Inner Chinatown: Charles Yu on the pressure of bringing his book to the screen

Charles Yu won acclaim for his novel satirizing Hollywood clichés. Four years later, with the new mini-series adaptation of Inner Chinatownhe’s the one who writes the scripts.

Four years ago, Charles Yu published Inner Chinatowna satire of Hollywood stereotypes and representation anxiety. Today, he is the one responsible for writing the scripts, as showrunner of the new television series based on the novel.

It’s a funny situation, he admitted during our interview this month. “It’s something I’ve struggled with, to be honest,” Yu said. “It’s not even necessarily about selling or not. It’s: how to tell the story in a way that stays true to the original impulse – while keeping up with the times, adapting it to a different platform, working within a large company like Hulu and Disneybut also have the resources? (All 10 episodes arrived on Hulu this week.)

The novel, which won the National Book Award in 2020, follows Willis Wu, an “oriental man of substance” whose greatest ambition is to become, like his father before him, a “Kung Fu Guy.” Willis works as an anonymous character in the Golden Palace restaurant – which is somehow both a real location and the setting for a detective series, Black and white – hoping for a chance at the spotlight, or just a line of dialogue of his own. Taking inspiration from the format of a teleplay, the story becomes a surreal tour of racial clichés. It functions, on the surface, as a simple piece of cultural criticism. But beneath that lies a melancholic exploration of how the desire for recognition – the dream of one day playing “the perfect role” – can flatten our aspirations for our lives.

Inner Chinatown was difficult for Yu to write, so much so that he almost abandoned it altogether. At this point in his career, he felt blocked by the need to produce something that “felt more serious and heavier,” he said, “and every time I put that serious writer hatIt squeezes my head, and no thoughts come out.”