by Eddie Huang
I had no problem getting the kid, but that weekend was rough. Sunday morning, we woke up to a car crashed right through a wall on Apopka Vineland Road, a mile from my house. The bricks were all scattered, the wall was shattered, and there was a champagne sedan stuck halfway through the wall with the other half hanging out. As soon as I saw it, I knew it was my man Ricky Santo’s car. Ricky was a year younger than me, but one of my good friends. I’d always watch sports with Ricky and he was also the first to put me on to Mos Def: Black on Both Sides. He was a two-sport star at Dr. Phillips, playing baseball and football, which was a big deal since a lot of our players ended up at D-1 programs. But more than that, Ricky was one of the most likable dudes. He never beefed with anyone, always smiling, and when news broke that he was in critical condition with head and neck injuries we all bugged out.
We went to school the next day and before first period, the principal was on the intercom telling us to have a moment of silence for Ricky. I was just walking into school so I stopped right inside the entrance as thousands of us stood frozen for Ricky. I lifted up my head, opened my eyes, and to the right I saw Emery coming out of the bathroom and that motherfucker that punched him was waiting. I was shook from the moment of silence, but I knew what I had to do and dropped my backpack. Warren was right behind me so I knew he’d scoop it. Those were the days right after Columbine so we all had to wear student IDs around our necks. I took my ID off, wrapped it around my hands, crept behind this kid, and yoked him right in front of Emery.
All the Tangelo Park cats hung by the bathroom so as soon as they saw it, you heard the motherfuckin’ bird call. Kids surrounded us and formed a wall so the cops couldn’t break it up. Emery froze for a second, but then reared back and mashed him right in the face. After letting him get the first shot, I put the kid in a headlock and started punching him right in his left eye over and over. Emery kicked him from behind, then we threw him headfirst into a wall.
The kid fell in a pile, but the cops still couldn’t get through. I lost all self-control. When I got into fights, my hands would always shake and feel light. I could never feel the punches until after when my knuckles were cut and swollen, but every time I hit this kid it was heavy. I beat that kid like he was Ms. Truex, Edgar, Reaganomics, the Counting Crows, and Moby-Dick all rolled into one. I heard the kids surrounding us start to talk.
“Cot damn, y’all.”
“Oooofff. This some Rocky IV shit, boy.”
It really was like the Russian versus Apollo Creed. The Red Chinaman pummeling Mr. America. I stood over him, looked at the cops finally breaking through the crowd, and stepped right on this kid’s balls.
“Ohhh, hell naw. Huang done gas-pedaled this n!gg@?!?!”
“That’s too much. You already know that’s too much.”
“Ha, ha, yaaaooo, don’t fuck with these Chinamen y’all! Do not fuck with these Chinamen!”*
Usually I was quick to run when cops came, but I just stood over this kid. I don’t know what got into me, but I just never wanted anyone to fuck with me or my family again. I was sick of it.
The cops grabbed me and I spit my gum in one cop’s face and that’s when I’d gone too far. They arrested me, walked me out of school, and sent me to booking. Things done changed.
* I remember going to Chik-fil-A two days after the fight and the entire staff giving me pounds ’cause they had watched the fight. No one ever fucked with any of the Huangs after that.
9.
LEN BIAS BROKE
MY HEART
I still remember the shoes I had on that day at booking: Carolina Blue Jordan XIVs. They made me take the laces out because they had metal tips, but it was cool, the XIVs looked good broken out anyway. Plus, a lot of kids in booking were walking around with tongues floppin’. I got lucky: since I was still seventeen they sent me to juvie. It wasn’t bad at all, looked like a doctor’s office with linoleum floors and holding cells with skinny dudes in long white tees. I wasn’t worried; I didn’t do anything wrong. Someone punched my brother in the face so I stomped him out.
It definitely didn’t faze my dad. I’ve never seen a parent so proud to pick his kid up from holding. “You dumb-ass … You’re not supposed to get caught!” he said with a smile. Around this time, I had become closer with my dad. He had stopped hitting me at home, we talked on the regular, watched Magic games together, and I was working at the restaurant a lot more. Once his restaurants were successful and that was off his mind, he could handle my mom. She didn’t get to him as much and the house was a lot more calm. Every day, she would still wild, but my dad learned to walk away. He just rolled around in a bathrobe and boxers all day eating fruit and watching NBA games he recorded.
Just to keep me out of trouble, he’d been scheduling me for work every Friday and Saturday night, but it didn’t really help. If anything, it made things worse hanging with servers, bartenders, and cooks. Now I could get beer, weed, Xanax, acid, whatever, any time I wanted it. Once I got arrested, though, I knew I’d have to chill; I didn’t have that many chances left. The kid I knocked out never came back to school. Romaen saw him one time and found out his face was broken. I felt bad about that, but figured he should have thought it through before hitting Emery. We all chose to fight that day, just happens he took the L.
