‘Interior Chinatown’ Review: Off the Shelf

“Interior Chinatown” was never going to be an easy adaptation. The novel’s success — which was considerable, including a National Book Award in 2020 — flowed from how seamlessly its author, Charles Yu, deployed the metafictional device at the book’s heart. His gimmick was simple enough in outline, but it was hard to see how it would work onscreen (even though it was, in part, about television).

The adaptation is now here, in a 10-part mini-series that premiered Tuesday on Hulu, and it was overseen by Yu, who is both a novelist and a TV writer; he served as showrunner and wrote the first and last episodes. To keep his concept alive, he has stretched and twisted it to the breaking point — the onscreen “Interior Chinatown” is recognizable as an expansion of the book, and at the same time a completely different story and experience.

It is an adroit and polished response to the different expectations of the screen-watching and book-reading audiences (and to a nearly seven-hour running time). It improves on the book in some ways, but in other, more obvious ways, it inherits the book’s problems. Overall, it reinforces the apparent difficulty of lifting Asian American characters out of the ghetto of good intentions and achingly familiar situations.

In his novel, Yu gave a spin to a typical story of Asian American anxiety — Willis Wu, the son of immigrant parents, works in a Chinese restaurant while seething over his invisibility in mainstream America — by combining it with a satirical take on a “Law & Order”-like TV crime drama, written in screenplay format. (The title puns on “interior” as a screenwriting term.) Wu is a bit player, Generic Asian Man, in both the TV show and in his “real” life, which exist on different fictional planes but are cleverly intermingled. They are suffused in each other with such thoroughness that Yu, and Wu, barely need to move between them; the story is often in both worlds at the same time.

Allegory is a tougher sell in the more literal world of the actual TV screen, however, and Yu has adjusted. The show takes the somewhat nebulous events of the book and, while still trafficking in plenty of flashy self-referential effects, presents a more conventional, linear plot with a jokey, sardonic style that replaces the book’s wistfulness. Most noticeably, the ethnic family drama has been condensed, while the cop-show component has grown to the point that it effectively takes over.

The story’s two worlds now exist on the same plane: The restaurant worker Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang) worms his way into the police department in order to investigate the death of his older brother, taking on Asian-accessible roles like tech guy and interrogation interpreter that the cops literally do not see.