I had never read Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat, nor had I watched the show, but I’d heard that Huang had reacted very poorly to the adaptation of his memoir for TV. Apparently they cleaned it up a lot for TV, and after reading it, I can totally see why. Huang’s experience growing up in Orlando was pretty rough — he was beat up at school and at home, he lashed out by drinking, doing drugs and stealing, his language is atrocious, etc. Still, beneath that angry, unhappy boy, the reader can see someone highly intelligent and motivated, just trying to break out.
“To this day, I wake up at times, look in the mirror, and just stare, obsessed with the idea that the person I am in my head is something entirely different than what everyone else sees. That the way I look will prevent me from doing the things I want; that there really are sneetches with stars and I’m not one of them. I touch my face, I feel my skin, I check my color every day, and I swear it all feels right. But then someone says something and that sense of security and identity is gone before I know it.”
Huang spent most his childhood in a major identity crisis — the American kids teased him for being Asian, the Asians thought he was too white washed, and everyone agreed that he was what he calls a “rotten banana” — an Asian kid trying to be black. Huang found great solace in rap and hip-hop music, and wholeheartedly threw himself into the culture. He writes about what the music and people meant to him, and the sentiment is lovely (even though his writing can be a bit…much). He also rhapsodizes about his love for food — specifically, Chinese and Taiwanese. After being a juvenile delinquent, he redeems himself (in his parents’ eyes, at least) by becoming a lawyer — then quits that to open the restaurant he runs today. It’s quite a story, and worth reading, even if you have to claw yourself through the way he tells it.
