Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

  “Give up on what?”

  “Cooking, dude! Go for it.”‡

  Anytime I went to restaurants, I would pick on what could be improved, write notes, and practice at home. Cooking was something that I loved to do on my own. I didn’t agree with people on their interpretations, their favorites, or their preferences and didn’t care because my tastes were mine. That’s the thing I really loved about food. I couldn’t build my own Jordan Vs, I couldn’t draft for the Redskins, but I could make my own food. Nothing stood between me and the flavors I craved. The only thing that kept me from cooking professionally was the feeling that people wouldn’t understand my food. I saw idiots ordering lo mein for most of my adult life at Cantonese restaurants that made amazing seafood panfried noodles. I didn’t want to be those motherfuckers’ Captain Kirk.

  I remember at Cardozo, there was this kid Barry Goldstein who thought he knew everything about Chinese food because he lived in China for a year or two after college. When I ate hot pot, I always mixed sa cha sauce with sesame paste, garlic oil, a raw egg, and a teaspoon of soy. Barry said to me once, “That’s not how you eat hot pot! That’s some new-age Taiwanese thing. In Beijing, you don’t mix the sauces.”

  “Son, I’ll say this the nicest way I can. I’m Chinese and you’re an idiot.”

  Barry had a false sense of confidence. He had been impressing his white friends for years with his “knowledge” of Chinese food and figured he could school me, but it was a joke. One of his friends at dinner that night mixed his sauces and said to the table, “You know, it’s pretty good when you mix it, Barry.” For the most part, people who have grown up eating a food their entire lives love learning new techniques or variations within the same pantry. My mom’s beef noodle soup takes on a new ingredient every three to five years, and hot pot seems to find a new protein every season. I’m confident in my taste because it’s been refined over thirty years of eating the same dishes hundreds of times. The problem with expats is that they never get to say shit in China. When they’re over there, they are like dogs being led around from restaurant to restaurant by locals trying to take them for a ride. They may taste one or two variations of a dish and form opinions based on that cursory knowledge, hanging on every word like it’s the holy grail. When the expat gets home, he’s in such a rush to impress false maxims on any fool who will listen. People who don’t understand something need poles to grasp, but those who truly love and understand something through experience don’t need those training wheels. Food is that way for me. There’s a difference between bastardizing an item and giving it the room to breathe, grow, and change with the times. When Chinese people cook Chinese food or Jamaicans cook Jamaican, there’s no question what’s going on. Just make it taste good. When foreigners cook our food, they want to infuse their identity into the dish, they have a need to be part of the story and take it over. For some reason, Americans simply can’t understand why this bothers us. “I just want to tell my story?!? I loved my vacation to Burma! What’s wrong with that?” It’s imperialism at work in a sauté pan. You already have everything, do you really really, really need a Burmese hood pass, too? Can we live?

  Writers ask me: “So, should Americans be allowed to cook ethnic food they didn’t grow up with?”

  I reply by asking: Are you interested in this food because it’s a gimmick you can apply to French or New-American food to separate yourself from others? Or, will you educate your customers on where that flavor came from? Will you give credit where it’s due or will you allow the media to prop you up as the next Marco Polo taking spices from the Barbarians Beyond the Wall and “refining” them? The most infuriating thing is the idea that ethnic food isn’t already good enough because it goddamn is. We were fine before you came to visit and we’ll be fine after. If you like our food, great, but don’t come tell me you’re gonna clean it up, refine it, or elevate it because it’s not necessary or possible. We don’t need fucking food missionaries to cleanse our palates. What we need are opportunities outside kitchens and cubicles. #Sing #Clap #ItsMe§

  COOKING WAS A hobby but the whole Food Network experience threw me for a loop. Literally, the day before, I thought I’d be spending the next nine years of my life going across America, telling the same jokes at clubs every night. I loved stand-up, but admittedly, I was bored. Writing sets and performing was a lot of fun, but to really get good, you had to tell the same jokes every night in different clubs. Some nights you’d do three shows in different parts of the city. By the time transportation was paid for, you went home with a hundred dollars and a hangover. I thought to myself, What is it I really want to do? That list I made wasn’t a good list at all. It was an empty list of jobs. They were vehicles that could get me places, but where was it that I actually wanted to go?

