Read: 2026-10-17
Recommend: 7/10
Indeed, he sounds like an Asian American version of Malcolm X.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
“Shhh, shhh, shhh, don’t ruin it for yourself. You did a good thing, just eat your food now.” I think my mom is manic, but Chinese people don’t believe in psychologists. We just drink more tea when things go bad. Sometimes I agree; I think we’re all overdiagnosed. Maybe that’s just how we are, and people should leave us alone. My mom was entertaining! If you met my family, you’d prescribe Xanax for all of them, but then what? We’d be boring.
When I told Emery what I did, he laughed. “Ha, ha, you ‘let God into your heart’?” “Yeah, man, it’s a good deal! You gotta do it, too, or we can’t hang out after we die.” “But you don’t believe it!” “So? If God is real, you should let him in just in case. If it’s real and you didn’t, then you go to Hell. It only takes two minutes!” “But if God is real, then doesn’t he know you don’t reaaaallllyyy believe?” “Well, I’ll convince myself.” “You can’t convince yourself! You either believe or you don’t believe.” “People can be convinced of anything! We’re stupid. Plus, this is like those lottery tickets Mom buys. We know she’s not gonna win but just in case, naw mean?”
She also gave us each two pieces of bread, the same plain Wonder Bread I saw at school. Jeff started wiping the gray stuff on the bread. I didn’t want to come off like an idiot so I did the same thing. I put the other slice on top, lifted up, and went to take a bite, but holy shit, that smell. What the fuck was in this? Jeff and his brothers couldn’t get enough but I was scared. I took a deep breath, clutched my orange juice, and forced myself to take a bite. Right on cue, gag reflex, boom went the orange juice. I couldn’t hide it anymore. I had to ask. “What is that, man?” “You’ve never had tuna fish sandwiches?” “No, never. Where do you get it?” “At the grocery store, you want to see the can?” “OK, but what’s the orange stuff?” “Macaroni and cheese.” “What’s macaroni?” “It’s pasta.”
I realized that day, it’s the simple things in life. It’s not about a twelve-course tasting of unfamiliar ingredients or mass-produced water-added rib-chicken genetically modified monstrosity of meat that makes me feel alive. It’s getting a bowl of food that doesn’t have an agenda. The ingredients are the ingredients because they work and nothing more. These noodles were transcendent not because he used the best produce or protein or because it was locally sourced, but because he worked his dish. You can’t buy a championship.
Within minutes, two bowls of noodles appeared for us. Huge melamine bowls with khaki noodles, steaming soup, and a gremolata-like mixture of crushed peanuts, pickled radish, and chopped scallions. Of course, my pops put chili oil in it immediately, but I wanted to taste the broth: intense, deep, and mind-numbing. It was one of those bites that make you think maybe, just maybe, your taste buds carry a cognitive key that can open something in your mind. Like the first time I heard Lauryn Hill’s voice scratch over “Killing Me Softly,” I felt that I just had a mental breakthrough via sound; there has to be something like that with taste. It was then and there that I realized, you can tell a story without words, just soup.
I read everything I could about Charles Barkley during those years. I saw him on television getting made fun of for being short, fat, and unable to beat Jordan. I saw people hammer him for marrying a white woman, spitting on a girl, throwing someone through a plate-glass window, and not being a role model. But he was for me. I’d read about Charles and how he persevered. I figured, if this guy is being made fun of every day on national television and can throw it back at people, never forgetting to smile, I could, too.
I read Thank You, Jackie Robinson. I read Hank Aaron’s biography and all the hate he faced breaking the home-run record. Without anyone to talk to, I just read books about sports heroes and the racial barrier. There wasn’t a section in the library titled “Books for Abused Kids” but there was black history and somehow, some way, it made sense to me. I listened to 2Pac. I remember when “Me Against the World” came out, Emery and I would just sit by the radio reading comics listening to that song over and over.
Coach Rock was stumped. He had no idea what to do with me. I absolutely sucked at organized football. But I never once thought about quitting. In some crazy, sadistic, twisted way, I was having the time of my life. I was part of something. It wasn’t Chinese school. It wasn’t family. It was good ol’ American Fun and I loved it. When the helmets and pads were on, for sixty minutes, I wasn’t Chinese anymore. I was part of the team. Instead of being singled out and laughed at for being Chinese, I was being laughed at for totally sucking at football. It was a relief.
“Listen up, team! Huang is the smallest guy on the team, but he gave it up today. If we practice like this, we’ll win some damn games this year! So, player of the day today, Eddie Huang, let’s hear it.” To that point in life, I’d never been more proud of myself. For twelve years, I really never once did anything that made me proud. There were things that made my mom or dad happy, but this was mine. It wasn’t much to most kids. I mean, I was basically getting recognized for being straight dogshit, ignoring that I was straight dogshit, and doing anything in my power just to maintain my dogshittiness. I think on Urban Dictionary that’s the definition for insanity—or a Michael Bay film. It was just one good day of practice, yet it meant everything to me. There was hope.
