![]() ![]() “But in some of the research for the book, I realized that Chinatown has this dual function where it would have to play itself for Hollywood.” “I didn’t spend a lot of time there even though I grew up in L.A.,” Yu said. I pointed out that we were only 15 minutes or so from L.A.’s Chinatown, which largely owes its cinematic fame to Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown,” a movie about the white people of Los Angeles. The closest analogy I could come to is something like a cartoon, where the rules of physics or logic don’t always apply and you can walk from one room to another plane of existence, like sort of a Coyote and Roadrunner or Bugs Bunny thing.” “It exists in a mental space,” he said, “a kind of collective imagination for Asian Americans who grew up in my generation, feeling like you don’t exist fully inside of America. Yu’s Chinatown is an amalgam, based less on any geographical place than on a state of being. The story is set in a fictional Chinatown SRO where protagonist Willis Wu lives with his family and neighbors, all of them working at Golden Palace, a Chinese restaurant/television set on the ground floor. ![]()
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