Interior Chinatown Ending Explained (2025)

Interior Chinatown explores themes of identity and representation through Willis Wu, but what happens to him at the end of the series?

Spoilers ahead!

Interior Chinatown is an American television series created by Charles Yu. It is based on Yu’s book of the same name, which tells the story of Willis Wu [Jimmy O. Yang], a waiter/character actor who is put into the spotlight after witnessing a crime and meeting Detective Lee [Chloe Bennet].

What is the show about?

Willis goes from a side character to a main character, a not-so-subtle metaphor for fame and success in the tv industry. In this aspect of the series, the show is satirising the way the American film and television industry treats Asian actors, casting them as “Chinatown experts” or “kung fu guys”, as the show points out. The tropes of Asian-American characters are plentiful and range from the ‘magical Asian’ to the ‘nerdy Asian’. For examples of these tropes, consider Pai-Mei from Kill Bill and Data from The Goonies.

A study funded by Amazon Studios and the UTA Foundation looked a database of the highest-grossing films from each year from 2007 to 2009 and representation of Asian, Asian American, and Pacific Islander characters. The study found that 67% of API roles represented characters that were either silenced, stereotyped, tokenised, isolated, sidekicks, or villains. The study also found that API characters are most likely to be young, male, straight, and able-bodied. Considering the influence of media in the US and its rate of consumption, the consequence of typecasting Asian-Americans results in the promulgation of harmful stereotypes within the social fabric.

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The characterisation of Chinatown

Because Chinatown plays such a large role in this series we can consider it to be its own character. In film and television, Chinatowns are found within countless cities and are often used to segue tired tropes into a story. If you want your big American action film to include organised crime, martial arts, drug dens, and money laundering, why not include a Chinatown you can fill with shady establishments? As a result, movie Chinatowns and real-life Chinatowns are then conflated into some kind of magical portal into John Carpenter’s mind.

Within the narrative of Interior Chinatown, all these ideas are being thrust upon the location by an external force. The gang known as the Painted Faces fits the stereotypical narrative. As does the Golden Palace restaurant with its dubious back office. Therefore, the character of Chinatown is treated much like a character who lives in Chinatown – existing only to have tropes pushed upon them to serve the wider narrative. This is a simple allegory for the way the roles are shaped by an external force, in this case the production industry.

In the final episode, we discover that the Painted Faces are actually a trio who are aware the inhabitants of Chinatown are being controlled. This subverts the fictional expectation in the procedural that the ‘gang’ is behind all the crime in the area, but fits squarely into the wider narrative of a “La Résistance” situation.

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What about the detectives?

HBWC airs a crime procedural show called Black and White which is a spoof of cop shows from the 90s. The show within a show features to detectives, Turner, a black man, and Green, a white woman. The show also features Lana, who is mixed race. She doesn’t operate fully within the show, suggesting that because she is half-Chinese, she is somehow more acceptable to the audience, compared to a character like Jonathon who had a very distinct stereotype of play. It is also worth noting that of the detectives, Turner becomes sceptical of his life before his white counterpart Green.

The name of the procedural, Black and White, obviously references the Hei Bai Wuchang, as described in the series. This translates to Black and White Impermanence, the two deities that escort the dead to the underworld. Their task is to catch lost souls of the wicked and bring them to justice in the underworld. Clearly, these roles are mimicked by Turner and Green. There are many instances where the series refers to terms like hell and purgatory, however it is never explicit in whether the setting is a literal underworld environment or simply comparable to one. In my opinion, the setting relating to the underworld is purely metaphorical and serves only as an indictment of the film and television industry.

There is another element to the reference of Black and White however, and that is evidenced by the character’s clothing. You may have noticed that at the start of the final episode, Willis was wearing black in contrast to Lee’s white uniform of the golden palace, and Fatty was wearing a two-tone black and white suit. I think this most likely represents a sense of duality in several respects; the longing for fame but disliking the attention and the way the characters appear in Black and White contrasted against the way they appear in Interior Chinatown.

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What is real?

The series is very meta and therefore plays around with the idea that the audience is involved. There is the audience we see in the show, the characters who consume the content of HBWC, and the other audience, we the viewers. Willis’s older brother, Jonathon, for example, exists in two separate identities. There is the version of him we see on Black and White, and the version we see in Willis’s world. The version we see of Jonathon at the end of the series, at the arcade machine, has seemingly escaped and been trapped simultaneously. The series does not reveal any more information, so we can only make an assumption on what has happened here. This does, however, mimic the ending whereby Willis has also escaped and been trapped, appearing in a modern series for a new audience.

This means time is not relevant to the characters within the series. Willis was in the 1990s before moving into what looks to be current day. Procedural shows in the style of Black and White were more popular in the nineties, and the new series, Standards and Practices, looks to be more of a series catered to audiences of the 2010s onwards. We are also shown that Willis has just finished typing the screenplay of Interior Chinatown. Note, the original text is written in the style of a screenplay so this could demonstrate an allusion to showrunner and author Charles Yu. Standards and practices relates to the section of a television network responsible for moral and ethical implications of content aired in the US. It is also mentioned prior that Hulu (the series’ original network) exists within Interior Chinatown. Hulu was launched in 2007, many years after the setting of the show, which would therefore mean that nothing about the series was ever true, it was always an artificial environment.

So, what does it all mean?

Interior Chinatown is open to interpretation because it’s narrative is very unreliable. My interpretation is that the series doesn’t actually contain any actual storyline that runs throughout, but rather, it is all artificial. You could suggest that the story existed within Willis’s screenplay, however this is disproved by the framing of the new show, such as with the textual context clues like the title card. The existence of the show within a show is not created by magic, such as in WandaVision, or a hidden camera crew, like in The Truman Show. Instead, the only information we have to glean is that at present, the end of season one, everything seen so far is purely an allegory for the industry.

Interior Chinatown Ending Explained (2025)
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