Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

  I came into ninth grade an upset, stepped-on, defensive Chinese kid who felt white people were out to get me, but Warren showed me a new perspective even if we didn’t always agree. At the time, I was libertarian because I was reading Ayn Rand; I know, it’s horrible, but I simply didn’t trust the government, I hated people like C. Delores Tucker, and felt that money was the third party that won every time. In my mind, if money was winning, what chance did government have against it? We just needed to stack paper ourselves.

  Warren, on the other hand, was a Republican because of his dad. My parents were the same way; they’d always tell me to vote for whoever wanted lower taxes. I’d argue with Warren, but it’s a funny thing with people. Even if you argue, when that person isn’t around to say their piece, you say it for them. You may not even link with their point, but out of loyalty you make that man’s point for him ’cause he ain’t there. Years later, in college, surrounded by cynical liberals like myself, I’d say things that I swear came out of Warren’s mouth and it helped me understand that old saying that no man is an island. People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them. There are pieces of you that are inherently yours, but everything else is a collection of the things you’ve seen and the people you’ve met. In the end, we’re like the Triumph beat: who’s next on this RZA track? Step up and drop a verse on my story. That’s the illest.

  One day in tenth grade, this girl Emily Connors came over to my crib after school to kick it. She used to see my boy Ben, who lived down the street from us. It was pretty unanimous in ninth and tenth grade that if you liked shawties with curves, Emily, half Cuban, half white, was the one. She was also the only other person in our crew in the gifted program with me, not that it mattered. We were all family.

  I was walking Emily out of the crib that day when we noticed these Indian kids cruising up my block. I remembered them from Lake Highland in sixth grade. The kid driving’s initials were A.K. and so his vanity plates read AK-47. We ignored them and said our goodbyes but when Emily got in her car and tried to pull out of the driveway, these Indian fools pulled their ride up to block her. They didn’t just casually block the driveway. They drove up onto the grass, cut the turn tight, and sat one side of wheels on the dip on the front of my driveway and the other on the grass. Alim thought he was slick, cheesing, and refused to move. I called Romaen, Warren, Austin, and Ben. While we were waiting for them, eight-year-old Evan saw this dude parked in our grass and got pissed. He came out with a paintball gun and just started blasting this fool’s Jeep to fuck up his paint job. Of course, the Indian kids called their people, too. In the end there were twenty-plus fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids in my driveway. It looked like a Ruff Ryder Proactiv commercial with a bunch of skinny punks in white tees staring each other down.

  “Yo, it’s one-on-one, man, Eddie versus one of y’all.”

  “What, you pussies don’t want a piece?”

  “I’m saying, we doing you a favor, we got you by at least five people. You gettin’ off easy one-on-one. Keep it clean.”

  I didn’t give a fuck so I pushed AK’s boy first. I wanted to smack both of them so I figured just go for one and the other will fall back, but these Indian motherfuckers had heart. As soon as I pushed his boy, AK punched me in the face, a closed fist studded with rings, and I went down. I couldn’t believe the shit. I looked at my friends, but all of them just stood there while it went down. The only one out of our crew that did anything was my brother Emery, who went running at AK with a pitchfork, but Ben held him back.

  When my dad got home that night he was so mad I almost got a second ass-kicking. Warren, Ben, and Emery were all still at the crib and my dad just kept talking about how fighting isn’t about fair. It’s about winning. Warren kept shaking his head, but Ben and I were all ears. He talked about how in Taiwan they never fought one-on-one or if they did, it was a trap just to jump people. Warren didn’t agree, but he wasn’t sitting there with a broken nose. I never wanted to get hit again and from that point on, I got busy.

  The next Monday at school, I showed up with a broken nose and black eye. That fool AK got me good. We couldn’t go to Lake Highland to even things up with AK because private schools were so small; we’d never get in and get away without getting caught. But AK’s friend M-Ron—the one I pushed first—went to Dr. Phillips and Ben found out his schedule.

  English class was my first class after lunch and when I sat down I noticed everyone acting really weird. Kids who usually spoke to me or said wassup just moved to the side. I figured it was ’cause I had a black eye so I said to this one kid, John, “Damn, man, is my face that bad?”

