Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

  I knew that in a matter of days, I’d be back to the land of slanted-eye or ching-chong jokes. After those months in Taiwan, I started asking myself: Why? Why the fuck do I have to be Q-Tip cryin’ Sucka N!gg@? I was sick of explaining myself, sick of being different, and sick of Florida. I felt something weird and new: I was happy. Reconciled. I learned my lesson from America and didn’t want to go back. But in truth, in Taiwan, I was different, too. I had to explain myself to people in Taiwan just like I did in Florida and I realized that if I stayed, I’d have a whole new set of hurdles to face. And I was already buggin’ out because I was about to miss the Redskins’ second preseason game after Danny Wuerffel set the world on fire in the first one. I was stuck in the middle.

  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. Did I still think there was a lot wrong with the aforementioned? Hell, yeah, but unless I was going to do something about it, I couldn’t say shit. So I drank my Apple Sidra and shut the fuck up.

  * It may seem contradictory to say I want people to preserve their culture and then reject certain things like the model-minority expectations, a la carte, but there is a fine distinction to be made between stereotypes and actual culture. In my Chinese America, I don’t care if you have high SAT scores or use chopsticks. All I want to know is if you are aware of shared problems and issues due to our skin, eyes, and country of origin.

  13.

  ROYAL HUANG

  When I came back from Taiwan, I was on a mission. Somehow everything was coming clear, like juices dripping from a turkey timer. I saw that my interests in hip-hop, basketball, food, comedy, and writing were symptoms of a larger interest: finding a place for myself in the world or making one. School helped me give that larger interest more precise names—racial identity, social justice—and I was determined to figure it all out.

  I finally felt free. For years, I knew what I wanted to do but felt guilty because I knew my parents wouldn’t approve. They wanted me to be a business major, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I fought them, I argued, and hated them because so much of my life was stunted due to their wants and desires. Once I understood why, I stopped reacting with anger. They were so cute and delusional trying to come up in the world using the master’s tools. Luckily, I got my Audre Lorde on and realized you can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools.

  Instead of living my life trying to please them, I started to jux them.

  Sometimes being honest isn’t good for anyone. I knew I wasn’t going to give in to my parents, but I also knew they’d never understand, so I had to be a trickster. I did what I wanted to do, made a plan for myself, and kept them in the dark. I said the things I needed to say so they could sleep at night. Every semester, I’d sign up for one class that I could show them a textbook for, like marketing or business administration. On my own time, I took a ton of classes in different departments: anthropology, sociology, English, Asian studies, film, women’s studies, African-American studies, and even theater. I ate the shit up. All of a sudden, I loved school. I didn’t even want to get fucked-up anymore. I started to read every book I could get my hands on and joined the school paper to practice writing. I couldn’t believe how long I had been kept in the dark but as I opened each book I saw there were other people like me who saw the things I saw. 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.

  The most important professor in my entire life was Dr. Jennifer Henton. She was a strong black woman from Philly with a voice like Marge Simpson. All the kids at Rollins hated her. No one recommended her classes, everyone said she was difficult, and no one really got good grades in her class. But I looked at the syllabuses for her classes and thought to myself, These are all hit records! Syllabuses became like playlists for me those days. I was just into school and got mad excited thinking about all the new shit I’d learn every semester. The first class I took with her was a film criticism class with a feminist angle. At first I had no idea how I was going to relate since I still called bitches hos and hos bitches, but I signed up anyway. The class was housed in a cottage on campus with a round table in the center of the room. Dr. Henton looked like a cat lady holding an Alcoholics Anonymous session. I knew because I was taking anger management and alcohol/drug abuse classes every week as part of probation.

  She was fragile and soft-spoken, but once we got into the course work, I’d never seen a woman go so hard. She changed my entire view of women. Where she saw bias, misogyny, racism, classism, and the like, she pointed it out, and never felt like she needed to curb her opinion for people when she was right. She reinforced a lesson my pops tried to teach me with his hands: NEVER EVER EVER back down if you’re right. If you have evaluated all the perspectives, gone around the round table, and come back around with the same opinion, then walk right up to the offending party and tell ’em why you mad. I realized that as wild as I’d been up to that point, I still curbed my opinion ever so slightly because I was surrounded by conservative white people at Rollins.

  ONCE WE HAD a debate about emasculated Asian men in Hollywood. Dr. Henton busted out a book called Screening the Asian Male and it made total sense, but the idea of the emasculated Asian wasn’t new to me. My cousin Allen was the first to point it out to me one day when we were still kids:

  “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!”

  “Damn, son, you right! Even Long Duk Dong has to ride that stationary bicycle instead of fucking!”

  “You see!”

  I never thought a professor would back me up, but Dr. Henton literally put the topic onto the syllabus! We talked for hours about how Asian men should be getting pussy in movies and I couldn’t have agreed more.

