by Eddie Huang
I understand my father. He wasn’t ready to give up the driveway, but it didn’t matter. I had to take it off him.
* * *
*1 Pack it up, pack it in, let me begin….
*2 Historical banking district on the water in central Shanghai.
*3 Sarcasm…the difference between the neighborhoods carved out for white people in China and black people in America is that China shows off for white people, while the nicest thing America’s dropped off in the hood are Clark Wallabees, which Ghostface has to paint blue and cream to be any type of wearable.
*4 Fear of missing out.
*5 Foreigners.
*6 This is one reason why I’m glad I live in this era versus any other. I exist at a point in history where you can actually be ignorant of the middle, create for the margins, and live in a rabbit hole because of the internet. There are so many tentacles that grow from each and every subculture that if you want, you can make a living on any point of your countercultural spiderweb of choice. That is, until your industry actually makes an impact, crosses over, and attracts new followers, who unfortunately don’t want to understand the culture from its genesis and follow the throughline, but instead step into the arena and present their Ninety-Five Theses for how your culture should now be consumed.
*7 In Mandarin, it means “service person” or “waiter.”
*8 Johnnie Walker with wang lao ji at karaoke is also the most Chinese drink.
*9 I’ve known Corky for about a year now and it’s always dope when he hits me, ’cause the first thing he asks is, “You good, man?” Not in a “What’s up?” way or just casual checking-in way, he genuinely wants to know how people are doing, and it’s rare. I respect it. I respect it a lot.
*10 Big boss style.
*11 There was a zoo in China that had a Tibetan mastiff posing as a lion in an exhibit.
*12 Tortoise jelly.
*13 Coquí frogs are native to Puerto Rico and get dumb loud hollering at shawties.
*14 Kanye.
*15 More Jadakiss.
*16 One of my favorite episodes of Curb is when Larry gets called out for giving a dismissive bow.
Xiao Zhen
Back in Chengdu, I still couldn’t read the signs and symbols.
For three days, Emery, Evan (when he wasn’t working on the taxes), and I wandered around Chengdu looking for things to do. We walked Jinli Lao Jie (Jinli Old Street) to try traditional Sichuan street foods and quickly realized it was a tourist trap serving outdated, but still delicious, renditions of dan-dan noodles and san da pao (three big cannons), glutinous rice balls ceremoniously thrown against a reverberating tray full of sesame and toasted soy.
Emery wanted to zone out at a twenty-four-hour spa theme park called Noah’s Ark, so we trekked twenty-five minutes outside the city and lamped for about $50 apiece, meals included. We walked into what looked like a giant beige savings bank–themed casino, except the crowd was decidedly Chinese Outback Steakhouse. It made some sense to me that Chinese people would model a casino after a bank, since our idea of heaven, or at least vacation, is a Chase Bank with a super buffet. There were attractive women dressed like flight attendants greeting you as you walked in, but killing the Admiral’s Lounge vibe were kids and parents pushing and shoving against your calves with rubber flotation devices on their arms racing to get to the exquisite-looking registration desk. I wasn’t sure if I was applying for a loan at Wet ’n Wild or getting a locker at Noah’s Ark, but I was intrigued.
The ideas of separation and elevation are relatively futile in China. The entire country is the Meadowlands. No matter how far up the ladder you climb, anyone short of the owner is still going to take the same shitty escalator to the same shitty bus to the same shitty PATH Train next to the same shitty person from Hoboken who’s definitely going to puke on your shitty jeans. In China, even when you pay for the upgraded amenities, you can still see, hear, and smell the people in the upper deck farting siu mai, which I liked. No matter how much you try to ascend social strata in China, you’re still anchored by the scent of egg wrappers and steamed pork wafting out of some Chinaman’s ass while you try to find a good seat in the sauna.
At Noah’s Ark, I thought about these things in the one pool without lane dividers, filled with young couples making out, families teaching their toddlers how to swim, and the ABC from New York trying to get his Michael Phelps on and swim laps. Initially, it seemed chaotic and impossible, but it worked. Of course, I couldn’t swim my laps in one linear fashion, but only by winding my way around the various enclaves in the pool. Still, I got it in and came out the pool just as swole as I would at the New York Health and Racquet Club, i.e., not very swole at all but that’s beside the point. You don’t need to privatize the pool for linear consumption. It is extremely possible to have a multi-use pool that everyone can get busy in.