  “Naw, you didn’t hear?”

  “Hear what?”

  “Your boys got that dude that lumped you up.”

  “For real?”

  “Laid him the fuck out in the middle of the lockers, then changed clothes and left school. Kid is all fucked up in the office.”

  I couldn’t believe it. Ben and our boy Jared took what my pops said to heart. What kind of parent teaches kids things like this? My motherfucking dad, that’s who. If we were gonna run around causing trouble, talking shit, and starting fights, we had to be ready to finish them. From then on, if one of us was in a fight, we all were.

  Pops didn’t just let me run buc wild, though. He understood why I had to defend myself, but there was no excuse for stealing. One day Warren wanted to get his friend Kurt a birthday present and decided he’d like this giant tiki pole he saw in someone’s yard. I thought it was kind of fugazi, but whatever, I was down to steal some shit. We pulled your average midday smash-’n’-grab, throwing the tiki pole into a car and then driving it home, figuring no one saw it. A few hours went by and nothing happened, but then there was a knock on my door. It was Officer Randolph.

  I never liked cops, but this dude wasn’t so bad. He was always patrolling the neighborhood, stayed out of our way for the most part, but when something happened, he’d come to our cribs first.

  “Hi! How are you, Officer?”

  “Good, how are you, Mrs. Huang?”

  “Good, good! Can I help you with something?”

  “Is Eddie home?”

  “What he do now?”

  “One of the neighbors is missing a tiki pole that was on their lawn, just wanted to see if Eddie knew anything about it.”

  “Ahhh, I see. Give me one second.”

  “Sure.”

  Mom closed the door politely, but as soon as I heard it click in my room, I covered my ears.

  “HUANG XIAO MING NI GWO LAI NI TSE GU WAN BA DAN!”

  “OK, OK, hold on, I’m sleeping.”

  “SOOSIN! NI GWO LAI!”

  I paced around my room thinking if he’d let me go playing stupid or if he’d come search my room. Meanwhile, downstairs, Pops had to stop karaoke-ing to come talk to the police so he was pissed, too. He put his leather slippers on and walked toward the door.

  “Hi, how are you today, Officer?”

  “Good, just waiting to speak with Eddie.”

  “Yeah, he’s on the way down right now.”

  Dad was a lot more savvy and knew that yelling in Chinese bugged everyone out. That was the difference between my parents. If my mom was mad, you’d hear wild and crazy Chinese. If it was my dad, he got his white man voice on.

  “Eddie, would you please come down and speak with this officer? Thank you.”

  I ran down the stairs.

  “Hey, how’s it going?”

  “Good. There was a tiki pole taken out of Mrs. Hogan’s yard this afternoon. Did you happen to see anything?”

  “Oh yeah, we thought it was trash in the front of her yard! I got it upstairs.”

  “Really? You thought it was trash? Because it was standing upright in the middle of her lawn.”

  “I mean, yeah, I’ll give it back. It’s not a big deal.”

  “She said she saw Wa
rren from her window helping you grab this tiki pole. Where’s he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did Warren help you take the tiki pole?”

  “Why don’t I just get you the tiki pole?”

  “Eddie, was Warren there with you?”

  “He’s across the street, you can ask him while I go get the tiki pole.”

  Fifteen minutes later, we managed to drag the tiki pole down the stairs. I went outside and Warren was standing there with Mrs. Neilson and my parents.

  “Look, you boys know that wasn’t trash, and you stole your neighbor’s property. Luckily she doesn’t want to press charges, but this is burglary any way you slice it. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Officer Randolph.”

  “Huang Xiao Ming Gui Xia!”

  I’d never heard my dad scream Chinese in front of white people. He thought it was rude.

  “No, Dad …”

  “GUI XIA!”

  Everyone’s faces turned. My dad was a respected person in the neighborhood and always maintained his cool with people outside the family. Warren was nervous, Mrs. Neilson was dumbfounded, and Officer Randolph tried to intervene.

  “Mr. Huang, is everything …”

  Before he could finish, I did what my dad asked and kneeled on the concrete driveway. I kneeled right down in front of the officer and bowed three times.

