Willis must wait forty-five days before he can return to Black and White, the designated amount of time it is believed to take for audiences to forget an actor’s face. He reflects, however, that dying on screen is not always such a bad thing. Some of his fondest childhood memories are of when the character his mother was playing died, as it meant she got to spend more time with him for the next forty-five days.

Willis’s mother—who calls herself Dorothy—was born in Taipei, the eighth out of ten siblings. She dreamed of becoming a film actress and eventually immigrated to the United States in pursuit of this goal. She started out working as a nurse’s assistant while living with her older sister Angela in Alabama. However, Angela was resentful of her younger sister’s attractiveness and eventually kicked her out, sending her to Ohio to live with another sister. Years later, Angela’s husband contacts Dorothy, informing her of Angela’s decline in health. Dorothy dutifully cares for her sister for the next year until Angela eventually passes away.

A young Dorothy recounts the story of how she came to the United States to Ming-Chen Wu, Willis’s father. They met while working at the restaurant that would later become the Golden Palace, Dorothy as a hostess and Ming-Chen Wu as a busboy. She asks him about his backstory, which he shares.

Ming-Chen Wu was born in Taiwan. In 1947, when he was seven years old, the Kuomintang, or ruling Nationalist Party, began a violent campaign against anti-government protestors, resulting in the deaths of thousands of civilians. As his family attempted to flee from the violence, Kuomintang soldiers shot Ming-Chen Wu’s father and stole the deed to their home, leaving the remaining members of the Wu family homeless and destitute.

Years later, Ming-Chen Wu immigrated to the United States as a graduate student. He moved into a house in Mississippi with five other graduate students. One man was Japanese, two were Korean, and another was Punjabi Sikh. The final roommate was another Taiwanese man named Allen Chen. Regardless of their differing nationalities and ethnicities, Americans derogatorily referred to all of the young men as “Chinamen.” They shared a certain camaraderie at first, discussing the different slurs people yelled at them and remarking on their treatment by different members of the University campus.

One day, Ming-Chen Wu came home to the news that Allen Chen had been brutally assaulted. The assailants claimed that the assault was “revenge for Pearl Harbor.” Chen survived, but the attack was a reminder to all of the young Asian men in the house that mainstream white society still viewed all of them as an indistinct “other.” They gradually drifted apart.

Chen went on to become wealthy and successful, filing industrial patents worth millions of dollars, marrying a loving wife, and fathering two children. He continued to write letters to Wu about his life. However, despite all of his success, Chen never felt comfortable or at home in the United States again. He also suffered headaches as a result of the assault. At age fifty-eight, he died by suicide.

A few years later, Chen’s daughter graduated from Stanford University with a degree in physics. Two weeks after graduation, a man threw a beer bottle at her out of his truck window, telling her to “go back where she came from.” Like her father, she went on to become a highly successful scientist. Also like her father, she suffered headaches for the rest of her life as a result of the attack.

Ming-Chen Wu was accepted into a doctoral program...