The scene was similar at IKEA. At the Chengdu IKEA, you’ll see people conducting meetings in the office furniture displays where you get free refills of coffee. Instead of getting a room at Hakka Homes, people will go on dates at IKEA and lounge in the bedding section. Grandpa may just show up and fall asleep in the La-Z-Boy on a Sunday afternoon reading People’s Daily. There’s no shame in anyone’s game in Chengdu. Luxury isn’t a lifestyle; it’s just a category of things. They seem to understand better than we do that none of it matters. A bag looks better with a logo and a meeting is more productive with coffee, but whether it’s fake, real, or paid-for really doesn’t matter. Expectations and self-awareness in this arena are just social constructs hailing from some fantastically nonsensical place beyond Tibet.
While Emery and Evan ran around Noah’s Ark raiding the buffet for unlimited duck wings, I sat in the locker room. The chaos of Noah’s Ark centered me, and in my moment of clarity, I pondered calling Dena’s dad, Mr. Fusco. Over the last two weeks, I’d told Evan, Emery, my parents, and my best friends about my plans to propose. And without fail, before I got off the phone, every one of them asked, “You gonna call her dad?”
My mind had skipped a few steps, and by this point I was assuming victory, assuming acceptance of the ring, and already moving on to setting aside part of the wedding budget for a Cam’ron appearance. I’d spent so much time thinking about how I was going to break the news to my mom and then convince Cam’ron to perform at the wedding that I hadn’t thought of Dena’s dad, but here I was. Ten days out from Dena’s arrival in Chengdu, and I still hadn’t told her pops. I didn’t necessarily agree with the idea that you had to call someone’s parents. Dena wasn’t his property, and it seemed archaic, even excessively patriarchal, that you had to ask a father’s permission to marry his daughter, but the traditionalist in me told me to do it. It was the right thing to do. Regardless, I was a little shook.
No matter how friendly a white person is to me, I’m still suspicious. I just assume they’re going to find something in my life they don’t understand and disown me. Dena understood this insecurity and force-fed herself my culture whenever she could. Even if she never actually finished any of her Rosetta Stone lessons, she tried. I wasn’t sure if she was genuinely into it all, but I appreciated the effort; it’s all I could ask. But how would Mr. Fusco receive me?
Whenever I met Dena’s family, I tried to slowly reveal the secret of my Taiwanese-Chinese identity. I spent most of my time with her family focused on things we had in common: football, basketball, and, uhhh, hard work. We all like hard work? Yes, yes, and calamari? We like calamari. White cake is good? OK. Great. Do you like fruit in between the layers of white cake? No? OK, so, yeah, I hate it, too! What kind of human being puts nectarines, grapes, lychees, and strawberries in between a perfectly fine white cake? If the white cake wanted fruits in its personal space, it would have invited them! Yes, I agree, I hate fruit in my white cake as well! They are fucking trespassers!
The first time I visited Scranton with Dena, she had a dentist appointment. I sat in the waiting room watching their local news, amazed at the provinciality of it a
ll, when the dentist came out.
“Hi, are you Eddie?”
“Yeah, nice to meet you.”
He pulled his mask down, revealing his face, and shook my hand.
“I don’t mean to make this awkward, but I am so excited to meet you.”
“Oh, thanks, man.”
“We got a group of guys, the Y-Pals, we work out together every morning, and Frank is always bragging about all the things you’re doing like the restaurant, the shows, it’s really cool stuff. I know he’s excited to meet you this weekend.”
“I’m excited to get to know him, too,” I responded.
Dena walked back from the bathroom into her chair, so he put his mask back on and walked in.
“Anyway, see you soon, pal!”
I was flattered. I mean, how else can you feel? Your girlfriend’s dad is excited to meet you. That’s a good thing, right? I wasn’t necessarily sure, but it stuck with me.
That night, Dena had a rehearsal with a group she used to sing with in town. She didn’t really want to go, but her parents kept pressuring her, so she did it. While she was out, Mr. Fusco took me to a high school football game. Dena and I had only been dating about four months at the time, but without any fear or hesitation or time to get a hot dog, he got right into it.
