Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir

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He learned to appreciate things like education and challenging norms because he was already at a disadvantage from birth being Asian-American in America. I had never met or even talked to Margaret, but I remember her jokes about penises being like snowflakes and still refer to my dick as a six-inch meatball sub. After misadventures as an unlikely lawyer, street fashion renegade, and stand-up comic, Eddie finally threw everything he loved – past and present, family, and food – into his own restaurant, bringing together a legacy stretching back to China and the shards of global culture he’d melded into his own identity. If you can find any crumb of a complete thought in the book that remotely infers ‘America is great,’ I’ll read the line. Hip hop and African American culture provided a sympathetic counterpoint to the racism and exclusion he experienced at school.

I needed that contrast in the show supported by the specific musings and perspectives of Asian-Americans who actually lived this life. Eddie Huang is the 30-year-old proprietor of Baohaus – the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night – and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars. It told my life story as a Taiwanese-Chinese-American creating his own America replete with bound feet, bowl cuts, sports sex, and soup dumps. I didn’t understand how network television, the one-size fits-all antithesis to Fresh Off the Boat, was going to house the voice of a futuristic chinkstronaut. Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the twenty-first century.Whether it be his relationship with his family, being an entrepreneur, finding himself, going to school, and opening his own restaurant, and eventually finding success. Perspective is a powerful thing – Throughout his journey, Eddie has come across so many people with different points of view and life experiences. I’m sure there’s some angry Korean dude in Hollywood who grew up eating Spam, watching his dad punch his mom in the face, who knows how to use Final Draft! The only way they could even mention some of the stories in the book was by building a Trojan horse and feeding the pathogenic stereotypes that still define us to a lot of American cyclope.

It makes for a perfect M2M episode when the theatrics, comedy, sisterhood, and ostentatious lifestyle porn come together like this. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH). In our first production meeting, there were about 50 to 60 people gathered in a classroomlike studio setting, with Jake Kasdan, Natch, Lynn Shelton, Melvin, and myself going scene by scene through the script. Reader’s note: Wow, he’s really going into a lot of details about different types of food and how to cook. They have no idea what they’re doing, but they’ll have opinions about everything you’re doing,” she warned.Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the 21st century. It has all of the elements of a compelling narrative, intriguing character, amazing growth journey, and strong themes. But for all the bullshit I heard at studios about universal stories and the cultural pus it perpetuates, I felt some truth in it for those three minutes. The standard shots were there, the kitchen scenes, banter, banter, banter, but through all the fucking duck sauce and wonton strips, Melvin and Natch did it … They fucking did it.

After several conversations with my agent about industry standards and Ed O’Neill’s availability and unwillingness to go yellowface, we came to an agreement on a term sheet with the studio, which simultaneously attached Nahnatchka Khan (who was behind Don’t Trust the B— in Apt. Since 2009, I’ve opened Baohaus, produced and hosted Huang’s World for Vice, and, in January 2013, Spiegel and Grau published my memoir, Fresh Off the Boat.The network’s approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane. She has her own America complete with songs of saffron ice-cream dreams deferred, and we can show solidarity in Raekwon’s ice-cream truck, but it’s not the same.

Dwight Garner said it was “a surprisingly sophisticated memoir about race and assimilation in America. The social contract is here because we have a collective desire to be individuals and preserve our rights to pursue singular happiness with or without cilantro. You can’t flash an ad during THE GAME with some chubby Chinese kid running across the screen talking shit about spaceships and Uncle Chans in 2014 because America has no reference. Everything we know about his murder, the two alleged killers, and a recent new arrest ahead of the January 29 trial. This is the story of a Chinese-American kid in a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac blazing his way through America's deviant subcultures, trying to find himself, ten thousand miles from his legacy and anchored only by his conflicted love for his family and his passion for food.ABC’s approach “was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo go gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane. We still wake up spotting the man 10 points, walking with our heads down, apologizing for our FOB-y aunts and uncles as if aspiring to wash your shirt or do your taxes were really such an insidiously foreign idea. I got upset when they dressed Randall like a Fung Wah bus driver or Hudson like an And-1 yard sale or Constance like the Crocodile Hunter with kitty-cat heels.