowing that Willis and the other characters live here gives readers a greater sense of their economic disadvantage. The lives these immigrant characters and their children experience are quite different from the mythic American Dream, where America is the land of opportunity and any immigrant with a can-do attitude can move their way up in the world.

This section gives more insight into Willis’s relationship with his parents. For Willis and his parents, the pressure to perform a role—in this case, the roles of parent and child—create tension and distance in their relationship. Willis knows he’s expected to stop by and see his parents, and yet knowing that his mother will respond with her own performance (the nagging mother who loves her son but won’t dare express it on the outside) makes him not want to visit them.

Like every other Asian character in the book, the Emperor has had to act out a dehumanizing, ignorant Asian stereotype in order to pay the bills. In the world of the novel, Asian people either conform to ignorant western ideas about how Asian people are supposed look and act, or they cease to exist altogether. An Asian person is either the Emperor or Generic Asian Man—there’s nothing in between.

Willis’s mother scolds him until he hands her the bag of bah-chang (a traditional Chinese rice dish), playing the part of dutiful son. Once more, the book reinforces how performance dominates characters’ lives and interactions with themselves and with others. This scene thus isn't quite an interaction between Willis and his mother specifically—instead, it’s a generic interaction in which Willis tries to act how his mother’s culture believes a good son is supposed to act.

Willis’s mother has been playing parts all her life. Metaphorically, the many roles she has played reinforce the book’s overarching idea that mainstream American society deprives Asian people of individuality. Each of these roles are designed to “other” Willis’s mother—to highlight how exotic and un-American she is. None of them attempt to identify anything about her as a person with unique experiences and perspectives. This scene also shows how years of society dehumanizing Willis’s mother has exhausted and dispirited her—she dreamed of a bigger, brighter future when she was a young woman, but life made her put that dream to rest.

The textbook’s lofty claim that anyone can make money if they just work hard enough gestures toward the bootstraps-mentality that is at the heart of the American Dream. At this point in her life, Willis’s mother still believes that such a dream is possible and plausible to achieve. But for someone who must first fight for mainstream society to take her seriously—to see past her accent or her cultural differences, perhaps—there are extra hurdles to overcome, and so the path to success might not be quite as straightforward. 

The physical pain that Willis’s kung fu moves cause his mother—and the emotional pain that they cause Willis—suggests that there may be more costs than benefits to becoming Kung Fu Guy. When Willis’s mother urges him to “be more,” she’s urging him not to internalize America’s perception of him as lesser—as different from any other American due to his race and ethnic background. He should strive to be the person he wants to be—and he shouldn’t let America’s ideas about what he can and can’t be limit his hopes for his future.

Willis seems conflicted about his desire to be Kung Fu Guy. While it’s clear he still longs for the fame and success that being Kung Fu Guy would bring him, he acknowledges its limitations: even if Generic Asian Men like himself and the other male residents of the SRO one day become Kung Fu Guy, it won’t change the fact that society ultimately sees them as lesser. They might have a little more money and be successful for Asian people fighting the various disadvantages of living as minorities in the United States, but the core issue lies in the fact that their world limits the success and acceptance within mainstream American culture that they can achieve—all because of their racial and cultural backgrounds.

The shower pan becomes a metaphor for the broader predicament that many of the people living in the SRO experience due to their poverty and immigrant status, showing how nearly impossible it is to achieve upward mobility and success when one must abandon long-term goals (replacing the pan) to simply make ends meet in the short term (cheaply repairing the pan instead of replacing it). As the perpetually flooding SRO apartments show, when a person is experiencing poverty, the simple goal of staying afloat can be a losing battle. 

Willis sees his room’s flooding as inevitable and uncontrollable as the weather, suggesting the degree to which his poverty influences his view of the world and controls his life.

Old Fong’s death is especially tragic because of its circumstances—when he died, he’d been eagerly anticipating a call from his son. This development adds to the book’s focus on parent-child relationships—and parent-child relationships in immigrant communities specifically.    

Given the book’s focus on how performance and roleplaying factor into a person’s identity, readers may interpret Wang Tai Tai’s remark to Young Fong as a passive aggressive reminder to stick to the script: Young Fong’s lack of sadness deviates from the cultural expectation that he should grieve his father and feel ashamed of the ingratitude he showed him while he was alive, and he needs to play the part on the outside—even if he doesn’t genuinely feel that way on the inside. When Young Fong packs up his father’s possessions with care, “just as Old Fong had taught him to do,” he’s honoring his memory, either genuinely or to perform the role of grateful son that his Chinatown community expects him to perform.

Though the world of the novel exoticizes old Asian men like Willis’s father, casting them in roles that emphasize their otherness and portray them as decidedly unassimilated into mainstream American culture, in fact Old Asian Man and other men like him relate to one of the most quintessentially American cultural relics—the country song—because it surfaces nostalgic feelings for a home they can’t return to. This karaoke scene thus emphasizes how overgeneralizing, one-dimensional stereotypes are often incorrect. 

This brief section, which lists the products that Black and White’s makeup department uses, gestures toward the inaccuracies of the entertainment industry’s portrayal of Asian design and architecture (“Oriental flourishes and torches”) and either some form of whitewashing (“taped eyelids”), which is where non-Asian actors are cast in Asian roles, or perhaps manipulating an Asian actor’s eyelids to appear more conventionally Caucasian.

The purpose of Green’s character in Black and White seems to be to give the show a (false) air of cultural sensitivity—yes, the show stereotypes Asian people, but it does so in a “sensitive” and respectful manner. She also counteracts Turner’s character, who is more overtly racist. At the same time, though, Green’s inability to read “the repressive conditioning of [Old Asian Man’s] Confucian worldview”—and the exoticized tone of that description itself—shows that her sensitivity is mere performance; in fact, she’s no more able or willing to level with Old Asian Man as a person (as opposed to a stereotype) than her overtly racist partner is.

Turner’s comment about minoring in East Asian Studies at Yale is another example of meaningless posturing. He’s essentially implying that he can’t be racist because he took a few classes in East Asian studies, when in fact his behavior—his aggression and his unwillingness to relate to Old Asian Man as a real person—suggests the very opposite. When Willis, in character as Generic Asian Man, offers to help Turner and Green (who here represent “the system”), he symbolically agrees to participate in a system of racial discrimination that actively discriminates against him and people who look like him.

Interior Chinatown frequently blurs the line between the world of the screenplay (the world of Black and White, in which Willis embodies Asian characters) and the real world (in which Willis is an actor playing these roles). This passage is an acute example of this—it’s unclear whether Green (in character) is complimenting Generic Asian Man’s English in a condescending way (to convey her surprise that an Asian man like him can speak English) or whether the actress portraying Green is passive aggressively “complimenting” Willis the actor’s English to point out to him that he forgot to speak in the Asian accent the script called for.