“Ya know, Eddie, I just want Dena to be happy, but for her to be happy she needs direction. She is so talented, has so many ideas, but she just needs to pick something and go.”
“I agree. I always told people in college that declaring a major is ceremonial. It’s like going to LensCrafters. They’re all just lenses to see the world from, and they’re all going to do the same thing. You plug in your particular prescription and just go.” I had a whole gang of digestible metaphors for parents I’d developed from my interactions with probation officers and college administrators.
“Exactly, Eddie! Exactly! And there’s time in life for everything, but you have to start somewhere….Have you heard her sing, Eddie?”
“No, not yet. She doesn’t want to sing these days. I even took her to karaoke and she wouldn’t do it, ha ha.”
“Aw, geez. Geez Louise. Eddie, I don’t know what to tell ya. She has the most beautiful voice. You gotta have her sing for you.”
At the time, I thought of making an analogy between Dena’s unwillingness to sing and the female orgasm, but luckily, something, a fleeting moment of integrity, maybe, stopped me.
“Well, I feel like you can’t force it. The more you force it, the more she’ll run, so I’m just going to pretend like I don’t even know she has a voice.” Or a clitoris.
“Eddie, I’m telling you, even if it’s not her career, she should sing. She loves it and she’s great. She’s not going to be happy if she’s not doing what she loves and that girl loves to sing.”
I’ve met a lot of parents who think their kids are the best, but by the time they’re twelve or thirteen things like soccer, algebra, or American Idol reinforce the possibility of their child’s mediocrity. But Mr. Fusco deep down still felt Dena was the best. I didn’t disagree.
In regard to his daughter, Mr. Fusco came to play forty-eight minutes plus double OT and expected me to as well. It was something I wasn’t necessarily conscious of before, but as the time for my proposal drew closer, I realized that your girl’s parents are inevitably going to be part of your relationship. You can get yourself through the first date, the first year, and so on, but when you start to see yourselves as a unit, as a family, inevitably the parents are part of the relationship. You can’t deny it. You’re a fool to think you’re just marrying the person. Does anyone sell one fucking dinner fork? No! It doesn’t make sense. Who buys one fork? Bank robbers and college kids at Surprise Surprise,*1 that’s who, ’cause they have no intention of having families, but for the rest of us, you buy the set. You have dinner for four, dinner for five, and when you’re finally ready to call yourself a family, you buy a lazy Susan.
I tried to imagine going to the Fusco house during winter holiday for the next fifty years, and I wasn’t mad at the visions. They had a nice-sized pool to swim laps in without couples making out. Mr. Fusco had the ill Notre Dame mancave in the basement to watch games, and if I wasn’t going to have Chinese or Korean food on the couch, Italian and Jamaican would probably be the ones fighting it out for third place. Plus, they weren’t just cooking “Italian” food.
These Northeast Pennsylvania Fuscos pulled out all the stops. Gravy fortified with meatballs, homemade sausage, and braciole; handmade manicotti, Mrs. Fusco’s specialty; and stuffed clams. When we weren’t eating in the home, they’d take us to Old Forge, ’cause it’s not Old Forge pizza if you’re not in the Pizza Capital of the World. Dena’s brother, Joey, had a good head on his shoulders for fantasy sports, Mr. Fusco and I could agree to hate Ohio State the day after Thanksgiving, and Mrs. Fusco*2 was very curious about graffiti so I could always burn time with that. What else do you need in a biannual three-day trip to your future in-laws’ house? I enjoyed visiting them because if you grew up in America, visiting Scranton feels like going home.
It was never my home, but this 1980s red-sauce image of family is what got projected into my consciousness. Scranton was everything I understood to be normal. Families like mine never watched A Christmas Story or It’s a Wonderful Life at home—but if you slept over at your “normal” white friend’s house you saw these movies. I’d talk about it when I got home and in an effort to expose us to more American culture, my mom took us to Pizza Hut. I guess it was our P. F. Chang’s: something for foreigners to gaze on and eat appropriated victuals in an epic racialized setting.
