Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

  “My face?”

  “I mean … your face. You know … you look young, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I know, but you don’t put the beat writers’ photos in the newspaper, do you?”

  “No, but no one is going to talk to you with that face. I’ll try to get you some work, but I just don’t know how we can make this work.”

  Just like that, it was over. All because of “that face.”

  That face … What the fuck did he mean by “that face”? I could go on for pages trying to unpack everything he meant by that, but I won’t give this cracker the satisfaction. I knew what he meant, my family knew what he meant, and you know what he meant. That was it for me. I wanted power, I wanted respect, and I never ever ever wanted anyone to tell me about my face again.

  14.

  I KNOW A LITTLE BIT

  After my interview at the Orlando Sentinel, I was forced to face a few realities. Although professors at Rollins gave me a chance and saw through the surface, other people were still going to judge me based strictly on appearance. No matter what I did in Florida, there just wasn’t a critical mass of progressive liberals who’d seen more than rednecks on John Deere ride-ons. The only thing I had in common with most people is that I watched the Chappelle show and even then we laughed for different reasons. I decided to do something so no one could ever look down on me again. I went to law school.

  I didn’t even want to be a lawyer. I had no idea what the law was about, but I did know that when you passed the bar, you got an Esq. at the end of your name. My other options were M.D. or CPA so I went for the J.D. I remember the Black Album had come out the year before and Hov’s verse kept ringing in my head:

  Aren’t you sharp as a tack, you some type of lawyer or something?

  Or somebody important or somethin’?

  People always fucked with me ’cause they assumed I was a quiet Asian that wouldn’t say shit or know any better. I spent my life bitin’ back, but I was tired. I didn’t want to keep proving myself so I figured devote three years to this bullshit degree, to show people I can do something most people couldn’t, and be done with it.

  You figure getting a professional degree can’t possibly put you in a shittier place than you were in previously, but that’s a misconception. It’s like having kids. In theory they cool, but the motherfuckers will shit on your life mad quick if you’re not ready. It’s a gamble. If you don’t have a scholarship, you spend about $200K for three years’ tuition, room, board, and books. Most people take out loans so that’s another 7 to 13 percent interest over twenty to thirty years paying it all back. By the time you factor in three years of lost wages, you’re just glad New York City got free condoms and 3-1-1.

  Stats will show 70 percent job placement after graduation, but they’ll count people that got temp, paralegal, or any ancillary work. If you are one of the lucky 15 percent of students that get a big firm job, you have to bill 1,800 hours a year at minimum. If you worked Monday through Friday fifty-two weeks a year with no holidays, that’s 6.9 hours a day. It doesn’t sound bad until you get to the firm and realize billable hours means actual hours that they can charge to a client. Eighteen hundred doesn’t count the hours you spend sitting in Brooks Brothers* waiting for old heads to give you billable work to do. It doesn’t count the hours you have to spend at “optional” networking, mentoring, circle-jerking events. It also doesn’t count the hours spent avoiding passive-aggressive dickheads who want to compete on everything from doc review to how much starch you have in your shirt. For most first- to third-year associates, you have two days of waiting for every one day of billable work so when you do get it, you’re staying till 3 or 4 A.M. to do the best job you can and hope you get more.

  By my count, if you finished in the top 15 percent of your class, nailed the interview, made it through the summer associate phase, billed 1,800 hours a year for six to seven years, saved enough to pay off loans, then you most likely lost your hair, your friends, and any sense of dignity, happiness, or meaning in your life. On the upside, you probably got really ill at fantasy sports waiting for billable work. I used to give myself haircuts or download porn onto an external drive, and I once told a senior associate that my secretary was lactating when he asked why there was a stain on the memorandum of law I wrote for him. Not only was the J.D. a bad investment, but the law wasn’t anything I thought it would be. It wasn’t about justice. All those courtrooms with Lady Justice holding scales are just pitching propaganda. If courtrooms had a statue of Justice Scalia with the inscription “Most People Fux Wit Us,” that’d be closer to the truth. Not very inspiring.

