Charles Yu’s novel “Interior Chinatown” is about stories. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell about others. Stories where only certain people get to be the main characters while others, like the protagonist Willis Wu, are relegated to playing bit parts.
Yu structured the novel in the format of a screenplay. The title follows the scriptwriting convention of scene headings, which specify where the action is taking place (for example, INT. UNMARKED POLICE CAR). Scene headings are peppered throughout the book, and in Hulu’s series adaptation, which premiered on Tuesday, the settings are just as essential, and more tangible, to the overall concept.
“Willis has this world that he lives in, this Chinatown which is both physical and psychological,” said Yu, the show’s creator and showrunner, in a video interview. “When you write a book, you get to use the reader as your ultimate collaborator. You’re leveraging off someone else’s imagination.”
“You can’t really film that, unfortunately,” he added.
So in constructing the sets of the show, he said, “it was like, how do you build a place that feels real and lived in — and at the same time can feel subjective and evocative of the Chinatown that comes from the novel, which is an interior Chinatown that functions as a place where people work and live but also as a mental space?”
Here’s a look at four of the key settings in “Interior Chinatown” and how they bring the story to three-dimensional life.
Int. Golden Palace Restaurant
In many ways, the restaurant is the central location for the story. It’s where Willis (played by Jimmy O. Yang) and his best friend, Fatty Choy (Ronny Chieng), work as waiters, serving Chinatown locals and tourists. Willis spends much of his time gazing out at the wider world or watching television and wondering when a more exciting life will arrive. While he feels safe in Chinatown, he also feels trapped.
To recreate an authentic Chinese restaurant — what Yu thinks of as “an iconic American place” — the production designer Kate Bunch and the director of photography Mike Berlucchi traveled to San Francisco’s Chinatown to research and photograph details like door handles, broken tiles, window displays and ornate woodwork like the one inside the dining room. Swinging doors with porthole windows function as a dividing line between a front stage, where Willis and Fatty serve their customers, and a back stage, where they can just be regular guys playing video games, drinking beer or making other dreams and plans.
“The Chinese restaurant in a lot of ways has functioned as a safe, approachable but enticing way in for a lot of people outside of the Chinatown community or ethnic enclave,” Yu said. “For people within it, it feels like an anchor and an identity, limiting or defining.”
Int. Lily Wu’s Room
Willis’s mother, Lily (Diana Lin), lives above the restaurant in a tiny, overstuffed apartment that serves as the emotional heart of the story. It is a single-room occupancy unit Lily once shared with her husband (Tzi Ma) and Willis, and the decades of life are reflected by the dense accumulation of stuff filling every available space, from floor to ceiling.
“She takes pride in the space she has,” Bunch said in a video interview. “At some point she put up wallpaper to make it her own, to make it pretty. It’s organized but it’s cluttered. Her whole family lived in this room, so there are a lot of memories and a lot of layers of her life.”
Lily’s room embodies a monologue delivered by Willis in the book, in which he describes Asian homes: “Our houses smell the same way, have the same embarrassing piles of clutter, with random-ass Asian [expletive] mixed in with plastic toys and free crap and a mishmash of furniture and decor.” It was important to the show’s creators to evoke that authenticity onscreen.
Int. Police Station
“Interior Chinatown” includes a show within the show, a police procedural called “Black & White.” It stars a white woman named Detective Green and a Black man named Detective Turner as partners.
Willis loves the two characters and wishes that he could be as cool or that his life could be as consequential. As he travels increasingly outside Chinatown, Willis manages to trick his way onto the set of the show, a world he always wanted to be part of, and carve out more physical space for himself.
“You see a lot more negative space around Green and Turner,” Yu said. “Their frames are cleaner, so they are the heroes. It’s about them. With Willis, it’s about being more at the margins.”
The starkness of the precinct contrasts with the teeming Chinatown building where Willis spends most of his time, and the details are meant to convey a 1990s procedural. “The technology, phones, graphics on the computer, pager and the soundtrack — all of it is supposed to feel like a ’90s cop show and is supposed to feel very cool to Willis,” Yu said.
Int. Underground
Mild spoiler alert: In the middle of the season, Willis makes a shocking discovery about his uncle, who is also his boss at the Golden Palace Restaurant. After he breaks into his uncle’s office to investigate matters, he must make a sudden escape, and he finds himself navigating a warren of underground tunnels below Chinatown.
The setting is inspired by the real-life Doyers Street tunnels in Manhattan’s Chinatown, a network that connected businesses. On the set, Bunch and her team created a maze of actual storefronts and drop ceilings, which echo back to scenes from earlier in the season, giving the moment of Willis’s escape a mysterious quality.
“It was like, what weird reality are we in?” Bunch said. “We needed to build enough real estate to have Willis keep running and running and not pass the same things, so you just feel like it’s endless.”
To Yu, the underground labyrinth symbolizes what he thinks Chinatown used to represent: “The exotic, dangerous, mysterious. There’s some seedy underworld.” The scene is meant to show the actual layers underneath Chinatown but also to depict Willis’s journey as he digs deeper into the secrets of his own home and family. Eventually he comes to question his own identity.
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