Interior Chinatown: Act 4: Striving Immigrant Summary & Analysis

DEATH, PART I—II. The worst part about dying, Willis explains, is that you need to take 45 days off before you can start working again. Willis is out getting coffee and donuts when he runs into Attractive Officer; she says hello, greeting him as Very Special Guest Star. He’s surprised to see her here, thinking she’d have a bigger part on Black and White. “Asian Men aren’t the only people,” she replies, gesturing at the Asian men and Black women sitting around the shop. She suggests they start their own show someday and call it Black and Yellow. They raise their coffees to toast to the dream they know will never happen.

DEATH, PART III. Willis explains why 45 days is the minimum amount of time you have to take off work—it’s “just long enough for everyone to forget you existed.” Even if viewers think all Asian people look alike, they’d still know if you get murdered one day and show up as a busboy in a scene later in the week. Of course, 45 days is only the ideal amount of time for “them.” They don’t care that you have bills to pay or a family to take care of—“you are nobody” to them once you’re dead. 

Some people think it’s good to die—otherwise, you play the same role for too long and can’t remember who you really are. Willis’s mom used to die all the time, and these are his happiest childhood memories; his mom’s hair would be down, and they’d go back to the SRO together, and Willis would have her all to himself. It was only when she was dead that “she got to be your mother.”

INT. AMERICAN MOVIES—1950s AND ’60s. Back when she was Young Asian Woman, Willis’s mother used to dream she’d have a better life. Once, an American movie made it to the theaters in Taiwan. Willis’s mother sat with her father and her nine siblings, all of them sharing the same bottle of Coke and watching the “luminous whiteness” of Grace Kelly, Kim Novak, and Natalie Wood on the screen.

INT. THE MOVIE VERSION OF HER LIFE—NIGHT. Willis’s mother (as Pretty Asian Hostess) is wearing a red cheongsam. Nat King Cole plays on the jukebox. She descends the stairs. Old Asian Man looks up as she approaches him but he’s young now, wearing a suit, and playing the role of Dashing Asian Man. He approaches Pretty Asian Hostess and says he’s been looking for her. But suddenly he can’t say anything more—there are no lines for him to read, nothing that lets him know how he’s supposed to think or feel. As she waits for him to speak, she thinks of the beautiful life they might have, one where they have names that aren’t Asian Woman and Asian Man. The scene transforms, and now the two characters are in the Golden Palace Chinese Restaurant.

INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT—NIGHT. Willis’s mother still looks beautiful in her cheongsam, but now she’s standing at the hosting station instead of descending a staircase. Old Asian Man is still young and dressed in a suit, but he's not wearing a tie anymore—he’s now playing the role of Asian Man/Waiter, and his clothes are soaked through with sweat from all the hard manual labor he’s done that day. He asks Pretty Asian Hostess if she has a name. When she says no, he suggests they make up names, just for themselves—maybe names they’ve heard in movies. Pretty Asian chooses Dorothy; Asian Man/Waiter chooses Ming-Chen Wu.

Dorothy and Ming-Chen Wu share a cigarette and pots of tea. They talk about their pasts—both come from poor families in the old country. They decide to make the best of the bit parts their new home gives them “just to get in.”

INT. DOROTHY’S BACKSTORY—HOSPital—DAY. It’s 1969, and Dorothy is working as a nurse’s assistant in Alabama for meager wages. She gives sponge baths to older patients who call her “China doll,” come on to her, and then get angry when she turns them down. Home isn’t much better: ever since she first arrived in America, she’s lived with her older sister, Angela, who is jealous of her good looks and the way Angela’s husband looks at her. Then one day Angela packs Dorothy’s bags and buys her a one-way ticket to Akron.

