Who else watched Interior Chinatown? The original book by Charles Yu is one of my favourite pieces of fiction about racist stereotyping and pigeonholing. It’s also one of those books where I was like, how are they ever gonna translate this to the screen?! I think the approach they took (no spoilers, but IMO it’s subtly yet also significantly different from the book) worked brilliantly, especially given the ending, and I still found it an immensely satisfying social satire and (painful) parody of Hollywood (and cop shows, and TV in general.)
In particular, the central allegory about how coming from certain backgrounds means your life feels like you’re stuck in someone else’s show, having to play by their ever-changing rules, based on their preconceptions of who you are, in a role chosen for you and from which you are not permitted to break out, with little control over your fate (omg that slamming door scene at the police precinct… I felt it in my soul!) remains as incisive as I found it in the book.
“He stopped playing his role,” a character says at one point, and oof, how many times have some of us known THAT particular sentiment. Also “the news makes reality” - ouch. So many weighty lines in amongst all the humour and Ronny Chieng’s glorious grumpy waiter scenes. I also really appreciated Diana Lin’s sidelined mother character, and Chloe Bennet’s racially ambiguous, job-changing Detective Lee (I could probably write a whole essay about that character and what she represented to me as a person of mixed heritage.)
This is the sort of show I could talk about all day because it addresses one of the least explored and most damaging aspects of racism: the restrictive boxes we’re placed it. Because that’s what racism is, at its heart: a system of control that divides people into categories and assigns them roles based on those categories, roles from which they are not permitted to escape.
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