Willis Wu is an extra on a police procedural. While he waits tables at his uncle’s restaurant in the background, Willis fantasizes about becoming a hero. After he witnesses a crime, Willis must solve mysteries he didn’t know existed in Chinatown, thrusting him into the spotlight and giving him a chance to become a main character of his own.

This is “Interior Chinatown,” a satirical, biting novel-turned-television-show about the stereotypes Asian actors are routinely cast as in Hollywood. Writer Charles Yu, who became the showrunner for the Hulu series of the same name, cleverly captures the psychology of someone pushed to the margins.

Ray Stark Family Theatre was abuzz with laughter and thoughtful conversation Monday night as Yu graced the stage to talk about “Interior Chinatown” with professor Mary McNamara during her television symposium class, which invites prominent television creators to discuss their creative journey and work.

Yu, a second-generation American, recalled how his experiences growing up as part of a “bridge generation” and watching his parents perform different roles after they immigrated helped him develop the emotional heart of “Interior Chinatown.”

“My dad had to put on a brave face and go to the workplace where everybody saw him as a foreigner with an accent. My mom had to do the same thing, and at home, ‘perform parent’ to us,” Yu said. “In a lot of ways, having that vantage point goes to some of the other questions about, ‘How do you keep the personal aspects of what you’re writing?’”

​​Yu described his experience starting college pre-med, then working as a lawyer for over 13 years before coming out with “Interior Chinatown.” Throughout the years, he never stopped creating, finding his voice through fiction.

“Your path might be long and winding and take you to places that you may not expect,” Yu said. “I worked jobs that I hated. I worked jobs that I wasn’t very good at, even before being a lawyer. That’s what I write about still — I write about work in a lot of ways. I write about family … but I think in a lot of ways [work has] sustained me because I never wrote for money.”

While some audience members attended the screening for McNamara’s class, others were drawn to Yu’s work. Raghav Sinha, a freshman majoring in legal studies, first read “Interior Chinatown” in high school, where it stood out from the other books he read in his English classroom.

“When I actually picked up this one, I couldn’t put it down. I ended up reading ahead of the class,” Sinha said. “I was also intrigued at how he put the characters together and really made it seem unpredictable. Every page I turned, I was surprised.”

Yu wrote the novel over a period of seven years, opening up about struggling with writer’s block. “Interior Chinatown” and Yu’s sharp writing inspired Sinha to write, too.

“​​When I heard him say that [writing slowly] was what he struggled with, I changed my whole view on it, because I feel like good books take a long time, and I think part of it is getting past the initial fear of not being able to kind of commit to it.”

After publishing the novel in 2020, Yu began working on the pilot for the show and eventually became the sole showrunner for the Hulu series. One facet of adapting he struggled with was creating multiple visual tones for the show to differentiate the different worlds of “Interior Chinatown” — the police procedural world and Willis’ world.

“There’s two different lighting schemes. There’s two different sets of colors and cinematography, but that scheme actually starts to get blurry quite fast,” Yu said. “Even by episode three, you’re like, ‘Which one am I in now?’ Even the characters are like, ‘Which one am I in now?’”

While the detectives are the main characters of the show-within-the-show, “Interior Chinatown” main character Willis exists on the margins of the police procedural.

“He’s kind of dancing around the outside of the story,” Yu said. “Willis’ life is supposed to be sort of bit parts in the pilot, so it does feel like the rhythm is off. This doesn’t feel like a TV show that’s flowing from scene to scene because his life isn’t like that yet. He hasn’t entered the narrative yet.”

Yu noted that as a novelist, tone is about word choice; however, bringing “Interior Chinatown” to the screen meant he needed to collaborate with the crew to develop the style.

“As a prose writer, I work in words. I work in images that nobody has to shoot,” Yu said. “Visual storytelling is its own thing completely, and I’m not always going to have the answers … so the exercise becomes, how do we blend all of these creative talents into something that feels cohesive still?” 

Yu and executive producer Taika Waititi both had a hand in casting, sitting in on virtual callbacks during the pandemic. Comedian and actor Ronny Chieng, who plays Fatty Choi in the series, was one of the first people cast, giving Yu room to write toward Chieng’s comic persona.

“It almost feels like we’re ripping off his stand up, in a way,” Yu said. “Some of the best lines, if I can say, in the season are just him. He wrote them, not the writers … that’s kind of what you hope for, right? That someone’s going to do better than you did on the page.” 

Kariena Panpaliya, a sophomore majoring in computer science games, loved watching the pilot Monday night, noting how impressed she was with the cinematography and fourth-wall breaks. 

“The humor was so unexpected and so subtle, but we were all just laughing so much,” Panpaliya said.

Yu closed out the talk thanking McNamara and the audience for their thoughtful questions.

“It is a labor of love, but it’s also years of life, and you pour your heart into it. You don’t know how many people are watching it or what’s happening in someone’s house, but to actually talk to people who want to make things themselves, I think, is the most inspiring for me.”