Stale off the Boat with Eddie Huang

Notes: For this four-hour assignment, I watched episodes 3 and 4 of the new sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat, with 3 other Asian-American friends and afterwards debated whether or not the show was realistic, racist, or any good at all. Then, I went home and wrote a review.

Stale off the Boat with Eddie Huang

By episode four of the “groundbreaking” Asian-American sitcom, I’m starting to see what Eddie’s angry about.

image from Hollywood Reporter

Fresh Off the Boat, a new ABC sitcom based off the adolescence of Eddie Huang, big restaurateur (he owns the popular Baohaus in the East Village) and even bigger personality (he’s a regular on VICE and prone to dropping four-letter-words along with extended Frankenstein ones of his own creation left and right in every interview), drew some controversy for using the racial slur “chink” in the pilot episode. The scene goes like this: in white-washed Orlando, Florida, where young Eddie is an outcast newcomer, the only other kid of color, a black boy, pushes him out of the way in the lunch line and onto the bottom of the middle school totem pole– a place he used to inhabit de-facto.

In isolation, it’s a simple act of pre-teen territorial marking, some standard name calling pushing the biggest button an 11-year old can think of, the race card. But here’s the thing. It’s more complicated than that– what little Eddie, whose idols are all black rappers with big swagger, living the FBGM life– wants most is to be accepted by his white schoolmates. To be a Lunchable, pizza flavor. Walter, the offending name-caller, says it best, after Eddie chooses the shaggy haired popular crowd over him, with a roll of his eyes: “What kind of country is this, where a white kid and an asian kid bond over a black guy?”.

I find myself asking the same thing about the show. Despite all the racially colored, exaggerated antics of the Huangs, there is very little substance addressing the so many obvious racial questions we’re left wanting to ask. Why is the show called Fresh Off the Boat, a racialized slur that in my experiences is far more common and loaded than the above offense, when Eddie’s family is fresh off the boat at all, but fresh off a car drive from another major U.S. city? Did little Eddie have black friends in DC, where his family recently moved from and which is significantly less white-washed than Orlando?

Hip hop is so clearly an inspiration to Huang, but we only ever see it repurposed in the hands of white or asian kids. What young Eddie aspires to the most is the image he’s formed in his head of black masculinity. He wants honeys (literal Honeys, in Episode Four, where he tries to win over his sexy new (married adult) neighbor– was that a nod to Biggie’s lyrics?) playing him close and a soundtrack to go with his swagger (albeit currently played on a boombox by his grandmother).

It makes great sitcom fodder, because to the viewer, there’s nothing further away from a black rapper than the fat little asian kid, eating tofu and being told to do his math exercises by his Dragon-lady mother and his contentedly obedient younger siblings. Hilarity and entertainment ensues, but doesn’t the fact that we the viewer find it comedic at all, affirm, on some level, that the struggle is real?

For Huang, the real life one, the struggle is exactly that: what he calls “breaking the bamboo ceiling”, or the stereotype of model minority. The show, although at times endearing and “aww”-inspiring in an overstated way (parents making up after a fight, cute child actors being cute) fails to do that. At most, it puts a more human face to a heavily-stereotyped, fantasy Asian-American family. Which isn’t to call it a trivial feat: after all, this is the first Asian family on TV ever.

Eddie, as expected, had harsher words: “The network tried to turn my memoir into a cornstarch sitcom and me into a mascot for America. I hated that”[1]. As for me, I’m left wondering what all this means to the little Asian kids out who grew up listening to Biggie and Nas and Tupac (if we must include the West Coast) to fuel their swagger. What about girls, who have two ceilings to break: bamboo and glass (that’s another thing; aside from the mother figure, this show is a Boy’s world). Are we all just material for laugh tracks?

Still, any depiction of Asian-Americans that brings at least more than one-dimension to the unexplored arena can be a welcome one. Despite all the unanswered questions and the heavy-handed reliance on tropes, it’s a step in, if not the right direction, at least some sort of movement. As for the opinion of this little “Chinkstronaut”? I go home, pull out my laptop, and blast some Notorious B.I.G.

In the words of Biggie Smalls: It’s all good, baby baby.

1http://www.vulture.com/2015/01/eddie-huang-fresh-off-the-boat-abc.htm

2 thoughts on “Stale off the Boat with Eddie Huang

  1. Sophie, nicely done. You gracefully blend your personal experience watching the show with Eddie Huang’s comments and broader questions about the sitcom genre’s ability (or inability) to actually address substantive questions.

    You mention in the beginning that you and your friends debated the show after watching – I’d be interested in hearing more about those conversations as part of this piece.

  2. I read your piece after it was mentioned by Alexis, who knows I’ve been watching Fresh Off the Boat and following the adult Eddie Huang. What I hear you saying, to paraphrase, is that FOB is cheap with its humor and material (“exaggerated antics”), but doesn’t have the depth to explore the underlying concepts/conflicts that it should be highlighting. So the cognitive dissonance a viewer feels when seeing little Eddie Huang quoting Notorious B.I.G. is brushed off. As you say, “there’s nothing further away from a black rapper than the fat little Asian kid.” The situation becomes a joke and further reinforces a model minority stereotype.

    I hear where you’re coming from, and I’m also a bit salty. But the show may deserve more credit that you’re giving it. The most profound point that the show could make, and what Big Eddie Huang works toward in his memoir IMO, is that identity is a choice. That it’s legitimate for a hyphen-american to feel a kinship with a culture that’s not made for them. Perhaps this is an optimistic view, but when Little Eddie shows that he identifies with black culture, it’s not only for cheap jokes. He’s quoting Biggie to articulate his thoughts to his parents and relates his own experiences to the stories told through rap. Little Eddie isn’t just trying on a hat for fun, even if it’s occasionally funny: he’s parsing life through a lens that makes sense to him. (Eddie makes this point much clearer himself in his interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates at the NY historical society…even his memoir quotes Tupac next to Emerson).

    Compare to Fresh Prince of Bel-air for a second, with Will Smith romping through his school with a backwards hat and an inside-out blazer. The premise is a clash of classes, which is funny. The naivest interpretation is that Will doesn’t, and will never, fit into this upper-class society by virtue of his background. He’s just a hoodlum playing in the wrong court. A better and more common interpretation IMO is that what we take for granted (Bel-air in this case) is pretty absurd, and that Will is just trying to survive with what makes sense to him. The clash leads to cheap laughs, but the deeper point isn’t completely over people’s heads. My point is, I don’t think FOB reinforces the model-minority (or “one story”) idea as much as you claim.

    And let’s not expect too much of this show. They could always do a better job, and I agree it’s already great to have more Asian representation in mainstream US media. To simply not be destructive is already a step forward (shout-out to Margaret Cho). That said, FOB is only a half hour on TV, designed for consumption by Middle America. To have the courage to even put a different face of AAs forward (they could’ve easily had two doctor parents) and challenge the idea of being a docile minority group (Eddie’s reaction to being called a chink) is admirable. That’s not stale, it’s pretty fresh. This is especially admirable when it’s hard to dive deep — Eddie Huang’s life, raw and unfiltered, is not safe for TV, even if he were white.

    All that said, I’m looking forward to seeing how this show progresses and I’d love to discuss this further sometime!

Comments are closed.