Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

  While this was going on, she’d lower the window so other people could see, and I’d have to slap myself in the face the whole ride home. It was the most embarrassing shit I had to do as a kid. If I didn’t hit myself hard enough, she’d have Emery slap me, too. But that motherfucker had way too much fun doing it and my mom would end up smacking him when we got home, too.

  Of course, there was Emery, as always next to me getting hit, with no front teeth,‡ smiling the whole time. My parents always wanted things to be serious and the kids to be remorseful, but Emery loved drama, fights, jokes, etc. Anything irregular, that kid was all about it. If anyone in the family had off-kilter romances, strange habits, or skeletons in their closet, Emery was most excited to recount them. Things like supermodels with athlete’s foot interest Emery. He wasn’t a gossip; he just saw everyone for the weirdos they were and not the normal people they pretended to be. So when the fucked-up shit came to the surface, he rejoiced. Eddie vs. Pre-Trig, Tyson vs. Holyfield, Tiger vs. Ambient? He loves that shit.

  “You think this is funny, huh? I’m taking you off the football team!”

  “You can’t take me off the team!”

  “Oh, yeah? Who’s going to pick you up from school?”

  “I’ll get a ride from Dave!”

  My mom called Dave’s mom and Coach Rock; I was off the team, just like that. I didn’t think anyone would care. Despite all of Coach Rock’s cheering during practice, I never played in a game. Yet, when I told my friends Peter and Andrew, they reacted differently.

  “What? You can’t quit!”

  “I’m not quitting, man, my mom told Coach not to let me play.”

  “Dude, Coach is gonna flip.”

  “He never even lets me play in the game, man. You guys will be fine.”

  “Who do you think he’s been talking about all season? Every day he tells us to practice like you.”

  “So practice like me, ha, ha. Just run until you puke.”

  For two weeks, I didn’t get to play. I just sat around at home doing math homework and hung out with Dave when he got home. That Thursday, around 8 P.M., the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Is Mrs. Huang available?”

  “Coach Rock? Hey, man!”

  “Eddie, put your mom on the damn phone.”

  “Mom! It’s Coach Rock!”

  “What the hell does he want? He ruined your life!”

  My mom took math pretty seriously and was sick of football, but Coach Rock had a way. He was actually the advanced math teacher for eighth and ninth graders so he talked to the seventh grade teachers about my troubles. I wasn’t even doing that badly. I mean, I got C’s. He really respected my mom. Most parents put sports before academics, so it was refreshing.

  “Mom! What’d Coach say?”

  “He say you work hard at football. But you don’t work hard at math.”

  “I can work hard at math, though!”

  “He says he guarantee you work hard at math so I let you play football.”

  That Friday, I came back to the team. I walked into the classroom where we usually had the pregame meeting and it was all dark. They had just finished screening Rudy.

  “Eddie’s back, guys!”

  It was insane. Motion picture shit. We never watched movies before games, but Coach always talked about Rudy. I don’t remember much about that moment or what was said because I was just so fucking happy to be back and wanted to get to the game. We strapped on our helmets and ran onto the field. That game, even my dad was in the stands. I don’t know what Coach Rock told my parents or the team, but something was in the Gatorade. It was my first game Pops ever came to and the whole team seemed to be in on something. With one minute left in the fourth quarter, Coach Rock called my name.

  “Huang! Get in there! Right defensive tackle, let’s go!”

  The offensive and defensive linemen all lost their shit. We were a unit and I was the little guy. Kwame, Dave, and this other big guy who played left tackle started the cheer.

  “Eddie, Eddie, Eddie …”

  That shit was craze. Coach Rock basically recreated Rudy with a short, fat defensive tackle that should have been in Karate Kid. I was so excited, I lined up over the wrong guy. I was supposed to be lined up over the guard and I lined up over the center. They saw I was out of position so they ran the ball my direction, but, somehow, some way, I came off the ball faster than I’d ever fired in my whole life. There I was in the back-field, past the whole line, staring at the quarterback. I should have just tackled the fucker, but I was so used to tackling running backs that I waited for him to hand the ball off so I could hit the running back. He saw me in the hole so he cut right and our defensive end gang tackled him with me.

  “Ahhh! We got him, Huang!”

  By this time, the whole stadium was screaming my name and we just went nuts. I stayed in for two more plays, until the game ended. We ran straight toward the locker room, but there was my dad at the side of the field.

  “Ha, ha, you suck, man!”

  “What do you mean I suck! Everyone was cheering for me, Dad!”

  “You should have tackled the quarterback! You let him hand the ball off, ha, ha.”

  I always believed him when he said I sucked … but this time, just this once, I knew he was wrong. He had to be. I played a logic game in my head. Like that shit teachers told you about philosophers and snub noses; I took my dad’s assumption. If I tried my best, puked my guts out, did my math homework, and fired off the line as fast as I possibly could and STILL sucked, I should probably die on the spot right there. But I didn’t want to drop dead. I mean come on! I was having the best ten minutes of my life. Even if I sucked, who cares?! We lost the game, but the whole stadium was cheering my name. Shit, our whole team stunk, but we went out there every week and had a really good fucking time. I didn’t have an abacus like Grandpa, but I was pretty confident in my calculation. Either my dad was wrong or he didn’t matter. For the first time, I thought to myself, Even Dad can’t ruin this for me, and then I ran to the locker room where my teammates were waiting for me.

  THE FUN WASN’T over after football season. My birthday is March 1. That year my parents threw me a party in the backyard. It was the best birthday party I ever had. All my friends from school, Dave, his friends, and some guys from the team came. My mom went so far as to buy us water guns, balloons, all that good shit. Halfway through, in came the boogie man.

  “What, I’m not invited to this party?”

  Billie G. and Billie F. Before I could say anything, they started stomping out my balloons and kicking around our chairs, my presents, the tables.

  I’d had enough. I wanted to tear Billie G.’s fucking eyes out, but I knew I couldn’t fight him one-on-one without getting my ass kicked, which, even in my rage, I knew was not going to be a good look. So I cleared my head and did what any Zen master would. I waited for them to finish. My friends were all smaller than Billie G., and two years younger so they just stood around, too. Dave was the biggest one, but he’d already left the party. My mom saw the whole thing, but in classic Jessica Huang fashion, she didn’t bail me out. She wanted to see me fight through it. The boys finished laying waste to my party, streamers wrapped around their legs, hands smeared with cupcake icing.

  “This shit sucks, man. Happy birthday, Huang, ha, ha.”

  The Billies left. Their dumb asses thought it was over, so they just walked next door and stood around on Billie F.’s driveway, laughing about what they’d done. But it wasn’t over.

  I took all the water guns and put bleach in them. We didn’t want to permanently disable them—none of us wanted to end up in juvie—so we diluted the bleach but kept just enough so that it’d burn. I gave my friends the water guns and drew up a plan like Joe Gibbs. We ran up on the Billies on that driveway and as soon as they turned and saw us, we shot bleach right into their faces.

  “Oh my God, dude, it burns, it burns! There’s something in the water!”

  Th
e assholes tried to run, but we had them circled. While they were distracted, Emery opened one of the windows to Billie F.’s bedroom and put our hose through it and flooded his whole room. Dave saw it going down and joined in with his brother. Kids from the whole neighborhood came out because we all hated the Billies. Even Ryan Sistar, who lived three streets down, heard about what was going on and ran over with his water gun late, waving the loaded Super Soaker around, looking for trouble.

  All of a sudden Billie F.’s mom came out of their house and confronted my mom.

  “What is going on! Your kids are fucking flooding my house! What kind of parenting is this!”

  As this happened, one of my friends started spray painting Billie F.’s driveway with smiley faces. My mother looked at Billie F.’s mom for a second and started sputtering.

  “You, you have a shitty nose job!”

  I couldn’t believe it: my mom felt no remorse and just blurted out some shit about this woman’s nose job. The Billies were running in circles with their faces on fire, but I wasn’t done. I wanted something they’d taken from me. People say kids always tease and that it’s an innocent rite of passage, but it’s not. Every time an Edgar or Billie called me “chink” or “Chinaman” or “ching chong” it took a piece of me. I didn’t want to talk about it, and kept it to myself. I clenched my teeth waiting to get even. Unlike others who let it eat them up and took it to their graves, I refused to be that Chinese kid walking everywhere with his head down. I wanted my dignity, my identity, and my pride back; I wanted them to know there were repercussions to the things they said. There were no free passes on my soul and everything they stole from me I decided I’d take back double.

  I had a Russian wolfhound named Nick, who hated the Billies. Nick was a funny dog. If he saw people hit me playing ball or just fighting in the neighborhood, he’d go after them. My dad kept him on a leash because neighbors complained and tried to put him in the pound. But that day, I let Nick out on the Billies and he chased Billie G. around the whole neighborhood. Kid never came around again. Justice was served. Welcome to America.

  * The hardest MC in the game: “I’m the best mang, I deed it.”

  † It’s killa, dog. (Cam’ron, “Dipset Anthem”)

  ‡ Our last year in D.C., Emery tripped in the parking lot of Better Homes and slammed his teeth on the curb. It took years for them to grow back, so all through middle school I have this memory of Emery with no front teeth, looking like one of the Red Wings.

  6.

  MO MONEY,

  MO PROBLEMS

  When I was in seventh grade, I met my first Asian homie, Joey Vano. We’d hang out at his house almost every weekend, which was perfect because mine was an embarrassing shitshow, but sometimes my parents would insist he come to the crib because they were worried that I was a burden on his family.

  Every time Joey came, I’d tell myself it would be different. But no matter what I did, how good I was, or how hard I tried to keep Emery under wraps, my mom went apeshit like clockwork. Every Saturday morning before we even woke up for cartoons, Moms would be acting a fool. She’d come busting out of her room yelling, throwing pots, calling my dad an asshole, telling everyone she was going to crash the car into a tree. We never got to sleep in past eight or nine because that’s when the Mom Show came on.

  Mom acted out even more when guests were at the crib ’cause she knew it’d embarrass Dad even more. Who was my mom? A Chinese-American woman in the nineties with no career, three kids, and a husband that didn’t pay attention. I felt her pain. It pissed all of us off how much my dad would cater to guests, outsiders, and Chinese uncles with five rings and a perm, but break out the bullwhip for his own fam. After all their brawls, there was nothing Moms could say that would hurt him, so the best she could do was embarrass him when guests were at the crib, even if the guest was a twelve-year-old Filipino kid who was about to watch a bomb named Jessica obliterate everything he knew about moms, women, or any organism carrying eggs, for that matter.

  I had to get away.

  Joey loved basketball, playing Twisted Metal, surfing, and alternative rock. I would tell him, “Damn, son, you Filipino, you should be the b-boy, rockin’ snap-backs, listening to Pac, not me!” but that was Orlando. There weren’t many Filipinos in Orlando so they didn’t have an underground smell-road, no places to gather and just be Filipino. Every year, what Filipinos there were would go to Lake Cane Park and roast a pig, eat some adobo and garlic rice, but they weren’t militant about maintaining their identity like the Chinese were. Joey was free to just do him, which meant being an easygoing dude with shoulder-length hair and grunge steez. Also, his brother, Carl, had this dope Italian girlfriend, Joanne, so he didn’t make fun of white people as much as me. I was rocking Starter jackets and Levi’s, but Joey was the opposite; he rocked Airwalks, flannel, and things I’d never seen. I remember this fool listening to Alanis Morissette and I’d ask, “Man, you can just go outside and hear white women whine in the cul-de-sac, why you paying money to hear that shit?” But that was Joey, Filipino in Orlando with a California state of mind.

  Joey was happier than me. That might’ve been because he had dope parents. They gave him everything he needed and most of what he wanted, but also made sure he got his work done and was a good kid. I thought to myself, Well, that’s easy. Why is it so hard at my crib? Why can’t we just wake up, eat some SPAM, watch the Lakers, and be like Filipinos. Then I realized, I’d rather stand in a horse stance holding a twenty-pound bucket of rice over my head than rep the Lakers.

  I loved going to Joey’s house. When I met white kids’ parents, they always asked me bullshit questions about race, where our family was “from,” and used words like Oriental. I was like a toy in their house, but Joey’s parents were Asian so it felt like family. I never felt like I had to carry the burden of the whole Chinese diaspora, or that everything I did was a statement about my people and where we’re from. Whenever I got to stay at Joey’s, I’d talk to his dad about basketball, food, the news, what I wanted to be when I grew up. Joey’s mom liked me, too, but she could tell I was a troublemaker. Joey’s dad covered for me and said things like “dee boys are boys,” but she was still suspicious. Dr. Vano was hilarious and had the ill accent. I remember one morning he told me about getting circumcised in the Philippines.

  “Eddie, you don’t believe how painful this is.”

  “I got circumcised and I don’t remember it being so bad.”

  “Oh, that’s because they do it to you when you leetle boy. I got circumcised when I was fifteen!”

  “Dad, why do you always have to tell this story!”

  “Joey, why you embarrassed, this is natural, everyone is circumcised these days.”

  “Yo, it’s cool, man, let him tell the story.”

  “So, in the Philippines, you go to the doctor when you’re fifteen and they cut your foreskin.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Of course it hurts! It hurts so bad, we would all run to the beach and jump in the salt water to clean it!”

  “Wait, you just jump in the water with bloody dicks?”

  “Yes! And you come out, your penis looks like a tomato!”

  “Dad, I’m eating, man!”

  “Yeah, just like Joey’s Vienna sausage there, ha, ha, but beeger, much beeger!”

  Joey would get embarrassed and take his food in his room so I went along, too.

  Joey’s pops was a Laker fan like most FOBs who grew up in the Magic era, but Joey was a die-hard Orlando Magic fan. I loved Shaq in fourth grade, but Orlando was full of idiots who didn’t know the game. When Shaq became a free agent they ran an article in the Orlando Sentinel asking if he was worth $100 million. No doubt he’s worth $100 million! Goddamn, Juwan Howard got $100 that summer and he was a six-nine power forward that got his buckets with line-drive fifteen-footers. Your boy Shaq was rippin’ backboards just eatin’ everybody’s food, there was no question he was worth $100. In the stands, you’d always hear people com
plaining about how much athletes made, wearing their Washington Mutual polo shirts. One time, I even turned around and said to a guy, “Every one of my friends could do your job, but not one motherfucker between Orlando and Houston can do what Shaq does, so fall the fuck back and watch the show.” Surprisingly, no one said a word after; motherfuckers started leaving the crazy Chinaman alone.

  When draft time came around, Joey would get excited and I’d tell him every single year that they were just gonna draft the best available white guy and I was right. Go back and look: Geert Hammink, Brooks Thompson, Brian Evans, Michael Doleac, Matt Harpring, Mike Miller, Curtis Borchardt, Zaza Pachulia, Travis Diener, and the whitest NBA player of all time, J. J. Redick. I was surprised these fools didn’t draft Frederic Weis twice.

  I couldn’t fuck with the Magic. I went for the Suns, Hornets, and Knicks: Barkley, ’Zo, and Patrick. I had a problem watching ball at Joey’s, though. No matter how hard I tried, I’d be yelling at the TV, cursing, making fun of the Magic, and Mrs. Vano always overheard. In front of his parents, I spoke good English, kept it clean, but around Joey I was just wildin’. There was nothing two-faced about it, but Mrs. Vano didn’t really like it.

  She started to see a change in Joey once he started hanging out with me. He left 2Pac All Eyez on Me in his mom’s car one day and she got real upset when she heard it so, of course, I got blamed. We’d always fuck around in class and end up in detention, but it was just hijinks. I never felt like I was transforming Joey into a “bad” person; I was just helping him live a little more. One week got especially funky, though. There was this science teacher we hated, Mr. Mazza, a passive-aggressive dick that always assumed we were fucking around when we weren’t. So, in the great self-destructive tradition of minority adolescents everywhere,* we figured, “Why not cause trouble, he gonna assume it anyway.” This was when Biggie’s “Big Poppa” was a hit, so when he walked into class I’d always yell, “I love it when you call me Fat Mazza!” and we all laughed at the fool.