Interior Chinatown is a celebration of the importance of family. How is Willis’s experience and identity shaped by his family’s history? In what way do the flashbacks to his parents’ backgrounds deepen your understanding of their family dynamics?

Through Willis's prolonged sense of dislocation, the author explores the complex feelings of home for immigrant individuals in American culture. Since he was a child, Willis's home has been Interior Chinatown. As a young man, he lives in the same building where he grew up with his parents: the Chinatown SRO Apartments. While describing the space in Act II, Willis says that "In the long tradition of immigrants living above their place of work, the SRO sits on top of Golden Palace...so that when you're sleeping you are, in a way, still inside the restaurant. You never really leave Golden Palace, even in your dreams" (46, 47). In this affecting passage, Willis's narrative slows down, lingering on the sensory details of his surroundings. Yet his descriptions of the SRO are not entirely affectionate. Willis is bound to the place not by choice or emotional attachment, but by his lack of agency. As an Asian man making menial wages, Willis has no other option but to continue living in the building of his boyhood. Unable to sleep at night because of all the noise and activity above and below him, Willis says: "You're here, supposedly, in a new land full of opportunity, but somehow have gotten trapped in a pretend version of the old country" (58). Though Willis was born in the United States, his sense of home seems as illusory as his parents. He feels the SRO is an imitation of a distant home country to which he never actually belonged, with which he has never had a personal relationship.

In the passages surrounding the aforementioned moment, and later in Act IV, Willis leans into his parents' stories in order to understand his own. Through these flashbacks, the reader learns that both Willis's mother and father have also always struggled to locate and retain a sense of home. For Dorothy, after leaving Taiwan, she moved frequently throughout the States, "Home not being much of a safe haven. She'd stepped off the boat and into the home of her sister...a guest (she thought) whose chores and responsibilities quickly began to feel more like payment" (135). After meeting and marrying Ming-Chen, Dorothy began dreaming of creating a new home. Yet Ming-Chen also came from a similar background, his sense of home similarly distorted and undefined. After coming to America, Ming-Chen's struggles disallowed him to feel "at ease in the United States. Taiwan is not home anymore" (149). Through these accounts of his parents' experiences, Willis begins to reconcile himself with his own dislocated feelings. By the end of the novel, he begins to understand that while home is a created place, it is also a feeling of longing for acceptance and validation.