  “I’m sorry, Officer Randolph.

  “I’m sorry, Officer Randolph.

  “I’m sorry, Officer Randolph.”

  “It’s quite all right, Mr. Huang, I see you have this under control. I’m sure the boys won’t do it again.”

  “No, they won’t. I’m very sorry they did this. It’s not right.”

  “No, it’s not, sir. We will see you around the neighborhood. Have a good evening.”

  I had never seen an officer so shook in his life. Warren’s eyes got huge, looked at his mom, looked at my dad, and everyone took off still fearful for my life. I mean, in the middle of a gated Orlando subdivision, there was a Chinaman kneeling in the driveway for all passersby to see in all his shame. For hours, my dad left me out there as punishment. People had no idea what to make of it. Were we a cult? Was it religious? Was the rapture coming? I saw the faces in cars as they passed, laughing and pointing in pure shock at this ancient Chinese ritual that had somehow landed off Apopka Vineland Road. I wasn’t mad at my dad. I deserved it. For our people, this is how we paid the price and I accepted it. I’m just glad there wasn’t Instagram back then.

  AROUND THIS TIME, Warren started dating this girl down the street, Julie. She had this red Toyota and would drive us to school, but she totally fucked up Warren’s taste in music. Dude went from Wu-Tang and the Menace II Society soundtrack to Modest Mouse and Incubus. I wanted to puke in my mouth every morning listening to that shit. I started bringing my Discman in the whip just so I could avoid listening to songs about water and wine or whatever it was Incubus kept going on about. In the end, some people can only keep up the “hip-hop thing” so long.

  I think hip-hop is real for a lot of white and Asian kids, but there’s a point of diminishing returns. That’s when they make an upward assimilation. I didn’t listen to hip-hop for strategic reasons. I loved it, I needed it. Watching my white and Asian friends move away from hip-hop opened my eyes to this rite of passage that I was never going to join—the ascendance into whiteness. It’s a funny position being an Asian in America. You’re the dude who can cross the union line. Your community actually wants you to sell the fuck out and work in law, accounting, or banking. But I realized then that I wasn’t going to cross the picket line just to get a nut. I was down with the rotten bananas who want nothing to do with that. We live to fight the good fight.

  I started kickin’ it with dudes who skipped school and skated. I couldn’t skate, but I could smoke the shit out of some weed and we liked the same music. Mike Muschewske was the ringleader and a fucking animal. This kid looked like he was eleven for most of high school, but he barely went to school, had all the video games, girls at his crib around the clock, and we all got to kick it. His mom was cool with it and kept mad food in the kitchen and he had this ill cocker spaniel that bit Austin’s nose off one night when he dropped acid and kept teasing the dog. Every day, it was me, Muschewske, Lil’ Cra, Justin, Austin, and Chaz hanging out at Chew’s.

  Justin called me “Gourmet,” ’cause every time we got high, I couldn’t just eat the chips or cookies. I made ill stoner food, like Doritos sandwiches, where I took ham, turkey, and cheese and rolled it up on plates, then sandwiched them between Doritos. I’d microwave cookies and eat them with ice cream, bake macaroni and cheese with crushed Cheetos on top, real disgusting Scooby snacks. A few years later at a bachelor party in Miami, after hitting Miami Gold, pissing off the VIP balcony onto the dance floor at Voodoo, and copping frozen chimichangas at 7-Eleven, we went back to our hotel. Total fail, because we didn’t have a microwave in the room, but I didn’t give up. I told my homies, “Ay yo, let me get the ironing board and iron!”

  I put the frozen chimichangas on plates and started ironing the shits. Fifteen minutes later, we were eating chimichangas with crispy exteriors and I was officially the Iron Chef.

  THIS WAS MY downward assimilating crew and my parents definitely weren’t feelin’ it. I first spotted Justin at school, walking across the campus wearing those ugly-ass Pippens with the word “AIR” plastered all across the entire shoe, and recognized him from Sea World Summer Camp when we were in third grade. We were supposed to train mice to walk through a maze but Justin and I didn’t have the patience. There was a giant python tank at Sea World so we would take the mice from class and feed them to the snake. We got caught, but even then, Justin was using the line he’d be using seven years later: “It’s cool, man, nothing’s gonna happen. My dad is captain of the SWAT team.” Anytime we got busted for shit, if we were with Justin, we walked. He was our get-out-of-jail-free pass. So we went buck wild.