  Here were my choices: I could read cases about sentencing guidelines, work at the Innocence Project fighting against wrongful convictions,† volunteer in Jamaica, Queens, family court and watch families get torn apart because of the legal technicalities, or I could get the fuck out and realize that the Lox were right all along: money, power, and respect drive the world.

  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. Flowery language, Jonathan Swift, and propaganda wouldn’t work against attorneys. Their hearts were cold fucking places that “I Have a Dream” wouldn’t appeal to. The only way to win in law school was with dead-ass logic. I had no intention of being an attorney, but I was down for another round of mental training.

  During Christmas break of my first semester, there was this competition called the Association of the Bar of the City of New York Minority Bar Fellowship. We were all given a set of legal facts and asked to write memorandums of law. Any student who qualified as a “minority” could apply and the school would select students to represent at the city-wide competition. From sixteen schools, about sixty students were selected. After writing the memo, getting high scores, and then participating in competitive interviews, I won one of the fellowships. The prize was a job at a top-100 law firm. The reaction from other students at Cardozo was hilarious. People were so competitive and saw every job someone else got as a job that they lost. I didn’t agree and always told people what Cam’ron said: “Can’t get paid in a earth this big? You worthless kid!”

  As a minority at law school, I was on a lonely-ass island so I joined APALSA. It was the first time I ever joined an Asian club. Within a few months, I remembered exactly why I hated it. Everyone was concerned with jobs, but not what it should mean to be an Asian with a law degree. It was the same drill as always. I thought that I’d be joining a club that would provide opportunities to do pro bono work on legal issues that affected the Asian community, but it was all cursory. Every month, we’d have meetings, invite Asian alumni who worked for firms, family court, legal aid, etc. and they’d talk to us about their jobs and if we were interested in getting similar jobs, they said that we could email them. It sucked chicken feet.

  I proposed that we spend money on cultural events or bringing in Asian councilmen/women to speak with us, but they only cared about jobs and an annual ski trip. The whole club was full of pea-brained, slanted-eyed idiots who thought upward mobility meant they could climb a ladder and escape ignorance. I knew better and started going to meetings for the Minority Law Students Association that a black woman, Michelle Andrea Smith, headed up. For some reason I can’t explain, black people just understand the quan better than Asians. I know I’m being ignorant and stereotyping, but for real, the BLSA and MLSA always understood from jump when I mentioned how programming should talk about social issues and not just jobs. I ended up organizing a panel that brought Jeru the Damaja and Professor Akilah Folami to speak about the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and its impact on hip-hop, radio, and Internet freedom. I also invited Lawyers of Color to come back and talk to us about office politics. After my first summer as an associate, I had stories about uncomfortable situations where people would say culturally insensitive shit that I would usually womp somebody in the face for.
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  I played that Dave Chappelle skit “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” and talked about how close I got to that moment. Surprisingly, as soon as I opened up about it, everyone had a story about white people talkin’ out the side of they mouths at work. We all laughed about it and realized we’ll never teach them all at one time, but we had to be patient, bite our tongues, and talk amongst ourselves when shit got bad. My white and Jewish homies always came and supported the events, too, because they understood their own duality. That’s what I loved about New York: even white people hated white people. No one wanted the stereotype of an ignorant white dude to represent them and white people policed themselves.

  There was also this cat Tommy Wu,‡ who had the ill Chinaman look with gelled hair combed over, always in a suit with glasses, looking real business all the time. At first look, I wrote Tommy off as just another Asian herb, but I was wrong. I never went out for drinks with Tommy or got to know him outside of school but that was my bad. Every panel I put on, Tommy was there. When I worked at the Innocence Project, Tommy was there. He didn’t talk to me much, but he always laughed at my jokes or chimed in when we talked politics, and I started to remark to my boy Peter Shapiro,§ “Ay yo, this bull Tommy is ‘down.’ ”

  “Took you long enough.”

