![]() ![]() The racism Huang encounters in Florida is not underhanded, implicit or subtle, as it often is for the many Asians from the professional classes living in and around the coastal cities where the American educated elite reside. Though the picaresque book is written in Huang’s jaunty mash-up of hip-hop lingo and conspicuously learned references to American history and literature, it is also an extraordinarily raw account of an abused and bullied child who grows to inflict violence on others. The story Huang tells in his memoir is one of survival and struggle in a hostile environment - a prosperous neighborhood in Orlando. Then, he added, “we can get an axle and build a rice rocket.” If this can be the first wheel, maybe others can make three more.” “Culturally, we are in an ice age,” he said. He doesn’t want to purchase mainstream accessibility at the expense of the distinctiveness of his lived experiences, though he is aware of how acutely Asian-Americans hunger for any kind of cultural recognition. Huang feels that by adulterating the specificity of his childhood in the pursuit of universal appeal, the show was performing a kind of “reverse yellowface” - telling white American stories with Chinese faces. “And so I said, We can do this one more time! But network television wasn’t what I thought it was.” And I did it!” After a brief dalliance with the Cooking Channel, Huang started the Vice show, which at the time was called “Fresh Off the Boat.” “When had there been a television host with an identity like mine - a hip-hop Asian kid? I was the first! And the show was a huge success!” In 2013, he published a memoir, the story that Huang had always wanted to tell, and it became a national best seller. With Baohaus, for instance,” he said, referring to the basement hole-in-the-wall Taiwanese sandwich shop that took Huang to the forefront of a new generation of hip young New York chefs, “I had never worked in a New York City restaurant. “You have to remember how unlikely all of this was. By way of explanation, Huang reviewed for me the string of previous triumphs that induced him to overrate his ability to set his own terms in the world. He had, he admitted, been extremely naïve about the realities of network television. We were waiting for two young female marijuana dealers whom Huang would be interviewing for “Huang’s World,” the gonzo food and travel show he hosts for Vice. (Huang likes to give himself nicknames - Kim Jong Trill, the Rotten Banana, the Human Panda, the Chinkstronaut - all of which, like the name of his show, repurpose and reclaim slurs and stereotypes.) He was sitting on the back fender of a Vice Media van, in which a five-man crew was preparing its equipment to shoot. Huang, 32, was dressed in an acid-wash denim jacket and a black fur hat with its earflaps folded up, which lent his large, round baby face a not-at-all-coincidental resemblance to a certain East Asian dictator. “I thought that people in network television had their own conscience about things.” “I expected I could change things.” He told me that he thought his story was powerful enough for ABC to allow him to tell it his way. Huang chose to sign with ABC in deference to the residual power of network television to alter mass perceptions about race, and he had hoped to portray the Asian-immigrant experience without equivocation or compromise. “Fresh Off the Boat” would be the first network sitcom to star an Asian-American family in 20 years and only the third attempt by any major network in the history of the medium. 4 would be a milestone, not just in the history of television but in the history of the United States. He lamented the choice he had made to sell his life rights to a major network - before insisting that the premiere of “Fresh Off the Boat” on Feb. He described what he took to be the show’s falseness and insensitivity to nuance - before praising its first episode as the best sitcom pilot he had ever seen. He deployed his gift for pithy, wounding invective against the show’s producers and writers - before professing gratitude and love for the same people he just vilified. “What did you expect?”įor the past week in December, Huang had been venting about his tortured ambivalence toward “Fresh Off the Boat,” the ABC sitcom based on the memoir he wrote about growing up as a child of Taiwanese immigrants in Orlando, Fla. On a cold, dark street in Tijuana, Mexico, I asked Eddie Huang a question that many people were sure to ask him in the months to come. ![]()
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