Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

“Yes, yes, he gives the shot, right?”

  “Well, yeah, he gives people shots or treatment before they go into surgery.”

  “Ahhh, like the novocaine.”

  “Yeah, sort of like that.”

  “Oh, great! I know the novocaine! I get it all the time at the dentist.”

  “Well, that’s, that’s … fantastic.”

  “OK! Great. Well, I will see you tomorrow. We pick up Eddie around three?”

  I mean, people loved my mom and all the parents said nice things, but I would just laugh my ass off inside listening to her try to show people she knew what was up. That novocaine shit had me rolling.

  I walked up to Jeff’s room—they called it a loft because it was upstairs and had a low ceiling; I couldn’t believe my eyes. Everywhere you walked: toys, games, huge television, stuffed animals, it was like living in a Toys ‘R’ Us. I remember thinking to myself that if I died, I wanted to come back a white man. These fuckers had EVERYTHING. I didn’t know what to play first, I was so confused. I literally rolled around in video games, read the instructions, looked at all the GamePro magazines, and then went to the bathroom and wiped my ass with their fancy toilet paper just to see how it felt. When you washed your hands, they had hand towels so you didn’t have to wipe your face with the towel your brother wiped his balls with ten minutes ago. For real, if you are a broke-ass kid, you are wiping your face with your brother’s balls. I felt like some wild gremlin child living in Chinese hell after going to their house.

  By that point, I was ready to convert. I wanted to be white so fucking bad. But then dinner happened. All of us sat down. I had never eaten at a white person’s house, but I just figured they ate pizza, hot dogs, or something like that. After a few minutes, Jeff’s mom came out of the kitchen with two bowls. One bowl was filled with goopy orange stuff. For a second, I thought they might be little boiled intestines in an orange sauce, which I could get down with, but on closer inspection they were unlike any intestines I’d ever seen. The other bowl was gray and filled with a fibrous material mixed with bits of celery. I thought to myself, These white people like really mushy food.

  She also gave us each two pieces of bread, the same plain Wonder Bread I saw at school. Jeff started wiping the gray stuff on the bread. I didn’t want to come off like an idiot so I did the same thing. I put the other slice on top, lifted up, and went to take a bite, but holy shit, that smell. What the fuck was in this? Jeff and his brothers couldn’t get enough but I was scared. I took a deep breath, clutched my orange juice, and forced myself to take a bite. Right on cue, gag reflex, boom went the orange juice. I couldn’t hide it anymore. I had to ask.

  “What is that, man?”

  “You’ve never had tuna fish sandwiches?”

  “No, never. Where do you get it?”

  “At the grocery store, you want to see the can?”

  “OK, but what’s the orange stuff?”

  “Macaroni and cheese.”

  “What’s macaroni?”

  “It’s pasta.”

  I didn’t know what pasta was, but was really starting to feel like a dumb-ass so I didn’t ask. The shit was so nasty. We never ate cheese and it stunk like feet. A lot of Chinese people are lactose intolerant, so it’s just not something we eat normally. We drink soy milk instead of cow’s milk and stir-fry our noodles instead of covering them with cheese. I suddenly realized that converting to white wouldn’t be easy, but still, that toilet paper was like silk. I tried to force myself to eat the macaroni and cheese but literally barfed it through my nose. Jeff and his brothers couldn’t believe it. I realized no matter how many toys they had, I couldn’t cross over. I’d much rather eat Chinese food and split the one good dinosaur with my brother. Macaroni is to Chinamen as water is to gremlins, teeth are to blow jobs, and Asian is to American. It just didn’t fit.

  * Xiao Wen was my original Chinese name. When I started getting in trouble around third grade, my parents went to a fortuneteller, who named me Xiao Tsen, and when it got really bad in middle school, I was reborn for the third time as Xiao Ming. But to this day, Phil calls me by my first name: Xiao Wen.

  † Five words: RANDALL HILL SHOOT ’EM UP.

  ‡ R.I.P. ODB.

  § That’s how you spell “Jordan” in Chinglish. His nickname was Kong Zhong Fei Ren = Mid-Air Flying Man.