I remember reading books in elementary school to get coupons for free personal pan pizzas at Pizza Hut just so we could sit at a table with a checkered cloth and buy rubber NCAA Final Four basketballs. To us, it felt like we were sitting in a real Italian house. We were supposedly eating Italian food. They had cheese on the table! I didn’t see cheese until my mom bought those little cow’s head squares in middle school. And like Long Island Jews eating kosher Mongolian beef, we thought we were really doing it right for an hour. Although a lot of Italian and Jewish people have assimilated and disconnected from their roots, a couple generations back they were just like us, segregated to a small corner of town, working in the service industry, doing everything they could to maintain their identities. A hundred and fifty years later, what do we remember about Italian Americans besides meatballs and gangster flicks? Vaffanculo!
Eventually, urban sprawl is going to destroy everything. As Scranton’s own Jane Jacobs*3 has shown us, project stairwells, Central Park, and Walmarts are the bane of our existence. But before their culture died in a mini-mall, I wondered, did O.G. white people back in the fifties and sixties go to the Scranton YMCA trying to swim laps, but had to zig-zag around Italians making out, Italians flapping arms, and Italians causing traffic jams? Because in the eyes of this Taiwanese-American Chinaman, Scranton is just as exotic and spectacular as Chengdu. Everybody poops, everybody dies, and one day everybody’s home gets resurrected as mise-en-scène. This could be my home, too, right? I wasn’t sure about all this, but I kept recontextualizing Dena and her family because I didn’t want to make the mistake of seeing them as the other. I loved her and, somehow, I had to find a way to love her family. I just needed to understand them first.
Sitting there in the locker room at Noah’s Ark, I bit the bullet and called Mr. Fusco. My heart rate was on ten like I just took a dab*4 as the phone rang. By the third ring, I thought about hanging up, but then I heard a click. I was on.
“Hey! Mr. Fusco, how’s it going?”
“I’m great, Eddie, I’m great. How are you? How’s China?”
“It’s great, it’s great. It’s, uhhh, China!”
“Great. Well, that’s great. I’m glad you called.”
“Oh yeah? That’s great.” We were the Two Stooges having a “great” contest.
“Yeah, yeah, you know, Dena told me she was going to China, and I w
anted to talk to you about it.”
By now, I was wild nervous. Palms sweating, eyes darting, heart raging, mind racing trying to figure how I was going to ask him if he was cool with me proposing to his daughter.
“Great, great, yeah, let’s talk about China!”
“Well, where are you all staying?”
Fuck. I never thought about what Mr. Fusco would say if he realized we were staying at a by-the-hour hotel in southwestern China.
“Oh, we’re staying at this GREAT place, Hakka Homes, lots of students, young people, it’s a real community at Hakka Homes.”
“Great. Great. Because ya know, Eddie, this idea of Dena in China, I’m just not that excited about it. I tell ya, I have to be honest, I’m not excited at all about it.”
I hadn’t even gotten to the proposal part, and he was already uncomfortable with her just visiting me in China.
“OK, uhhh, well, that’s not good. That’s not good. What makes you not excited about it?”
“Listen, it’s just a movie, but have you ever seen The Firm?”
“The Tom Cruise movie?”
“Yup. Yup. That one, Eddie, The Firm….It was on last night, and I gotta tell ya, it doesn’t have me very excited about my daughter in China.”
I’d never seen The Firm, but I remember the cover had Tom Cruise in a suit running from something while holding a briefcase, so I just went with it. I guess Mr. Fusco was worried Dena would be running in a suit with a briefcase in China?
“Well, I’m here in China and my family is Chinese and it’s not as bad as Tom Cruise makes it out to be.”
“But, Eddie, it’s a communist country and, look, you know I’m an open-minded guy, but come on. You’ve seen The Firm….I don’t have to tell you how bad it can get. It’s not the same. It’s not America.”*5
I accepted that Mr. Fusco was nervous. I understood that these propagandistic, xenophobic visions of China represented the entirety of most of America’s knowledge of China. I respected that he was telling me exactly why he was tight, because some other parent with liberal guilt probably would have withheld the communist part of the commentary, only to channel those feelings into something like lead-based paint or bird flu, but I was pissed. There were a million reasons for me to not like Scranton, but I never mentioned the fucking Exorcist!*6 Also, how can you be proud of everything I do in your country, brag to the dentist, but be diametrically opposed to the country and culture my ancestors are from without ever understanding it? Regardless, I was committed to getting off the phone gracefully, but not without trolling him a bit.