  “Ha, ha, come on man, you SEE Tommy, you thought the same thing!”

  “You said it, not me!”

  “Fine, well I’m sayin’ it now, I was wrong.”

  “I’m sure Tommy will appreciate that.”

  Tommy was my lesson in not judging a book by its cover. Even in his Asian Mormon missionary get-up, he was down for the cause.

  THE MOST IMPORTANT person I met in law school, though, wasn’t a professor or mentor, at least not in the legal sense. Captain Jason C. Morgan liked to say that I was his “Ace Boon Coon.” Jae was half Jamaican, half Chinese and darker than a pair of chocolate wallos. Every time we went out to eat, he’d ask waitresses the same damn question:

  “Excuse me, excuse, but let me axe you a question.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do I look like to you?”

  “Come again?”

  “Like, racially, what do I look like?”

  “I dunno … black?”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Is this a trick question?”

  “Darkness, just order the fucking food, man! You holdin’ her up.”

  “Chinaman, I am not talking to you and I save time ordering food because I ALWAYS get the chicken. So instead of spending her time asking how the burger is prepared or asking for sauce on the side like your bitch ass, I’ma ask this … So final answer, black?”

  “Yeah …”

  “Look at my eyes, still black?”

  “So you’re Asian.”

  “I told you, Chinaman! She can tell!”

  “Man, you fucking forced her into that answer, you crispy motherfucker!”

  “Shit, but you still use more tabasco than me, Mr. Eddie Black.”

  “AHAHAHAHAHAHA, you already know.”

  Jae was my mans. In my lifetime, he’s the only person I ever met that hustles harder than me. Son would have Xboxes, them hundred-game cartridges, clothes, and Nike SBs in the trunk of his car every day. You’d see Jae running in and out of school with boxes of shit trying to sell it to students looking for a deal. Instead of going to class, Jae and I would just blaze and head downtown, to chill at skate and streetwear shops.

  Around 2004–2005, streetwear boutiques were popping up everywhere. Shit was ill ’cause every store repped different brands. I remember when cats like Lemar and Dauley came out with graphics that looked like the 1991 Skybox NBA Set with sweaters that had Biggie on ’em saying things like “Spread Love It’s the Brooklyn Way.” There was Reason, which put out my favorite shirt of all time, they flipped the Ramones tee to say Diplomats: Cam, Jimmy, Juelz, Freeky. Dipset had the mixtape shit on smash. Every month, there was some new Dipset that you had to cop. Sickamore had this cat Tru-Life that dropped “New New York” and G-Unit was going hard with The Game on Black Wall Street tapes. It was probably the best time since the mid-nineties to be in New York as a hip-hop streetwear-head.

  Back then, when the culture was still building, people were loyal to stores, brands, and the cause. The style was retro-nineties, loud colors, vector or photographic driven, skinny jeans, selvage denim, lots of Japanese brands, and hip-hop/street culture content. There was also a political aspect to streetwear. Speaking for myself, I was sick of rocking logos for people. When people started printing their own shirts on AAA or American Apparel blanks, we got to rep the culture through the clothing. In the post-9/11 era, a lot of the more powerful messages about individuality, free speech, and what it was to be American manifested themselves in streetwear.

  The only major brand we kept rocking was Polo, but most of us were stealing ’Lo. I heard about this crew called the Lo Lifes that would run into department stores fifty or sixty deep and just jack all the ’Lo off the racks. Shit was mad hard. I remember I was at Sutra for Just Blaze’s birthday one night when he came in with the Snow Beach pullover and motherfuckers didn’t even care if Blaze was spinning, they just bugged over the pullover. If you don’t know, peep Raekwon in the “Can It All Be So Simple” video, god got the Snow Beach joint in there and that’s how most people remember it. Raekwon is the original ’Lo-head and one of my favorite tracks is when he reps all that mid-nineties style in “Spot Rusherz”:

