This book was written in screenplay format, which was a daring and brilliant approach that worked most of the time. In Hollywood, Asian men can aspire to a very limited number of roles: never the lead, of course, but certainly the Generic Asian Man, and for the select few, the only possible pinnacle: the Kung Fu Man. Protagonist Willis Wu spends his days as Generic Asian Man, flitting around the edges of a long-running police procedural, hoping for his lucky break. I get why the book was structured as a screenplay; there are a limited number of ways to be acceptably Asian in American society, and it’s reflected in (maybe even because of) how rigidly those roles are defined in Hollywood. Therefore, naturally Willis’s whole life is pretty much a screenplay and the reader is purposefully blinded to whether, at any given moment, Willis is playing his role in the show, or his role in society at large (which is always a bit part anyway, amirite?). The book is full of pointed critique, both at Western society for pigeonholing Asians through institutional and individual racism, and for the Asians who twist themselves into knots fitting into those pigeonholes. A lot of it rang super true to me, striking to the heart of my experience as a 2nd gen ABC, but the screenplay presentation felt like it blunted some of the impact.