  After we finished taping, Emery, my dad, and my mom took me to eat at Kunjip in Koreatown. In the winter, I craved their kalbi tang. The whole family was really proud of me because throughout the taping, I never misrepresented our food, I spoke out about shitty Asian fusion, and I didn’t play into the network’s agenda. A lot of audience members went up to my parents throughout the day and told them they really appreciated someone who knew what they were talking about regarding Chinese food and wasn’t shy about calling others out.

  It became clear what I wanted to do. My entire life, I’d been looking at it all wrong. First it was football, then it was basketball, then it was comedy, and movies and restaurants, but what brought it all together? Why was it that I was on the verge of tears when AI lost to Kobe? Why was it that I related to Eddie Murphy’s ice cream joke? What was it about Do the Right Thing that made me watch it three times a year? Race. Race. Race.

  My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America. How something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness. It was race. It was race. It was race. Apologies to Frank Sinatra, but I’ve been called a “ch!gg@r,” a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn, and a chink; that’s life. I am obsessed with what it means to be Chinese, think the idea of America is cool, but at the end of the day wish the world had no lines. Like Michael Ondaatje writes, “All I ever wanted was a world without maps.” The English Patient is full of knowledge:

  We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

  I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books. We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience.

  You have tattoos and others have piercings, but for me, there’s nothing that says more about me than the food I choose to carry every single day. As a kid trying to maintain my identity in America, my Chinese was passable, my history was shaky, but I could taste something one time and make it myself at home. When everything else fell apart and I didn’t know who I was, food brought me back and here I was again.

  I was twenty-seven, just laid-off, looking for a new career, fresh off the set of a shitty competition show with a bowl of kalbi tang staring me in the face. The answer was clear. Eddie Huang was going to open a restaurant. Of course, my family didn’t get it.

  “Eddie! You don’t want to be a chef. Look how little Chef Andy at Cattleman’s makes?”

  “Mom, it doesn’t matter. I made money at the law firm and it sucked.”

  “You need to use your law degree. You can’t let that go. You spent all that time!”

  “It’s a sunk cost, Dad. I’m not going to throw any more time and money just because I’ve already wasted so much.”

  Emery wanted the best for me, he knew my food was good, but he was scared. He was never the one in the family who would take risks so he sided w
ith my parents. I didn’t care, though. I would be thirty in three years and I felt a lot of my life had been wasted trying to please my parents or do what Chinese people were supposed to do in this country. I was done. Ironically enough, the one place that America allows Chinese people to do their thing is the kitchen. Just like Jewish people became bankers because that was the only thing Christians let them do, a lot of Chinese people ended up in laundries, delis, and kitchens because that’s what was available. From Rothsteins to Huangs to Todd Anthony Shaw, the outsider’s credo is get in where you fit in, fool.

  AS A FIRST-TIME restaurant owner, I wanted it all. It’s like the first time you smash. You wanna try every position on shawty before she changes her mind or you run out of bullets. My entire life, I was that dude. I hated editing my writing, I hated following rules, I hated accepting realities, but that year in Fort Greene really changed my perspective. I was humbled.

  For six months, every two days, I woke up, got the work from Crown Heights, and either took a train to Grand Concourse and the Taft Houses, or gave Richie the work to do the drops. By 2 P.M. I was done so I played ball with Ben Griesinger, Jesse Hofrichter, and Rafael Martinez aka the Prince of Brooklyn. All four of us were unemployed so we hit the court at 2 P.M. like clockwork. We called it UBL: Unemployment Basketball League. It was a cold fucking winter that year.

  All four of us were hit hard by the recession. Jesse and I had money saved, but Raf was fresh out of law school with no job. I remember one day Raf came to UBL mad excited.