Emery was different, though. When the cops came that day, he took the kid who was knocked out and flipped his unconscious body on top of his own, which made it look like he was the one getting attacked. He never got arrested.
Emery saw what happened to that kid and basically quit fuckin’ around cold turkey. His friends were still wildin’ but he just stayed his ass at home, stopped listening to hip-hop, and got a little shook. He wasn’t scared of fighting, but became more wary of the consequences. I remember him saying to me, “That could have been one of us, man.”
He was right, people could catch you at any time. Emery was now getting turned off by my style, my music, my friends, and the drugs. I was doing a lot of ecstasy at the time and Emery got scared enough to tell my dad. The day he found out, he didn’t hit me, he didn’t yell, he took me out on the lake in our canoe, and we just kicked it. I thought he was gonna “Fredo” me, but he kept it real. It was one of the first times I really opened up to my dad.
He didn’t judge, he just listened. I explained that it wasn’t like I had a drug “problem.” I was just partying. I did it for fun. Kids love glo-sticks! But my dad knew this was one of those moments he had to be a dad even if it contradicted his own wild times as a kid.
“You remember I always talk about Len Bias, right?”
“Yeah, you hate Len Bias and Lefty Driesell.”
“No! I LOVE Len Bias and Lefty Driesell but they broke my heart. That goddamn Len Bias throws everything away. He could have been Michael Jordan, but that dumb-ass kill himself right after the NBA draft. I never been that sad in my life!”
I couldn’t say anything.
My dad was always an independent man. His family was poor, he ran the streets, and his mom spent most of her time playing mah-jongg. Like me, alone in the American wilderness, he just had his homies and the street in Taiwan. His father didn’t work and spent most of his time translating the Bible after seeing horrific acts during Chiang Kai-shek’s reign. Dad took care of himself and didn’t want to depend on people and he didn’t want them to depend on him, either. I didn’t notice until we both started working at Cattleman’s but we’re one and the same: horrible trainers. You’d always hear the same three words come out of our mouths when people asked for help.
“Figure it out!”
We always had to figure it out, so you can, too! We didn’t have the luxury of people explaining why I couldn’t use my left hand or why his family had no money. We just figured it out. But love is a funny thing.
Growing up, he loved the Bee Gees and basketball. That was it. When he came to America, went to university, and got to be part of a community—Terrapin basketball—he turned obsessed. Len Bias was the only per
son that gave Jordan a run for his money and when YouTube came around, the first thing I did was pull up old Len Bias videos, but my dad couldn’t even watch. Bias broke his heart and he hated being vulnerable to others. Len Bias was dead to him and he never wanted to think about it again. In a lot of ways, Len Bias mirrored his approach as a father. He was scared of heartbreak and tried not to show how much he cared about us. It was no problem for him to show love to acquaintances and business associates that came to the house. The show is easy when there aren’t real feelings behind it. My mom would always complain that he was cold and didn’t express himself well to his family, but was a maestro with strangers. None of us understood, but I finally got it that day. He was scared.
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.
We rowed the canoe back home that day after our talk and I felt good. I had a reason to stop doing things that I knew were self-destructive and sometimes that’s all kids need. A reason to live. Some people have the birds and the bees, others have the cat’s cradle, my epic talk with my Chinese dad was Len Bias. I look back and it’s funny. You think it’s gonna be Confucius, Lao Tzu, or maybe even something Grandpa passed on since he was such a great man, but no. Even as an immigrant who came over in his twenties, when it came time for the talk, my dad found the inspiration in an African-American basketball player. Like father, like son.
I REALLY GOT into working at the restaurant after that talk. I wasn’t so focused on defying my dad. I just wanted to make him proud ’cause I knew he cared about me. His chef was this cool Jamaican dude, Chef Andy. He had the ill machine-gun stutter and accent so it was always entertaining when he spazzed on people. He’d say shit like, “Tttttakkke tttthhhhaaattt, bbbbbboi.” Warren and I also worked at my dad’s other restaurant, CoCo’s, which served fusion Floridian and Caribbean food that this guy Chef Henry concocted.
I wasn’t a big fan of Chef Henry. He was dirty to me. He had gnarly hair flying around on his head, nasty shit under his nails, and he’d still insist on tasting things with his fingers. It was American kitchen culture. Shit, it was American food culture. People would take pride in having hands covered by buffalo wing sauce or BBQ stains on their face. I remember watching meat heads in the dining room eat thirty-two-ounce porterhouses, challenging each other to see how much they could eat. The way those people experienced food didn’t make sense; it was gross to me. I always loved food, but it didn’t bring me any extra enjoyment to eat it or cook it like a frat boy.