INT. GREYHOUND BUS—AMERICAN BACKROADS—DAY. Dorothy rides the bus through the countryside, which is every bit as magnificent as she imagined it would be. It helps distract her from the crowded, smelly bus. The worst part about Angela kicking her out is that she kept Dorothy’s favorite book, a copy of Hamilton’s Mythology—the book that she read to learn English. She loves reading myths about all the gods. She likes the minor gods best—it’s easier to learn all she can about them, and when she becomes an expert one day, she’ll write her own entry. Maybe one about the “god of immigrants.”

INT. DOROTHY’S FUTURE. Years pass, and Dorothy finds her old book of gods and reads it to young Willis in their one-room apartment. He struggles to sound out the words and becomes overjoyed when at last he can decipher their meaning. 

Years later, Dorothy receives a phone call from her brother-in-law in Alabama: Angela needs her help. Dorothy travels there and finds Angela sitting on the couch, watching TV, and wearing a diaper that hasn’t been changed for over a day. She brings Angela home with her and cares for her until she dies just over one year later.

INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT. Ming-Chen Wu sits and stares as Dorothy finishes her story. He snaps out of the state he’s in and begins his own story. EXT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY. Ming Cheng’s story is very different from Dorothy’s. His is more a “Historical Period Piece,” and he plays the role of “Child Victim of Oppression.”

BEGIN HISTORICAL NEWSREEL MONTAGE. A News Reader voiceover describes what will later be known as the 2/28 Incident, a period of violence and antigovernment protests that began in February 1947 and lasted several weeks in Taiwan, resulting in the deaths of thousands of Taiwanese civilians. The New York Times describes all the “indiscriminate killing and looting” and the bodies that lined the streets of poorer parts of town. By the end of March, the governor of Taiwan, Chen Yi, regains control with the help of troops sent from mainland China, and he orders organizers of the uprising to be imprisoned or killed; more than 3,000 are executed.

Later, in 1949, Mao drives Chiang Kai-shek (the Kuomintang leader of the Republic of China, or ROC) and the Nationalists out of China. He and his loyalists settle in Taiwan and impose martial law. It’s finally lifted in 1987—the longest period of martial law in history. During this period, called “White Terror,” the regime beats, kills, or disappears thousands of Taiwanese people. Ming-Chen Wu is seven when the 2/28 Incident takes place, and he sees family members shot in front of him and his home destroyed.

Ming-Chen Wu remembers seeing his father run back into the family’s burning home, promising to return by the time Wu has counted to 100. But Young Wu counts to 100 and still his father doesn’t return, and Wu starts to cry. Just when Young Wu is about to give up hope, his father emerges from the burning house carrying a box. Young Wu will later learn that it contains the deed to the family plot of land, and he will understand that his father risked his own life for “the chance at a better life.” But he doesn’t know this then. Suddenly, two Nationalist soldiers approach Young Wu’s father and shoot him. Then they take the box and the deed and leave Young Wu and his remaining family behind.

INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT. Ming-Chen Wu finishes his story, and Dorothy comforts him. He explains that he came here because he was the oldest son and felt he “had to do something.”

INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—JOURNEY TO AMERICA. Ming-Chen Wu is a student in Central Taiwan, daydreaming of America as he looks at a world map hung on the classroom wall. In his dreams, he arrives in the morning, and smiling strangers wave as his ship arrives at the port.

INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—THE UNITED STATES. In reality, Ming-Chen Wu and other immigrants arrive in the middle of the night. It’s cold, and nobody greets him. From there, he gets on a bus and travels for days, eventually arriving in Mississippi. 

INT. MING-CHEN WU’S BACKSTORY—MISSISSIPPI—1965—DAY. Ming-Chen Wu lives in a house with five other graduate students, all of whom are from other countries: Nakamoto is from Japan, Kim and Park are from Korea, Singh is a Punjabi Sikh man, and Allen Chen is from Taiwan. Wu is a teaching assistant, and the university pays him a teaching stipend. It’s not much, but he feels rich for the first time in his life. Most of what he doesn’t spend on rent and food he sends home to his family.