  THEN THERE WAS Dr. Maurice O’Sullivan. He was the longtime English chair and if not the most respected, clearly the most pugnacious. He went by “Socky,” short for Socrates, and he was definitely the gadfly of Orlando Hall. You see, most professors don’t engage. They start conversations, let the kids play, and referee. Dr. O’Sullivan was a different animal. He’s the old dude at the YMCA that will dunk on twelve-year-olds just ’cause he can. Every class, this dude knocked me out in the first round. No matter how prepared I was, he tore me apart. If I tried to use something from Shakespeare, he would undercut me by having an equal and opposite quote from another Big Bill work. He always got me because he had a deeper well to draw from. He also had a wit and sense of humor. He was my kryptonite. Bird and Magic, Hakeem and Shaq, Yao and Dwight, Mo and Me. But I went home, thought about what Dr. O’Sullivan said, and came back every day to get my ass kicked. I remember I turned in a satire as a book report once and he said to me, “Eddie, nice try. Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard, you’re not funny.” I laughed and went back to the lab.

  Prof O was from an immigrant family like me. He told me that back in the day, Rollins charged him with teaching African-American literature because he was black Irish. All my arguments, strategies, and opinions were old news to him. Every work I referenced was available to him. I was twenty and he was sixty-plus. He had kids, a lifetime of memories and experiences, how the fuck was I going to beat this dude? Not only was he smart like the other professors, but he had logos, ethos, and pathos. Most professors got the logos and ethos but been in the ivory tower too long to have a handle on pathos. Then I realized
… I gotta hit this motherfucker the one place he’s weak and play his strength against him: age.

  One of the most influential texts I read was Emerson’s “American Scholar.” The one passage that really stuck with me was his line about young men in libraries:

  Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

  That was the answer. You can’t idolize and emulate forever. At some point, you gotta cut the cord and go for dolo. I thought of Locke and his idea of tabula rasa. I realized that I needed to build arguments, philosophies, and a style grounded in my era and experiences.

  Dr. Henton taught me to fight without hesitation, but Prof O taught me to box. He gave me a lesson on discipline. I remember he called me a shotgun: “You have all this energy and it’s unruly, but like a shotgun, you need the barrel to direct the buckshot just enough.”

  Those professors changed my life. I went from a punk kid that fought without a true understanding of the who, what, when, where, and why to a contrarian with a cause. I’m probably the only student on felony probation that won college awards for women’s, African-American, and English studies. I won the Zora Neale Hurston and Barbara Lawrence Alfond Award in 2004. By all accounts, it was the year of the Rotten Banana. I had all them cats quoting Biggie, Lao Tzu, and Nas by the time I was gone.

  Finally, after three years of learning, I got my degree but not without a hitch. The last lesson came from Professor Papay. At first, I hated Professor Papay. She kept picking on my grammar. I always had a voice, heart, and now a mind to my writing, but no grammar. Up until my last year in college, I didn’t know what semicolons were for so I just didn’t use them. Whether it’s cooking, basketball, or writing, I was like Latrell Sprewell. If I couldn’t go left, I just got really good at going right until someone stopped me. That person was Professor Papay. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get passing grades on my papers in her class because my grammar was so bad. If Prof O was my first title fight, Prof Papay was my first title defense, and she came southpaw.

  I basically wrote in slang and had all kinds of fucked-up syntax, subject-verb agreement, and run-on sentence issues. While the other professors overlooked my grammar and credited me for my content and perspective, Papay focused on my weaknesses. She made me a deal. I could pass her class and graduate if I went to the writing workshop. It was worse than probation ’cause I cared about my writing, yet here I was walking with my head down into the writing center. I never wanted to admit I didn’t know how to speak or write English properly, so I avoided it. For years I figured it was like video games. Some characters don’t have any defense or hit points, but they compensate by being really ill in other categories. Luckily, Professor Papay didn’t let me slide.

  The kids at the center were really cool. My tutor was this girl Emily. She didn’t judge me, she liked my writing, and I could ask her anything without being laughed at. We literally had to start with capitalization because I didn’t understand what was supposed to be capitalized and what wasn’t. Even to this day, I can’t spit out the rules, but intuitively I can “feel” what is proper grammar. I remember asking her shit like:

  “Yo, so, if semicolons break up complete sentences, why don’t we just use periods?”

  “Because they are complete sentences, but not separate thoughts.”

  “Oh, like ‘My Melody’?”

  “Huh?”

  “You know, Rakim: ‘I say one rhyme and I order a longer rhyme shorter; a pause, but don’t stop the tape recorder.’ ”

  “I guess that’s it …”

  “Word! I get it. Use a semicolon when you want people to think about the shit together, right?”

  “Ha, ha, yeah, exactly.”

  That was my thing. I learned enough from class and books that I wanted to see their thoughts, rules, and concepts at play in the modern art that I related to. No matter how much Shakespeare I read, it wasn’t my era. The classics gave me a foundation and skill set, but now it was my turn to write some new shit.