  “The Prince is feelin’ good today, son.”

  “Oh, word? What’s really good?”

  “I was on Craigslist this morning and yo, Brooklyn Industries is hiring a manager!”

  “For real? That’s wassup. Need that paper. They hiring multiple managers or just one?”

  “Ay yo, this is my listing, man! If they need two I let you know but you can’t shark-bite my Craigslist ad.”

  We were that HONGRY. Grown-ass men fighting over who could apply to Brooklyn Industries first. Every day, we all hit Craigslist, message boards, looking for any leads on jobs. I was the least motivated, ’cause I was still gettin’ money, but I knew it was short term. Either the comedy shit had to pop off or I’d need a straight job by this time next year.

  Every day we met up, played ball, but talked about what we would do with our lives. Grown men waiting to exhale. We all had the same struggle. It was very clear in our heads what each of us wanted out of life, but there were some gaps in the path between here and there. Jesse was the most neurotic. He’d come up with an idea, we’d support the idea, and then he’d shoot his own idea down. It became clear really quickly that Jesse just liked to argue. You could never come to a conclusion or plan of action with Jesse because as soon as he said he’d go right, he’d go left, which would be a dope crossover move on the court, but the funny thing was, when this guy played ball he’d stand on the baseline and wait to shoot fifteen-footers! I loved Jesse and he always held me down, but he was definitely on some Woody Allen Mental Doppelganger steez.

  Ben, on the other hand, knew exactly what he wanted to do. He was a temp schoolteacher trying to get into grad school. It was a tense time waiting for his grad school applications to go through, but he knew it was a matter of time.

  Raf wanted to work in music. Since college, Raf wrote at places like Prefix Mag about concerts, albums, and hip-hop in general. He knew more about music than anyone I’d ever met even though he made some of the worst playlists I’ve ever seen, littered with random Top-40 hits he was a sucker for. He couldn’t make a playlist without a minimum of three Pit-bull songs. Raf went to law school thinking it’d help his career in music, but he realized quickly it was the wrong move. Seeing how little music attorneys got paid and how quickly managers, agents, and labels took off, he felt like he bought a ticket to a B-grade hustle. I told Raf if that’s how he felt he should just go to shows, hang with artists, and sign talent, but he didn’t think he had the contacts yet so he stuck with the legal grind. He liked making fun of other people’s hustles. For instance, there’s always that raggedy-ass manager that somehow put the hooks in a good artist, threw him on a few mixtapes, but doesn’t have the skills to take it to the next level. Happens all the time and we all laugh, but I’d tell Raf: you can’t be clowning people who are actually doing things if you aren’t even trying. As a reasonable man and the Prince of BK, he got it. That’s what I liked about Raf. He was a grown-ass man. If you pinned something on him that was true, he wouldn’t flinch, he wouldn’t squirm, he’d own up and fix it. I always respected that about the Prince.

  But once I knew I was opening a restaurant, the sky broke and everything was clear. It was the most exciting time of my life. The freedom felt good. It was the first time I can remember waking up every day and not feeling like I owed somebody some shit. All my life, I’d wake up to my parents fighting or my mom yelling at me to grow up faster. It never stopped. Then, when I went to college, I stayed in trouble. I remember the year I got charged, I just woke up every day thinking my life was over. Every interview or application I filled out, there was that convicted-felon box to check that never went away. It’s a fleeting moment, but those first ten minutes of the morning when you’re barely conscious are the worst. You wake up to this fog of fear, confusion, and uncertainty. I swear even now I wake up some days not knowing who I am or where I’m at. In law school, I woke up every day knowing money was going down the drain for a degree I wanted no part of. And even if I passed the bar exam, I might not pass the character fitness test because of my past. For three years, I kept thinking, “I may not even get that piece of paper I wanted!”