Ming-Chen Wu’s class calls him “Chinaman,” but most of them don’t seem to have any ill will toward him. People use all kinds of slurs to describe Wu’s housemates. “Chinaman” seems the least offensive to Young Wu—after all, it’s “literally a descriptor”—but it also reduces him to something generic. In general, the university faculty treat him with respect, though very few are outwardly friendly. People in town are either polite or hateful.

When Ming-Chen Wu comes home one day, his housemates tell him that Allen is in the hospital—someone beat him up and told him, “This is for Pearl Harbor.” Nakamoto says the people should’ve beat him up, not Allen. But that’s the problem: to people in town, they’re all the same. The incident should’ve brought the housemates together, but instead they find it pointless to commiserate over the names people call them—regardless, they know they’ll only ever be “Asian Man.”

After graduation, Ming-Chen Wu falls out of contact with everyone but Allen. They write letters, and Wu takes pleasure in hearing about Allen’s academic success. He gets his doctorate from MIT, is granted a patent, raises a family, and becomes quite wealthy. But decades later, he continues to suffer headaches from the beating, and nobody ever catches the men who beat him up. When he’s 58, he overdoses on sleeping pills and dies in his sleep.

A couple years after Allen’s death, his daughter Christine graduates with honors from Stanford. She gives a speech in which she thanks her mother and her father. A couple weeks later, someone in a car yells at her to “go back where she came from” and throws a half-full beer bottle at her head. She goes to the emergency room and gets stitches. But like her father before her, she has headaches for the rest of her life.

Ming-Chen Wu graduates with a nearly perfect grade point average and goes to UCLA to receive his doctorate. But his mother falls ill before he can finish, and so he drops out to care for her. Meanwhile, he can’t find work in his field despite his high grades. Later, a recruiter tells him this is because of his accent. When Wu claims he doesn’t have an accent, the recruiter tells him that his not having an Asian accent is actually the problem. So Wu learns to speak in an Asian accent and uses it to get a job as Young Asian Man, washing dishes at the Fortune Palace restaurant in Chinatown. 

EXT. DOROTHY’S BACKSTORY. Dorothy moves to Chinatown from Ohio. She brings her meager belongings and “a memory of her mother dying in her bed at home, surrounded by her 10 children, wondering aloud why, why.” She also brings incense and a shrine to her “minor god of immigration and prosperity in real estate transactions.” When she prays to this god, she closes her eyes and imagines the home and family she hopes to have someday. Despite her prayers, nobody will sell Dorothy and Ming-Chen Wu a house because of their skin color. Of course, they wouldn’t have the money to buy one anyway. Instead, they rent a room in Chinatown, which they can afford on their double income as Young Asian Man and Pretty Asian Hostess. They don’t have much, but they can eat meat once a week and are better off than others who live in the building.

Ming-Chen Wu works in back while Dorothy works up front. Men grope her and “imagine a world where they could keep her” as “their little China doll.” Wu watches this but doesn’t say anything—it’s Pretty Asian Hostess’s income that pays their bills, after all. She’s “almost a star” at Golden Palace and “dies” often, sometimes because of opium, other times as a “revenge killing.” Sometimes she cries before she dies, and afterward they return to their room upstairs, clean up, and eat dinner together.

On their days off, Dorothy and Ming-Chen Wu wander around Chinatown but don’t venture beyond its confines. Dorothy dresses in bell bottoms and floral prints and almost passes as an American woman. People rarely call her “chink.” But sometimes people can’t understand her accent. It’s harder for Young Wu to blend in—his long, slim build doesn’t quite fit into his clothes. They split a Coke, just like Dorothy would do with all her siblings back home. Young Wu turns to Dorothy one day, an intense look on his face, and tells her they’re going to get out someday. That’s when they she falls in love with him. 

Ming-Chen Wu and Dorothy debate the origins of their romance. Dorothy argues that Chinatown isn’t a place for love—it’s where police find dead bodies. Wu agrees but says they have to make do with what they have. They marry in the restaurant. That night, two rock crabs and a lobster are sent back to the kitchen, and they eat them with noodles. Someone gets bottles of Tsingtao, and everyone shares them. For a moment, they forget where they are. But then the boss returns to the kitchen and tells them to get back to work, and they have to “put their Asian costumes back on.”

GENERIC ASIAN KID. Baby Willis is born: “A little tiny Kung Fu Boy,” and suddenly his parents’ fragmented backgrounds—all the bit parts they’ve had to accept—seem to make sense. Ming-Chen Wu and Dorothy feel “less alone in the world,” their days are full of happy memories, and their lives “take some kind of shape[.]”

GENERIC ASIAN FAMILY. Willis, Ming-Chen Wu, and Dorothy try their hardest to be a typical American family. They dress the part and get rid of their accents. They tell Willis to speak English at home and work constantly. Wu practices his Kung Fu skills and gets the part of Sifu, the kung fu master. They celebrate with meat and a bottle of coke, and the family plans to move from the SRO. But then Wu realizes that even with this new job and the larger paycheck, he’s still the person he was all along: “Fu Manchu. Yellow Man.” In a flash, Dorothy’s husband is gone, replaced by the person “they made him.” He’s distant and focuses only on work. He’s “just a role,” having been “replaced by archetypes.” 

Sifu comes and goes at odd hours. He comes home late and wakes up Willis and Dorothy to rant about his plans to make a better life for his son. And then even this stops. Sifu starts “drinking, breaking props.” He’s cast in “epics” and becomes a lesser Bruce Lee. In short, Willis’s “dad is no longer [his] dad.”

Willis hears his parents arguing late at night. Ming-Chen Wu says, “They’ve trapped us.” But Dorothy wonders if she and Wu have actually “trapped” themselves. She still thinks they can make a better life. As young Willis listens, he dreams that one day he’ll “get out.”

EXT. THE ALLEY BEHIND THE RESTAURANT—PRESENT DAY. Willis stands outside smoking a cigarette, though it just makes him remember that he hates smoking. He looks up at a billboard for Black and White, Miles Turner and Sarah Green’s large faces staring down at him, “the light hit[ting] their faces just right.” Their features seem too perfect to be real. Seeing them reminds Willis that he’s Asian.

Just then, the door opens: it’s Karen Lee. She asks Willis how “death” is treating him. At first, Willis isn’t even sure she’s talking to him—women “with options” often don’t bother with Generic Asian Men. She asks where he’s from, and he says Chinatown. Willis guesses that she went to a liberal arts college and knows how to ride a horse and use chopsticks. She also probably studied abroad and got good grades. Karen laughs—he’s mostly right. Still, she admits, she worries that things won’t work out for her. Willis assures her that they will: “Pretty Girl is never not going to be in demand.” Karen reminds him that she’s “not White,” but he says she practically is.  

Willis asks about Karen’s background, and she tells him. When he observes that she’s a quarter Taiwanese, she takes issue with him “quantify[ing] it that way.” He tells her he thought maybe she was Latina or from Hawaii or something. He calls her a “chameleon,” noting her ability to blend into any situation. Karen agrees, wryly noting that she’s “objectified by men of all races.” She thinks it would “be easier to be one thing.” Willis disagrees, explaining how he has to fake an accent because otherwise nobody knows what to make of him. He’s just an Asian Man—“No one likes us,” he says. Karen says that she likes him, and Willis can’t believe it: Generic Asian Man never gets a love story. 

LOVE STORY. Willis plays the role of Delivery Guy, and Karen is a tourist. BEGIN ROMANTIC MONTAGE. Willis is still coming to grips with the fact that Karen likes and wants to date him. She suggests they start by getting coffee together. They do so, and Willis asks her what he thinks are standard questions. Karen says it sounds like he’s interviewing someone for a job, then she laughs. It feels good to Willis to make her laugh. The script describes a montage of date scenes: Willis and Karen sharing a bowl of tsuabing shaved ice in Chinatown, each learning about the other’s life, eventually kissing.

