Interior Chinatown

Willis sees his entire life as the fulfillment of roles that other people assign to him. As a result, his narrative’s structure is unusual. He tells his story as a series of scenes from a screenplay. Not only do many of the chapters have titles that correspond to his assigned film roles, but he talks about his family as if they were little more than the film roles they play. He often refers to his father as Sifu (kung fu master) or Old Asian Man—and to his mother as Old Asian Woman.

The book doesn’t follow the usual conventions of a novel in which two characters have a dialog and one character’s quoted line is followed by another’s quoted response. Willis tags each speaker’s lines with the role they’re playing, as if they’re running lines from a film script. In addition, Willis relates the backstories of his parents as if from a 1950s film, with each character speaking the lines one might associate with the romantic leads in a movie.

Willis deviates from this convention on several occasions. He goes off-script while shooting Black and White to indulge in snide comments to Turner and also occasionally breaks into an internal