  ‖ When I was fifteen, we were hanging out at this McDonald’s parking lot when these two guys in a Camaro rolled through. Both were twenty-three years old but liked the girls we were with so they started a fight with my boy, Lil’ Cra. Cra got the first punch: cracked it on the guy’s head and broke his hand. I had seen it happen from inside McDonald’s so I ran out with a tee-ball bat and handled that. Readers, pay attention, if you tryin’ to fuck people up, leave the baseball bat, bring the tee-ball stick, you’ll always beat them to the kneecaps.

  a What up, Woody? Annie Hall … you already know B.

  3.

  ROSETTA STONE

  I always liked sneakers. You had to look fresh playing ball, but I didn’t have to have the illest pair. That is, until I saw what Chaz Crowfoot had on his feet that day.… I still remember creeping through the basketball court, and BAM! There they were and I could never go back to life without the knowledge that they existed: fire-red Jordan Vs with the lace locks. It was the first time I remember ever wanting to jack someone. The shits were so fresh, it was like having cars on your feet. That silver 3M tongue was dancing, light just bouncing off all angles, calling my name with the Jumpman in the middle. I had to have them.

  Of course, my parents never bought us anything, but I thought maybe, just maybe, this one time, things would change. I went home that day on a mission. When I walked into the house, my mother was waiting and I seized the moment.

  “Mom, I never ever ask for shoes,” I started, figuring I should remind her of my silent sacrifices to date. “But I gotta get the Jordan Vs.”

  “Eh! I like Michael Qiao dan, how much are they?”

  “I don’t know, but everyone says they have them at Belz Outlet Mall.”

  “OK, we go after dinner.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, after dinner!”

  I thought to myself, I can’t believe this, but I’ll take it! The truth is, I probably should have started the “Please Buy Me Jordan Vs” tour about two months earlier, but I blocked out those thoughts and tried to run the two-minute drill. Whatever mind games I could play, I tried. I opened doors for everyone, I took out the garbage, I let Emery out of the car first. I swore to the god I didn’t believe in that if I got those damn shoes I would do this forever.*

  We pulled up to City Sports at the Belz Outlet Mall and didn’t even have to look for them: there they were, visible from twenty feet away, in the right front window on a five-foot pedestal with two platforms. The white ones on top, black ones on bottom. 3M tongue dancin’. Even Emery and Evan were in awe. They were the hardest sneakers I’d ever seen. Hands down, all time, O.G. Jordan V Fire Reds no doubt, no question, illest pair of shoes ever made. The reason you love sneakers changes as you grow. Some people follow players and cop the signature shoe. In high school, it’s a style thing. And when you get your first job, you buy every Jordan in sight just to make up for lost time or cheap parents. But when you’re a ten-year-old, there’s one reason you buy J’s: to jump higher.

  I hated Michael Jordan with a passion. I was a Barkley and Ewing and later on Chris Webber or AI fan, all day. But Jordan could jump over a backboard and was on his way to six rings, so it went without saying that he had the best technology in his shoes. The Jordans were packaged with these cards that would tell you about the materials with a level of seriousness that matched the Manhattan Project. Whether it was Spike’s, Mars’s, Phil’s (Knight), or Jordan’s fault I can’t say, but we swore we could jump higher with J’s. They were a rite of passage. I remember when my friends got Jordans we’d lower the hoop to seven feet and try to dunk. Every ten-year-old back then thought you needed the Jordans
if you were gonna yam it someday. The shoes were literally your hopes and dreams in a box. My mom took one look at the shoes and she knew, too.

  “Hmm, that’s a pretty shoe.”

  “It looks expensive,” my father said.

  “Dad, it’s an investment! I can go to the NBA if you buy me these!”

  “Ha, ha, man, you suck at basketball!”

  “That’s because you buy me shitty shoes!”

  “No, it’s because you’re fat!”

  I saw a sales rep standing around in the store so I asked him for a pair of size 7 Jordan Vs, but before he went off to the back, my dad had a question.

  “How much are these shoes?”

  Before it even started, it was over.

  “A hundred dollars! No, no, no, no, no, that’s too expensive.”

  “Dad, just let me try them on, you’ll see, they’re worth it!”

  Of course, Emery had to chime in.

  “A hundred dollars is crazy! We never buy anything for a hundred dollars!”