  You know the kid with the most doe-getters

  And terrors on fat shit clique they rock Lo sweaters

  Ironically, life was coming full circle. Here I was chasing Polo that I used to get as hand-me-downs from my pops. It was ill that Raekwon shouted out shit like ’Lo ’cause the people that designed it never expected it to end up in our hands. Didn’t no one in the meetings at Polo say, “You know who our ‘ideal man’ is? You know who it is we’re designing for? The Black Lex Luthor.”‖ That’s how streetwear flipped fashion on its head. Instead of designing for some six-foot, 150-pound medium man, they were making shit for us. Every brand had a different cut, different “ideal man,” and theme. There was fierce competition and people knew not to shark-bite each other. If the Hundreds came out with a paisley hoodie you could self-dye and freak out, someone in New York had to come harder. There was always this bicoastal streetwear competition; Leo from Union said it best: “How does L.A. even have streetwear? They fucking drive!” Union on Spring Street was my favorite shop. It was owned by Maryann, who helped start Supreme, a huge streetwear brand, with her boyfriend, James, back in the day. The two main streets most people hung out on were Lafayette for Supreme or Rivington for Alife, but I always went down Spring ’cause Union was my shit. While Supreme and Alife carried their own lines, Union carried ten to fifteen different independent brands at any moment. They were the first to carry Visvim, BBC, and eventually my brand.

  The single biggest driver of streetwear was Nike SB. From 2004 to 2008, Nike SB put out some of the craziest shoes kids had ever seen. The shoes were referential and mirrored what was going on in street art, music, and youth culture. Everyone has theories as to why, but my feeling was that SB was the only division that Nike gave creative license to roam free, do limited runs, and create just to create. They weren’t working under extreme oversight like the people doing Jordan, LeBron, or Kobe. The shoes always referenced skate, street culture, hip-hop, and New York. I remember when Supreme would get the newest SBs and everyone in Soho was confused why there were hundreds of kids in snap-backs and Urkel glasses camping out for days in front of the stores. The reason was simple: if you made it into the store with the first wave and got a pair at box price (i.e., retail), you could flip it for five or six times more online.

  Jae was smart. Instead of waiting in line, he went on the Nike Skateboarding website and started calling stores in different markets that couldn’t move the shoes. Whether it was Wisconsin, North Carolina, or Nevada, Jae set up deals with the stores so
that as soon as the cases of SBs came in, he would buy them all at box price. It worked for the stores because they couldn’t sell them for more than box price anyway and now they had guaranteed sales. The only catch was that if they got caught, they’d lose their license to sell Nike because the company wasn’t down with this kind of sneaker scalping.

  Jae taught me his technique but made me agree not to poach his stores. So I went on Nike Skateboarding and started hitting the stores that Jae wasn’t already doing business with. I ended up with a couple in Florida because I could talk to the store owners about bullshit we had in common. There was a store in Vermont and a couple of ski shops that happened to have SB accounts, but I needed more shoes so I went international. Jae wouldn’t do international because you’d have to pay import taxes. Sometimes if it looked like a commercial package, it’d get stopped in customs but I worked around. We’d have things packed in boxes, no more than eight to twelve pairs in a box, and we made sure people mailed it with the proper labeling so that it was clearly personal. Over three years, we only had one package stopped and we just had to pay a grip to get it out of the post office. I started going on eBay, finding the big SB sellers in China, and g-chatting them. Our best source became this chick that worked in a Chinese chain store called Catalog that had an SB account. She wouldn’t tell us her real name, always demanded bank wire, and when we tried to hit on her she said she was a grandma.

  Through Grandma, we weren’t just getting SBs, she got us Air Max, Jordan, Nike Sportswear, etc., because her store had a quick-strike account. I ended up with access to any Nike I wanted except Tier 1 drops.a Once I got the sneakers, I would post them on Craigslist, MySpace, Facebook, etc., and whoever wanted sneakers would hit me. One day in late 2006, I was sitting at Washington Mutual putting $5K in my account to wire over to Grandma. Two kids walked in with the Finish Line Air Max ’97s. They seemed like cool kids so I asked them: