Though set in modern times, Interior Chinatown features extended flashbacks to Willis’s immigrant parents’ pasts, portraying their respective journeys to the U.S.—and their experiences after they arrived—in an unromanticized light, highlighting the hardships that many Asian immigrants have endured to make a life for themselves in the United States. Willis’s mother, Dorothy, grew up in Taipei, one of ten children. When she was a child, she attended a screening of an American film; as she watched the stars illuminated on the cinema screen, she imagined the new life that she’d have in the United States—one “full of romance, glamour.” But her reality as an immigrant couldn’t have been more different. Instead of investing in real estate and getting rich in the supposed land of opportunity, she worked as a nurse, caring for old white people who would alternatively grope and dehumanize her with racial epithets.
Meanwhile, Willis’s father, Ming-Chen Wu, grew up in Taiwan under militia rule. After witnessing Chinese Nationalist soldiers shoot his father through the back, Wu vowed to travel to America to honor his father’s memory. But like Dorothy, Wu’s dreams of a better future are a far cry from what his future actually holds. Wu eventually moves to Mississippi to attend graduate school. Though he receives a generous stipend that makes him feel rich for the first time in his life, locals call him and his fellow Asian housemates racial slurs. A group of men beat one of Wu’s housemates—a Taiwanese man named Allen—so brutally that he suffers headaches for the rest of his life. Though Allen achieves wealth and success in his field, he later dies by suicide. And though Wu himself earns top grades and is accepted in a prestigious doctoral program, he ultimately discovers that nobody wants to hire him because of his accent. As a result, he’s forced to accept the roles society offers him, washing dishes and busing tables to make ends meet. After Dorothy and Wu meet and get married, they still dream of one day saving up enough money to leave Chinatown and make a better life for themselves elsewhere, but it never happens.
In turn, Interior Chinatown juxtaposes its immigrant characters’ lofty dreams of opportunity and upward mobility—their belief in the mythic American Dream—with the bleak reality of their existence in America, which is largely characterized by poverty, discrimination, and hardship.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Immigration ThemeTracker
Immigration Quotes in Interior Chinatown
In the world of Black and White, everyone starts out as Generic Asian Man.
He’d played his role for so long he’d lost himself in it, before some separation that happened gradually over decades and then you waking one day to feel it, some distance that had crept in overnight. Some formal space you could no longer cross.
Even for our hero, there were limits to the dream of assimilation, to how far any of you could make your way into the world of Black and White.
Be more.
You’re here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country.
Maybe they make one of us Kung Fu Guy. Maybe a few good scenes. Maybe a poster, in the back, real small. And then what?
GREEN (turns to you) You speak English well.
GENERIC ASIAN MAN Thank you.
TURNER Really well. It’s almost like you don’t have an accent.
Shit. Right. You forgot to do the accent.
“I’m working with them now. This could be good.”
“Happy for you,” he says. He looks skeptical. Worried.
No. But you’re going along with it. Look where we are. Look what you made yourself into. Working your way up the system doesn’t mean you beat the system. It strengthens it. It’s what the system depends on.
Are you doing the right thing? Something about this feels wrong.
But this is Black and White. They let you have a part. You can’t stop now.
You look at your dad. He shifts his eyes away, and you know in that moment that he is disappointed. But he won’t ever say it. You’ll never talk about it again. He’s gone, slipped back into Old Asian Man. He’s not going to make the choice for you. It’s your role to play.
Who knows how they calculate these things but someone did and figured out the optimal amount of time. Optimal for them, of course, not for you. Not for anyone who needs to make a living as a Delivery Guy, or a Busboy, or an Inscrutable Background Oriental. Not optimal at all. It feels like an eternity and no matter how much you might need the cash, whatever your sob story, sick baby, hungry kid, Mom needs her medicine, casting won’t even touch you for the mandatory cooling-off period. Doesn’t matter to them. When you’re dead, you are nobody.
When she was dead, she got to be your mother.
But the one that Wu can never quite get over was the original epithet: Chinaman, the one that seems, in a way, the most harmless, being that in a sense it is literally just a descriptor. China. Man. And yet in that simplicity, in the breadth of its use, it encapsulates so much. This is what you are. Always will be, to me, to us. Not one of us. This other thing.
Your mother weeps, and dies. Weeps and dies. Weeps and doesn’t die. Just weeps. Because now, your father is no longer a person, no longer a human. Just some mystical Eastern force, some Wizened Chinaman. Her husband is gone, Wu is gone, even Young Asian Man is gone. They took him away from her. He is lost now, in his work, in who they made him. Distant. Cold, perfectionist. Inscrutable. No descriptors, anymore, no age or build, just a role, a name, a shell where he used to be. His features taken away and replaced by archetypes, even his face hollowing out.
This is how he became Sifu. This is how she lost her husband. How you lost your dad.
“Oh, boo hoo, I’m a poor helpless Asian Man. It’s so terrible being me.”
“I have to talk with an accent because no one can process what the hell to do with me. I’ve got the consciousness of a contemporary American. And the face of a Chinese farmer of five thousand years ago. Asian Man. It’s a fact. Look it up. No one likes us.”
“Not with that attitude they won’t. And by the way, I think I might like you. Maybe. A little.”
You survey the room: drawings, hair ties, notes to herself. Seemingly every species of stuffed animal or creature, real or imagined, lined up like a royal court along the walls on the floors. Her friends, her audience. Her off-screen voices. She seems both more resourceful and yet more childlike at the same time—how she’s invented a world, stylized, so that its roles and scenery, its characters and rules, its truths and dangers, all fit within one room. How small it is, and overstuffed, and ready for expansion. How bright it is, how messy. This whole place, the objects in it, all from her.
The words coming out of your mouth, you can feel it happening, how you’re softening, changing into a different person. You were a bit player in the world of Black and White, but here and now, in her world, you’re more. Not the star of the show, something better. The star’s dad. Somehow you were lucky enough to end up in her story.
“Hey,” Turner says. Off-script.
“I can’t do this anymore,” you say.
Turner smiles. “Yeah, man. I know.”
Maybe, if you’re lucky, she’ll teach you. If she can move freely between worlds, why can’t you?