  “Shut up, Emery!”

  “Hey! Don’t yell at your brother, now you definitely aren’t getting those shoes!”

  The sales rep didn’t move. There would be no Jordan Vs that day. I didn’t even get to try them on. But my dad walked over to the wall of shoes and found a pair of orange and white Air Force high-tops.

  “Who wears these shoes?”

  “Charles Barkley! They’re only sixty-five dollars, too,” said the sales rep.

  “Hey, you love Charles Barkley, why don’t you try these shoes.”

  “Dad, they’re heavy! You can’t jump in those shoes.”

  “Eh, these commercials are lies. No shoe is going to make you jump higher when you’re this fat anyway.”

  This is how it always went. Before we even had a chance to believe in Santa Claus, my dad told us he was fake. Santa Claus, Jesus, the Tooth Fairy, and Jordan Vs never existed in our house. When I ran in after a touch football triumph and told them I’d play quarterback for the Redskins, they laughed at me. When they beat that dream out of me, I said I’d be a sportscaster on ESPN and I’ll never forget what my father said:

  “They’ll never let someone with a face like you on television.”

  To this day, I wake up at times, look in the mirror, and just stare, obsessed with the idea that the person I am in my head is something entirely different than what everyone else sees. That the way I look will prevent me from doing the things I want; that there really are sneetches with stars and I’m not one of them. I touch my face, I feel my skin, I check my color every day, and I swear it all feels right. But then someone says something and that sense of security and identity is gone before I know it.

  THAT SUMMER, MY cousin Allen came to visit from Virginia and he had on the new Bo Jacksons. I didn’t understand. We were all the same family, we were all Chinese, why did he have stuff and we didn’t? I don’t think it was money, ’cause at the time, things were starting to come around at Atlantic Bay; Dad always wore nice suits to work but Emery and I wore his old hand-me-downs or Allen’s old stuff that Aunt Beth gave us. Allen was three years older than me so he knew just about everything before I did, and he even had a white girlfriend. I really looked up to Allen, but he didn’t like me because when we went to Taco Bell, Aunt Beth would get the family pack of tacos that had half soft tacos and half hard shell. We both liked the hard shells, but I was younger so Aunt Beth made Allen eat the soft ones.

  I got to hang out with Allen a lot that summer. He had tons of jokes, made fun of everyone, and had the best cut-downs. Most of the time, he made fun of Emery, Phil, or me, but I didn’t care—he was funny! He showed me my first Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue with Kathy Ireland in the artificial grass skirt by the artificial pool. One day toward the end of summer, he gave me something. A cassette tape. I put it in my deck, pressed play, and I’ll never forget what came out the speakers.

  “This is dedicated to the n!gg@s that was down since day one … [click clack] Welcome to Death Row.”

  It was The Chronic and, just like when I first spotted the Jordans, life would never be the same again. These rappers on the record talked like my parents when they were fighting, dropping words like “fuck,” “bitch,” and “shit,” but they had new slang, too, like “eat a dick.” I was all about this Chronic shit and didn’t even know what it was.

  “Yo, what is this, man?!?!”

  “The Chronic.”

  “It sounds like rap, but not rap.”

  “It’s rap, but it’s hip-hop.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Hip-hop is that real shit. Rap is just … rap.”

  “Word … I like this hip-hop! You got more of it?”

  “Yeah, Doggystyle comes out soon and I’ll send it to you.”

  When I got Doggystyle, my dad took it away.

  “What is this stuff? These dogs are having sex on the back! Who is this Doggy Dog?”

  YOU’RE PROBABLY IMAGINING my dad as this maladjusted, socially inept FOB who didn’t know what he was saying to me. He was just the opposite. At home, he’d walk around in his underwear and house sandals, but if he had a meeting out came the Jheri curl, gator shoes, and Cartier sunglasses. Dude was a smooth-talkin’ motherfucker, who chose to come with the hammer. I didn’t understand why he had to be such a dick. I didn’t even really have to do anything serious. If I talked back to him, he’d step to me. I never backed down. I’d stand my ground, defend myself. But whether he was wrong or right, it usually ended in an ass-beating.

  One time, we went to Busch Gardens. For half the day it was one of the best trips we’d ever been on as a family. We never liked going to Disney because the rides sucked, but Busch Gardens was like Six Flags in Tampa Bay—less about creating worlds around licensed properties and more about riding big-ass roller coasters. I was still crazy high and giddy from riding the Kumba and if there was ever a day I loved my dad, love in the form of sixty-dollar day passes, this was it. But, before that feeling stuck, he took us all into this medieval souvenir shop he found. The shop sold the most fucked-up souvenirs: they had replicas of weapons and torture items. I can’t remember the names of everything, but the one that I’d end up seeing a lot was a three-foot-long leather whip. My dad saw the shit in a bin, picked it up, and turned to me and Emery:

  “This is for the next time you cause trouble!”

  It didn’t end there. He kept walking around the store with a wild grin on his face and stopped in front of this hard, heavy, three-foot rubber alligator with skin dotted by sharp points on the scales. The rubber was hard, cold, and flexible. You could hold the head, whip the body back, and just come with it. He copped both. The whip wasn’t so bad. He could get us from a distance with it, but it was light. Nothing more than a belt, really. But that alligator …

  To Americans, this may seem sick, but to first- or second-generation Chinese, Korean, Jamaican, Dominican, Puerto Rican immigrants, whatever, if your parents are FOBs, this is just how it is. You don’t talk about it, you can’t escape it, and in a way it humbles you the rest of your life. There’s something about crawling on the floor with your pops tracking you down by whip that grounds you as a human being. The bruises and puncture wounds from the scales of the alligator were clearly excessive, but I didn’t think anything was wrong with my dad hitting us. Emery and I were troublemakers. Just like he was.

  The thing my dad’s employees, American friends, and associates didn’t know is that my dad was a motherfucking G in Taiwan. His mother, my grandmother, was the daughter of a county mayor of Hunan in the last dynasty. She lived with us in Florida for a while and ended up hanging on until she was 101 years old. The last memory I have with her is hanging out in the hospital watching George Mason play Florida in the 2006 Final Four. At that point, she couldn’t talk, and had bedsores, but my dad’s family wasn’t the type to be overly somber or pretentious. They were strong, sharp, independent thinkers, especially in comparison to the bougie Taiwanese women on my
mom’s side. My grandmother was already over 100. We knew she was old, we knew she wouldn’t be here forever. So we watched the game.

  My grandfather was in the Internal Ministry of Taiwan when Chiang Kai-shek first fled China. He spoke seven languages and was from Hunan, just like my grandmother. For those that don’t know, Hunan produces revolutionaries out of proportion to its size. Mao and General Tso are both Hunan natives, which leads a lot of people to say it’s the food that gives men from Hunan their “fiery” disposition. In Chinese culture, you are what your father is. My mother’s family is from Shandong, but my father’s from Hunan, so I am Hunanese.

  Once when I was a kid, I had a meal of Wu Gin Tsang Wan, a spicy pig intestine casserole, with Uncle James, the second brother in my dad’s family. On the lazy Susan on the dining room table, there was this metal bowl sitting on top of a Sterno keeping it hot. Inside the bowl were pig intestines, green onions, garlic, lots of chili oil, and pig’s blood. Wu Gin Tsang Wan is one of my favorite dishes to eat over rice because the flavors—the spice, the herbs, the blood—seep into the rice really well.

  “Hey, this little guy really likes the pig intestines, huh?”

  “He eats anything. Look how fat he is!”

  “Ha, ha, that’s not nice, he’s your son.”

  “Like he doesn’t know. When he walks, it looks like he has an air conditioner for an ass.”

  I wasn’t fat, they were just dicks. But my dad just loved telling the air conditioner joke and this time I didn’t give a shit, I just kept eating pig intestines. But the Sterno was a little too hot and some pieces weren’t coming loose from the casserole bowl. When I pulled at one piece with my chopsticks, I upset the bowl and a splash of hot chili oil flew into my eye. While I screamed in pain, my uncle pointed at me and laughed.

  “Ha, ha, hey, Soosin, xiao Shandong ren yong yan jing ci la jiao!”

  Translation: “Hey, Louis, look at the little Shandong kid eating chili with his eye!”

  “Ha, ha, wan ba dan.”