Willis Wu is a young Asian American living in Los Angeles. Like his parents and most people in his Chinatown neighborhood, he’s an actor. The novel is more like a film script than a free-flowing narrative. Throughout, it designates each character and location. The character dialog has tags to identify the role that each person plays in the scene, which means that the same person has different roles assignments in different chapter scenes. Likewise, the beginning of each scene identifies its location. For example, the location tag “INT. GOLDEN PALACE” means that the scene is the interior of a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Palace. While Willis is the storyteller, he refers to himself from a second-person point of view in keeping with the screenplay template of his story.

Willis begins his tale by wryly describing the types of roles available to Asian people. They tend to be cast as extras with limited speaking lines. His mother and father graduated from young roles to generic roles as Old Asian Woman and Old Asian Man. Every male Asian actor aspires to be a character known as Kung Fu Guy.