  Orlando’s first Best Buy opened on Sand Lake Road around that time. It was a big deal. Our city had made it. So every Tuesday, a bunch of us would go in the spot with double-sided tape around our waists. All the mom-and-pop record stores and Sam Goody’s had big-ass alarms on rap CDs. They knew the deal, but Best Buy was slow. Every CD just had a security sticker that you could peel off. We’d just peel off the stickers and stick the joints to our waist under our clothes. Every week we brought home five or six new albums. Eventually, they caught on. Instead of putting stickers on the hip-hop joints, they put rent-a-cops at the ends of the aisle. We tried to outsmart the system: We’d take the CDs from the music section and leave them in different parts of the store. Then we’d circle the store like we were looking for something—a washer-dryer, a new coffeemaker—and pick them up on our way back out. This time, I could see a rent-a-cop following me.

  He thought he was slick, but I saw that fool. I led him into the appliances aisle and ditched the CDs into a dryer. With nothing on me, I just went toward the exit, but they arrested me anyway.

  “Yo, the fuck you touching me for, son? I didn’t do shit.”

  “Then who put these CDs in the dryer?”

  “Since when is it illegal to put CDs in dryers?”

  “We have you on camera transporting these CDs into the dryer. That’s attempted robbery!”

  “It’s not like I transported hookers over state lines; it’s CDs in the appliance aisle, son. You’re wildin’.”

  “Don’t get fresh with me! You tried to steal a Sporty Thievz ‘No Pigeons’ single!”

  Game recognize game, that rent-a-cop kinda shot me in the heart with that one. Talk about spot blown, getting called out for trying to steal the “No Pigeons” single is pretty much the Urban Dictionary definition. That was like the time Muschewske bought the Lord Tariq and Peter Gunz album, quite possibly the worst, most anticipated album of all time, the pariah of the Bronx. #Dejavu. The rent-a-cop let me go and five years later in college, someone stole my two-hundre
d-CD collection out of my whip. I had never even loaded the music onto my computer. My life’s work lost, but it was fair. Karma is a bitch and I never paid for those joints.

  Every weekend, Justin, Mike, and I would go to parties and wild out so much that people called us Fouls. Someone’s parents would be out of town and they’d invite the whole crew to come party ’cause we were the only ones that really threw down. These people that opened up their houses basically rented us like hookers selling “cool” but they had no idea what they were in for.

  One weekend, this girl Melanie threw a party. It was kind of a dope house, there were a lot of drinks, and at least eighty people were packed in. We were having fun, but I was toe up. I’d been drinking this jungle juice Mike made and saw all these herbs with board shorts and frosted tips. Most of the people that hosted house parties were first-timers. It was the cool thing to do, but they weren’t down so we’d toss the whole crib. Why? ’Cause they never talked to us, said sideways shit when we weren’t around, and stigmatized us as black sheep. Any chance they’d get in class to tell on us for being late or being high, they would, but as soon as the parents left town, they wanted to be us for a weekend. They assumed we’d steal their shit and piss in their milk, but they STILL let us come party ’cause they needed us. For one night they wanted a “pass” to wild out with the derels. I wasn’t about to be nobody’s Bojangles 3000 so I set it off.

  I went to the bathroom, where there was a long-ass line so I just whipped my dick out and pissed in the kitty litter. I never peed in a litter box before so I had no idea it would get so full, so quickly. The shit sloshed over the sides. I thought it was mad funny so I showed it to Mike and that’s what started the chain reaction. Mike and Justin would always one-up me so Muschewske took two boxes of cereal, poured them on the kitchen floor, then followed it up with a gallon of milk. Melanie’s man bugged out. “Dude, what the fuck are you doing?” Deadpan, Muschewske, with a blunt in his hand, doesn’t even trip: “I’m makin’ breakfast, bitch.”