Karen wants to meet Old Asian Woman. Willis is nervous and explains to Karen that his mother can be difficult, but Karen insists. Eventually they do meet, and Old Asian Woman says little but smiles at Karen. They speak in Taiwanese, and Karen says something that makes Willis’s mom laugh. Willis is totally confused: things are supposed to “fall apart,” but now the exact opposite is happening. Then Willis “stop[s] being dead,” and the romantic montage comes to a close.

BLACK AND WHITE. POST-DEATH NOTICE OF REINSTATEMENT. Willis receives word from “central casting” that his mandatory 45-day period of silence is over, and now he can “re-enter[] the system.” But before he does that, the notice states, he must give up “all status or other accumulated benefits” he earned pre-death, and he can’t continue any of his previous roles. 

Willis shares this good news with Karen; now that he can work again, they can plan in earnest for their future. Willis rejoins the workforce and once more climbs the ladder of success, starting at Generic Asian Man Number Three and climbing through the ranks, eventually becoming a guest star once more. Karen’s career flourishes—there are just more roles available to her. Eventually, they start seeing less and less of each other.

One day, the director speaks with Willis and tells him he’ll be Kung Fu Guy any day now. Willis comes home to share the news with Karen, but she’s got news of her own: they’re going to have a baby. Willis is happy but concerned: he’s doing well as Special Guest Star these days, but he’s not making enough money to support a family. Karen accuses him of “ruining the moment.” Willis feels awful, realizing that she’s right. Not long after, he scrounges together some money to buy Karen a ring, and then he proposes to her. She says yes. 

Time passes, and eventually Willis and Karen become parents to a daughter they name Phoebe. Now it’s Karen and Willis and Phoebe, all living together in the SRO. Willis knows they can’t stay there—it’s no place to raise a child—and resolves to get out. He works hard and takes a role on “the cop show” playing “Ethnic Recurring.” The pay is good, and he saves up. He knows he’s on the verge of something great, but of course, he’s been here before.  

One day, Karen gives Willis more big news: she’s been given her own show. It’s about a young mother, and there’s a part for Willis on the show, too. This means they can move out of the SRO and start a new life, finally. Willis smiles an uneasy smile; he tells Karen it’s great news but that he’s finally close to making it big himself.

Karen is skeptical. She believes in Willis, but she just doesn’t think “they” are ever going to give him the Kung Fu Guy role: so far, it’s just empty promise after empty promise. She tells Willis she doesn’t want him “to be trapped” like his father. This offends Willis. He tells Karen he wants to provide for his family. Karen says she can provide for them. Willis tells her it’s more than this. He wants to be Kung Fu Guy: it’s “the dream.” Karen thinks Willis should want more out of life, but Willis disagrees. He suggests they keep a long-distance relationship while he stays in Chinatown and Karen moves to the suburbs to do her show, but Karen says that’s not an option when there’s a kid involved. Still, they compromise: Karen will leave, but she’ll give Willis a couple months to stay behind to try to make his dream come true.

But months pass, and then a year has passed. Just when Willis is starting to think that Karen was right after all, he gets a call from the director with the news he’s been waiting for: he’s Kung Fu Guy. But it doesn’t feel as good as he thought it would—not with no Karen here to share his news with. He realizes that Karen was right after all: he is trapped. He’s “still in a show that doesn’t have a role for [him].” 

INT. GOLDEN PALACE CHINESE RESTAURANT. Willis is standing beside a table piled high with food, but he can’t eat any of it. He realizes what a mistake he’s made: as always, he’s “playing a part that was handed to [him], written for Asian Man.” He sneaks out through the back door. 

EXT. ALLEY. Willis looks up at the billboard for Black and White. He knows he has to get out. He sees Green and Turner’s car parked nearby. He goes to it, breaks in, hotwires it, and then drives off. Sirens blast behind him, but he drives fast and loses them.