I DIDN’T RESPECT Chef Henry and he didn’t like me. Mainly because I was the owner’s son, but also because I didn’t respect his food. There were a lot of goofy fusion things that he made and all his recipes were overcooked.* Warren worked with me and Chef loved him. I would always choose the tasks on the prep list requiring more skill and Warren would gladly take on the dirty ones. He took pride in doing the more physically demanding tasks, but I’d rather butterfly shrimp or clean the New York strip because I wanted to learn. Additionally, I liked working on the proteins so that I could make sure we weren’t wasting my dad’s money. Dad would cut the New York strip himself a lot of the time, but when he wasn’t there I’d watch it for him. Since that day eating soup dumplings on my sixth birthday, everyone knew I understood flavors and if someone showed me something once, I wouldn’t forget it. Chef could see it, but he resented me. He’d rather have someone like Warren who worked hard and followed instructions.
I learned a lot from him, though. That guy taught me how to make sauces on the sauté station, bread proteins, clean meats. All my technique prior to working there came from my mom and it was straight Chinese. We’d use a lot of bone stocks, cornstarch, scallions, ginger, dried chilis, and aged Chinese rice wine. The biggest surprise to me in an American kitchen was the use of butter. It was everywhere! Regular butter, infused butter, heavy cream, all things that you’d never see in an Asian kitchen unless you cooked Southeast Asian, but even then it was coconut milk.
I also kept my shifts at Cattleman’s, where I worked as the expediter. I loved expediting because you could control the whole operation and identify weaknesses. I expedited almost every Friday and Saturday night at Cattleman’s where we did $10K on average nights and up to $15K on big ones. The expediter stands on the side of the pass opposite the line, which is where the food is cooked using a grill, sauté, fryer, or whatever. The tickets come in, you put them on the speed rail, and as the food comes out, the expediter finishes the dishes with garnish, wipes the plates clean, and organizes the tickets. In a lot of ways, the expediter is the catcher calling the game. You tell the kitchen what to fire, what to hold, what to refire. The waiters and managers need to tell you what’s going on in the dining room, who’s in the weeds, which tables are causing problems. If you have a table that doesn’t have patience, you bump their ticket up in line, turn and burn ’em. If there’s a table that’s cool, drinking wine, having appetizers, you slow their meal, give a little extra, send a dessert. You want them to come back. My dad put me there to keep an eye on quality as well. If something came out that was inconsistent, I’d send it back.
When I started, I was a slow expediter because I kept burning myself. Most expediters were in their mid to late twenties and had been working in restaurants their whole lives. They had reptilian skin. Nothing could burn them. I sucked until I started wearing two gloves at a time. Such an easy fix and it made all the difference. There were people who were faster than me, but they made mistakes and didn’t pay as much attention to food cost or customer service. They just wanted to do their job, get the food out, and finish the tickets. Since my dad owned the place, I tried to stay aware of all the other factors and started to see how difficult it was to be the owner. Every single person in the restaurant needs to do things exactly how you teach them or you lose money. Additionally, they need to think like you and more than that, they need to care like you. It was an important lesson. I saw how managers would give people manuals, train them, and write them up, but it was empty. If you really wanted good employees that would have your interests at heart, they needed to buy in. You needed people who wanted to grow with your business and see themselves as valuable members on the team. My dad was the master at that.
He knew where everyone was from, their background, their struggles, their boyfriend or girlfriend, their hobbies. He took a real interest in people’s lives at the restaurant and even made the down payment for one of his manager’s homes.† No one called him boss or Mr. Huang. He wanted them to call him Louis, but they respected him so much they insisted on Mr. Louis. There were numerous people at the restaurant that had been at Cattleman’s over ten years and two employees literally worked there until they died. I still go home now and see the same bartende
rs and servers I grew up with. If they don’t work there, they still drink there.
On the other hand, my mom was the guard dog. Every day my mom would hunt down the parts of the operation where people were losing money or did their jobs wrong. These people were stealing right from under us and if they weren’t stealing, their laziness was costing us money. Fines from the health department, giving the wrong portions, ordering the incorrect amount of meat or produce—things fall apart every day at a restaurant, but as a manager, the key is to understand and accept the human element. No one is perfect and if they were, they wouldn’t be working for you.
People don’t make much working at restaurants so you need another way to motivate them. Servers have motivation because they make the most, but your kitchen, your busboys, your dishwashers, these guys don’t see shit and they work ten times harder than the servers. My mom wanted to fire everyone, but my dad understood that you have to have the proper expectations at restaurants. You understand people’s strengths and weaknesses, and put them in a position to succeed. There are numerous positions in a restaurant; it’s your job as the owner to find the right fit.
My favorite thing to do was watch the Haitian guys make ribs. I loved barbecue my whole life but had no idea how to do it. Southern food was one of those things that always eluded me. It drew me in because of the play between savory, sweet, and aromatic. Compared to other regional American food I ate, there wasn’t any comparison. You could see from the motley of dishes in the Southern American canon that it was created out of necessity and there was genius in how they made do with scraps. There was an honesty to the cuisine that I gravitated toward and I’d skip school in the mornings with my friends just to eat biscuits ’n’ gravy. It wasn’t until I became a chef that cooks would say to me, “You got nice moves.”
