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This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is the name of the television show the book focuses on?

2. What causes Turner to lecture the protagonist about the system?

3. What are the majority of the protagonist's earliest memories of his mother centered around?

4. What is "White Lady Cop's" name?

5. How often does the protagonist visit his father?

Short Essay Questions

1. When the protagonist finally steps into the spotlight, what is his first line, and what does it signify?

2. How does the Emperor feel about the commercial he was in, and how does the reader know this?

3. Explain what thematic ideas are communicated in the description from page 37, "BLACK AND WHITE. Two cops, one of each race....they drive around in a black-and-white police car, even through they're detectives."

4. What are the protagonist's earliest memories of his father?

5. Explain the context of the "Wong guy" pun and how the actors react to it in "ACT II: INT. GOLDEN PALACE."

6. What are the emotional complexities of the memories attached to the protagonist's mother's scars?

7. How does Young Fong pack his father's things, and why is this so significant to the protagonist?

8. What language does the protagonist speak to his father in the restaurant, and how does it reveal one source of the gap between them?

9. Why did the protagonist's father and Older Brother have a falling out, and what does the detectives' reaction demonstrate about them?

10. What causes the protagonist to realize that his father is suffering from dementia, and how does he respond?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

Write an essay in which you explore the text's mixed emotional responses to Older Brother. What emotions does he elicit from Willis's perspective and from the other residents of Chinatown? Which emotions are directly expressed, and which are implied? How would you explain the conflicting responses he generates? Be sure to support your claims with textual evidence.

Essay Topic 2

Write an essay in which you weigh the relative impacts that self-stereotyping and stereotyping by others have on the protagonist of Interior Chinatown. Does he have beliefs about himself or other Asian Americans that are derived from stereotypes rather than from individual personality and abilities? Think about the conflicts he faces, the choices he makes, and his beliefs about himself as you create and defend an argument about how much weight each form of stereotyping has on him. Be sure to use textual evidence to support your claims.

Essay Topic 3

Write an essay that examines how Interior Chinatown's status as metafiction as well as its use of pastiche, and hyperreality and simulacra relate to the thematic motif of performance versus authenticity. Be sure to support your ideas with evidence from the text and to cite any outside references in MLA format.

(see the answer keys)

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