  I was constantly thinking about how to get out. Those years between twenty-four and twenty-seven, when you start to realize things don’t always break the way they’re supposed to, are sobering. When you’re eighteen, you’re hustlin’, you got friends producing, DJ’ing, in bands, all the girls look like someone in the movies, you figure everyone is gonna blow up like soda and water. Shit is just fun. But you hit twenty-four, half your friends are strung out, some are in jail, some got herpes, everyone got HPV twice, and you realize, yeah, we’re in a movie: Requiem for a Dream.

  For a while Hoodman held me down. It was the outlet I needed for my creativity. I got a taste of what it was like to own your own business, create new accounts, market a product, etc. If it weren’t for Hoodman, I probably would have taken a straight job. You have the balls to take risks when you’re young because you don’t see all the barriers. You just see a way to win. The problem with Hoodman is that I made the classic first-time-director mistake. I tried to serve too many masters. It never works. I wanted the restaurant to represent everything about me, but I refused to make the same mistakes twice.

  A week after the taping of URS, I started a blog. I was always an idiot with brainstorming so the first name that came in my head I registered on Blogspot. Five minutes later I realized the name was terrible, but I couldn’t change it, so I just used a domain with the shitty name www.thepopchef.blogspot.com and made the title of the blog “Fresh Off the Boat,” which was more my steez. From jump, the blog was ridiculous. The fifth post I ever put up was of a dude with a ski mask robbing a bank with this text:

  So, after cooking, I went to go get a loan. That is me above. Things went well until they asked me for some information:

  LLC, TAX ID, ETC …

  For all you aspiring entrepoorneurs out there, leave the gun, bring the Tax ID.

  They said that to get a loan, I needed to do these things:

  REGISTER THE BUSINESS

  GET LLC

  GET TAX ID

  ESTABLISH CHECKING ACCT

  PUT IN APP FOR BIZ LOAN

  LOOK AT OUR PAY STUBS

  LOOK AT OUR TAXES

  Chase was cool, though. Once I took off the mask, they sat down, told me that they could actually do the LLC and tax ID registration for me. So that was dope. Will let you guys know how it goes with the loan applic
ation.

  This was the sixth post, titled Reader Questions. I didn’t actually have any readers at that point, so I made up questions and answered them myself.

  I love reader questions. Almost as much as I love getting really blazed using my volcano vaporizer and eating gummies … but not quite. OD’ing on gummies is still my favorite thing to do in life. It’s just not so fun when your teeth are rotting and your breath is stanking ’cause you fell asleep eating a pound of gummies watching Martin Yan’s China. Martin Yan’s China is the best way to brush up on your Chingrish. Phrases like, “This is the fashion” or “Rook how beaurifo my kung pao panda rook on dees rotus reef” are great for get togethers during the moon festival!

  Anyway, reader questions …

  “Where is the restaurant going to be?” Either NYC or Boston. Looking in both places right now, specifically East Village south of 13th, north of Houston, in NYC, and Brighton/Brookline in Boston.

  “Is this a Chinese restaurant?” Well, I am a Chinaman, there will be a few Chinaman items, but no, it is not a “Chinese restaurant.” But like they say, “You can take a Chinaman out the paddies, but he will still put MSG in all your food.”

  I didn’t know where the blog or the restaurant was headed, but I was having fun and honestly that’s all that mattered. I wanted to keep that mindset and energy that I’d had just chillin’ in Fort Greene playing ball and hustling every day. I never wanted to find myself in a situation again where I was doing things because someone told me I was supposed to. From the ground up, I was going to detox my identity of any and everything that someone else put there without my blessing.

  I knew that I couldn’t afford a big space in Manhattan so I started my search for spaces in Brooklyn: Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant. A lot of people still thought of Bed-Stuy as “Do or Die.” I kicked it out there, hung out at Pratt after playing ball, and went to house parties in the fragrant old brownstones with scrolling stonework on the façades. To me, it was dope, even though I realized that if you had a restaurant in Bed-Stuy, you weren’t going to draw customers from outside Bed-Stuy. That was OK with me. The concepts that worked in Bed-Stuy were neighborhood restaurants or grab-’n’-go, casual-seating type joints, which fit what I was trying to do.