For the next three weeks, literally every day, Coach Rock named me player of the practice. I was an animal. I got my confidence and just kept pushing back furiously with my eyes closed. Other people couldn’t compete. They were playing a game but I treated it like life and death.
Every time an Edgar or Billie called me “chink” or “Chinaman” or “ching chong” it took a piece of me. I didn’t want to talk about it, and kept it to myself. I clenched my teeth waiting to get even. Unlike others who let it eat them up and took it to their graves, I refused to be that Chinese kid walking everywhere with his head down. I wanted my dignity, my identity, and my pride back; I wanted them to know there were repercussions to the things they said. There were no free passes on my soul and everything they stole from me I decided I’d take back double.
My dad built a room where he put punching bags, speed bags, a bench press, and sparring equipment, just so Emery, Evan, and I could work out and spar with each other. He never wanted us to stop fighting, even if it meant fighting each other. We were never going to get soft, never going to give in to the cupcake life. My dad was still a G at heart, but unlike the American gangsters whose dream is for their kids to never look in the rearview, Dad did everything he could to make sure the money didn’t change us. I’ll give him that.
I started to study the mechanics that writers and orators used: complex sentences, allusions, metaphors, framing, satire, parody, alliteration, syntax, logos, pathos, and ethos. It wasn’t enough to be right; you had to know how to argue. I started reading classic essays like “American Scholar” or Tolstoy’s “What Is Art?” There was a formula to being persuasive and I wanted to figure it out.
Pops hated not being more in control of my life, hated how I made mistakes, hated how in many ways he couldn’t just live my life for me. It took a lot of self-control for him to not be like my mom. He knew he got a lot of his character from independence, struggle, and failure. That was the plan for me. Run out into the wild and hopefully return in one piece. It all worked in his head, but when the plan looked like it was falling apart and I came home with bad grades, bad manners, or a bad attitude, he kicked the shit out of me. As much as my friends thought I was Will Hunting, I wasn’t. I had a dad and he loved me. He just hated that I made him vulnerable. And when Emery told him about the ecstasy, he broke. Not in a weak way. Pops broke open. The dam burst and he unleashed an avalanche of fear, talking about all the worries he had. How he would play Len Bias’s story over and over in his head as a father scared that one of his kids would go out like that. He really believed that it could happen and even though he let me go out and do my thing, he just prayed I was strong enough not to lose total control. He made me promise that I’d stop doing ecstasy and never do coke. The weed, the beer, the Xanax, fine, but stay away from the sugar. I thought it was funny, but I figured, what the hell … Your dad asks you for one thing in life, anything, and it’s not to do coke? We’re gonna grant that wish. I got off easy. Thanks, Len Bias.
No one is perfect and if they were, they wouldn’t be working for you.
They’re both acceptable ways to make char-siu pork, but whatever method you take, there’s a right way to roast it in the oven and a right way to sous-vide. Style isn’t an excuse to cook without a standard. Style just determines the set of rules you choose.
Lucky for them, I gladly played the punk. As a freshman, I sent a letter into the school paper and they ran it. My letter wasn’t about how the school should give us Chinese New Year off. It was all about Uncle Chans and how they fucked the game up for Asian people. For too long, I wrote, we’ve been lapdogs. The people who don’t want to offend anyone. We hide out in Laundromats, delis, and takeout joints and hope that our doctor/lawyer sons and daughters will save us. We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it’s positive, but it’s a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we’re lactose intolerant anyway! We can’t even eat the cheese. I called out the Asian Students Association for not saying anything to the school, for not fighting for their identities, and for spending the budget on bullshit mixers and networking events without any substantive cultural programming.
They don’t understand that in China, Taiwan, or the Philippines, we can be whoever we want. In America, we’re allowed to play ONE role, the eunuch who can count. You seen Romeo Must Die! Jet Li gets NO PUSSY!” Whenever I tried to articulate what I really felt about being Chinese in America, my dad said I sounded like a slant-eyed Malcolm X. He’d always tell me not to talk like that in public because Americans would try to silence me. In Florida that made sense, so I played dumb, but college was supposed to be the place where you could have liberal ideas so I figured I’d drop the “dumb” act and speak my mind.
Whether it’s food or women, the ones on front street are supermodels. Big hair, big tits, big trouble, but the one you come home to is probably something like cavatelli and red sauce. She’s not screaming for attention because she knows she’s good enough even if your dumb ass hasn’t figured it out yet.
College just wasn’t live enough for me. It felt like some fantasy world incubating the future gentrifiers of America while the rest of the world did its thing. The whole idea of a campus felt unnatural to me. A lot of kids liked being insulated, but I hated living in a reverse retirement home with a bunch of kids who constantly asked me how to fade hair and cop ecstasy.
The first few weeks were the hardest. I ended up giving dimes away like Bourbon Chicken at the mall so people could get a taste. Most people are already copping from someone else. The only reason they’d check me out was to try something new—and if I didn’t have that, they already had someone else to call. I’d smoke whatever went dry. Everything I served was sticky, fluffy, no sticks, no stems, no seeds. When business was slow, my trick was to throw a piece of lettuce in every ounce. Never failed, it’d add weight, keep the weed fluffy, and no one could tell the water came from lettuce. Every game is the same. Baos, birds, or bud, you do everything you can up front to get them in a habit, then just don’t do anything to disturb it. Set a pattern, get them into an expectation about how you gonna move, and everybody settles in. The key is not to run with people who can’t be consistent.
“Hey, I have your money, meet me with the watch.” “Naw, it’s cool. Keep your money, I like this watch.” I made this kid chase me for three weeks trying to get his watch back just so he knew how it felt. In the end, I sold it back to him for three hundred. Pay your bills!
The airport honestly felt more like home to me than either Taiwan or Florida, and I enjoyed every moment. There was fried chicken, beef noodle soup, hamburgers, Coke, Apple Sidra, fried rice, and doughnuts. Something for everyone. I guess it’s the only place I didn’t have to explain anything. Everyone was in-between. The relief of the airport and the opportunity to reflect on my trip helped me realize that I didn’t want to blame anyone anymore. Not my parents, not white people, not America.
I gave up trying to find friends at college and befriended dead people between the margins. For years, I just didn’t know how to express it but reading things like Teresa de Lauretis, Audre Lorde, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison, I got it.
“Yo, you notice Asian people never get any pussy in movies? Jet Li rescued Aliyah, no pussy! Chow Yun-Fat saves Mira Sorvino, no pussy. Chris Tucker gets mu-shu, but Jackie Chan? No pussy!”
I WASN’T MEANT to be an attorney, but I was meant to go to law school. It made me a disciplined thinker, it forced me to think logically not emotionally, and it taught me to respond in an organized manner.
In the aftermath of 9/11, if you tuned in to television stations and watched the debates over the war in Iraq, no one had the backbone to point out the obvious. America, Inc. was running out of gas. We’d squeezed everything we could out of the rest of the world with our foreign policy. The answer was not to go into Iraq. It should have been to look at ourselves, look at our own crumbling policies, and economic mishaps. We should have lowered the debt, regulated the banks, prevented the oncoming mortgage crisis, and reevaluated our foreign policy, but we didn’t. We played on the fear of innocent Americans and spent our resources on a nameless, faceless war that tore apart Iraq, emptied our war chest, and left us with an American infrastructure screaming for help. We didn’t look at ourselves until it was too late. We spent our money on an arms race against ourself, fought an unnecessary war, and neglected the problems we had on this side of the water’s edge.
Instead of appeasing customers or playing into their bullshit, we consulted Bill Cosby, who famously said, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everyone.”
Music was also a huge part of the Baohaus experience. All of us made playlists, and numerous employees were either DJs, rappers, producers, or former street team kids. We almost never hired experienced cooks, because the goal was to create a team of artists who just happened to work at Baohaus while pursuing other dreams. It was a revolving door, but I wanted it that way. I hated growing up working at places like Boston Market that expected you to treat the job like it was your life. I’m cleaning chicken butts, motherfucker, this ain’t a lifestyle, this is a cot damn problem! I wanted people to want more for themselves; I wasn’t delusional and expected people to move on. If someone wanted to be a career cook, that was cool with me, too. I’d teach them what I knew, give them more responsibility, and they could stay as long as they liked. We’ve hired, fired, and reconciled, but over two years, we’ve tried our best to make the Haus a fun place to work.
I told my parents the story, but they just shook me off like they always did. Even on that day, nothing impressed them and it hurt. I started to feel like I’d never make them happy, but I let it go. I had done everything I could. I found myself. I rehabilitated myself. I took every bit of Taiwanese-Chinese culture I’d mustered in twenty-seven years, three hundred and sixty days, and threw it into four hundred square feet of Lower East Side basement. It wasn’t a palace, it wasn’t even a dim sum parlor, but it was the best I could do and it made me happy even if my parents didn’t get it. I realized that night that Cosby’s line about pleasing people didn’t just apply to strangers, but family, too. You only owe them so much and as Asian Americans we have to break away at some point.
MY PARENTS WERE Fresh Off the Boat, I’m a chinkstronaut, and my kids will be on spaceships. I didn’t allow America to sell me in a box with presets and neither should you. Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for 28.99 dollars. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let ’em know: WEOUTCHEA.