A strange irony lies at the heart of Hulu’s Interior Chinatown. Its protagonist is Willis Wu (Jimmy O. Yang), an unassuming waiter who’s always dreamt of being the hero but despairs of forever being relegated to, as he sighs, “a background character in someone else’s story.” Ostensibly, this very show represents his chance to change that — to take control of his own narrative, to seize his own destiny, to carve out his own role in a world all too eager to shove him into a series of stereotypical boxes.
But the only way that Interior Chinatown can apparently think to achieve that is by shoving him into yet another box, this time as an avatar for someone else’s cultural analysis. It’s a bigger box, to be sure, with more room for experimentation and cheeky self-awareness. But it’s a box all the same, prioritizing the tidy confines of its
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