  I started applying to English or film schools. I figured, with good grades and two major awards from Rollins, that schools might overlook my felony but it wasn’t so. There wasn’t one grad school that I got into.

  About six months later, I was chillin’ at home with my family watching the Pacers play the Pistons at the Palace. With less than a minute left in the fourth quarter, Ben Wallace drove to the bucket and Ron Artest took a hack at him. Wallace wasn’t feeling it so he came back hard at Ron and threw him back a good twelve to fifteen feet. As Ron fought to keep his balance, both benches cleared, mayhem ensued, and it was Reggie Miller in a two-piece jawn fencing off Ron Artest from the Pistons. Behind Reggie, Artest lay down on the scorer’s table and even put on headphones at one point just to stunt on Wallace. Things started to calm down and you figured the dust would settle, but some fan threw a large soda from right field meant for Artest. Luckily, Reggie was able to keep Artest at the scorer’s table, but then more fans threw drinks at the Pacers. Within seconds, Artest ran into the stands with Stephen Jackson and started whompin’ the fan that threw the drink. Or at least someone close to the fan that threw the drink.

  As Artest and Jackson started walking out of the stands, another Pistons fan ran up on them and took a swing. Artest sidestepped, dodged the punch, and then stuck the dude right in the face. Meanwhile, down on the floor a fan rushed Jermaine O’Neal and he had to defend himself, too. As the whole scene unfolded, my brothers and I got mad hyped. I was always an Artest fan from his St. John’s days but I couldn’t stand the Pacers. After watching the Pacers dismantle these punk-ass Pistons fans, I was a fan. For years, we’ve seen fans in Cleveland, Philly, and now Detroit throw shit at players from the stands. Who the fuck else goes to someone’s work and thinks it’s OK to just make it rain with fountain sodas and beer bottles?

  You hear people spit that backward logic, “Athletes make tons of money, we bought tickets and have a right to throw shit!” Bankers make money, too, but I’m not running up into Chase and throwing milk shakes at the homie selling subprime mortgages. If anyone did that and then got the shit beat out of them, there would be no question whose fault it was. But here people threw shit at the Pacers and expected them to just take it. Typical American hypocrisy in action. The incident went a good eight minutes before the first semblance of security showed up.

  The next day, David Stern suspended nine Pacers without pay for 146 games and a total of $11 million in lost wages. I understood why the Pacers were suspended, but Stern not only didn’t protect his players, he took no responsibility for what ensued and buried his players. It was one of the most disloyal moves I’ve ever seen in my life. I always hated Stern. From changing the hand-check rules to his legislation of culture to his failure handling Malice at the Palace, Stern has proven to be one of the coldest, most heartless individuals I’ve ever seen.

  I always listened to 740 AM Sports Talk Radio in Orlando. Everyone calling into the station placed blame on Artest, Jackson, and O’Neal, but as you listened to them you could literally hear the racism oozing out of their comments. Using code like “animals,” “gorillas,” “punks,” “no class,” “ghetto,” “un-American,” etc., people tried to tie the incident to a deeper cultural chasm. It was 100 percent horseshit. Look, if it’s “hood” to hit someone for throwing a drink in your face, move me to the projects because that’s me. I wasn’t raised to take a shot in the face and curl up in a ball. I wrote a letter to the Orlando Sentinel, making that point.

  IT WASN’T ONE of my best works, but what was meant as a letter to the editor became an article on page two of the sports section on November 28, 2004. My dad freaked out. “That’s my son! Eddie! You’re in the paper!”

  Two minutes later he came back with the newspaper and asked, “Eh! Did you get paid for this?”

  “Naw, it was jus
t a letter to the editor.”

  “Ohhh, so you’re still not professional?”

  Typical. I didn’t care, though. Later that day, I got a call from the Sentinel. After years of writing my own mock drafts and goofy pick ’em articles in the college newspaper, the editor of the sports section wanted to offer me a job as a beat writer. I couldn’t believe it. Six months after college, still on felony probation, I was about to be a beat writer for the local paper. I put on my only suit, got a haircut, did push-ups, and got into my car as fast as I could.

  You opened the doors to the Sentinel and the first thing you smelled was fresh ink. Huge machines thirty feet long, nine feet tall, with endless sheets of newspaper running in and out. Instantly, I could see how “newspapermen” fell in love with the life, worked over these desks for decades, getting next to nothing in return. Running around Orlando for years without a purpose, I felt like I finally found one. For the last eleven years of my life, my dad and I had read the Sentinel every morning despite its conservative bent. He was addicted to the sports section and here I was. It wasn’t just me that arrived, it was my father, too.

  I was interviewing for a lowly beat writer position covering high school basketball, but we didn’t care. The whole family bugged out and it was the most important interview I’d ever have. They led me to a conference room with a contract on the table. It was a standard contract for writers that I scanned quickly and signed. About fifteen minutes later, a big white guy standing six one and roughly 230 pounds came walking in with glasses on. I’ll never forget the first words he said.

  “Oh, wow, that face …”