Fresh Off the Boat

by Eddie Huang

  For the first time in my life, I played it smart: I took the job as a lawyer, walked through the doors of a giant midtown office building, and took the seat in my office next to Major Abshed. Major Abshed became my best friend at the firm. He was an international associate from Saudi Arabia who’d gone to Cornell before taking the job as a first-year associate. When he started he was gracious, accommodating, but also fearful. He didn’t know how Americans at work would receive him. We’d both been snake-bit before. You go to law school and figure you’re being exposed to the crème de la crème of American society, people with money, education, and experience. Yet, somehow, some way they never learn how to treat people.

  Working in a law firm was not for me. Major Abshed and I would get high and go to Yemen Cafe in Brooklyn after work. Right off Atlantic near Court Street, it’s the best Middle Eastern food in New York. They’re known for one dish: yaneez. You sit down, they bring you an iceberg lettuce salad in a wooden bowl like you’re eating red sauce Italian, but it comes with a spicy relish instead of dressing. Light, spicy, fragrant, and acidic, it was the best iceberg salad I’ve ever had. Simple, humble, satisfying. They follow that up with a bowl of clear soup made of lamb bones. The opposite of the salad, the soup is deep, complex, balanced, and mysterious. You can’t quite identify the spices because none of them is too pronounced. If you asked me what the spices were, I honestly couldn’t tell you. The spices are just there to quell the gamy flavor of lamb so that you can drink the stock and take in the flavor of its marrow. Once you finish your soup, they bring you a plate of roasted lamb.

  One day you get neck, another it’s shoulder, some days it’s chops or shank. The restaurant will give its regulars the shoulder, but I would always ask for neck. I liked to get between the bones and pick the meat out. It is hands down the best dish of lamb I’ve ever had. Every day, they roast the lamb with Arabic seven-spice, perhaps some lemon zest and extra paprika. The lamb is covered in foil and comes out dripping with juices. Tender, succulent, but not flabby. The lamb has just enough structure while still giving easily to the tap of your fork. Everything comes with Afghani bread, rice, and salta, which is a stew made of carrots, onions, okra, and potato that you throw over the rice. To finish, you get cardamom tea. When you’re ready, you get up, leave twenty-two dollars, and walk out knowing that you’ve just spent the best twenty-two dollars in New York City at that moment.

  While other associates competed on billable work trying to climb the ladder, I got high and took Major Abshed around the city. When I promoted parties, a sideline that grew out of my streetwear hustle, I’d bring Major Abshed. I’d give him new music; he’d take me to Middle Eastern restaurants. And, of course, we watched basketball. The NBA really is an international game. I’ve never met someone from abroad that gave a shit about the NFL, or could even decipher it, but they all love the NBA. As an undergrad at Boston University, Major Abshed became a Celtics fan. In 2008, the C’s were on top of the world so he never missed a game. It kind of drove me crazy listening to him go on and on about Pierce, KG, and Jesus Shuttlesworth, but I let him have his shine. Major Abshed smoked so much weed watching basketball that I started to buy ounces and split it with him.

  THE ONLY INSPIRATION in my life at that time was Hoodman. I tried to resuscitate the business but it was no use. I should have known it was going to happen. As a kid, I’d seen hip-hop lose its voice and edge when Puffy came through with the shiny suits and Master P started pushing plastic jewel cases. When Eminem came along it was a wrap.* There is a point where everything that meant something to us goes to die at two-for-one Ladies Night.

  The same thing happened with streetwear. It became too accessible and the customer base changed. Instead of being a culture created and sold to heads who actually lived in New York, Los Angeles, or the Bay, it became something people consumed on the Internet. Instead of buying the shirts for what they stood for—transgressive, satirical, do-it-yourself democratic street culture—people co-opted it as the style du jour. They rocked it ’cause it was hot, colorful, and played on Friday night. That was it. The people that copped Hoodman switched from hypebeasts and downtown kids to Jersey bros who went to Libation or Spitzers. I was suddenly dying for the hypebeasts to come back. Originally, I hated the hypebeasts because they never understood the “whys.” Why is this design dope? What does this message mean? Where does this allusion or lyric come from? Most of them didn’t know, they just read blogs or saw others wearing certain styles and copied them. They’d always go for the shiniest pieces and the most hyped sneakers, never really paying attention to the more subtle and nuanced designs. Everyone can appreciate Chris Paul or Deron Williams, but what about the Andre Millers† of the world? When I first started following streetwear I was a sucker for the flossy joints, too, but over time I understood it and really appreciated it on a level beyond seeing it as just “style.” Streetwear was the product of a greater downtown New York culture and consciousness that pervaded our lives. Downtown New York is a movement and, for a time, streetwear was its uniform.

  Despite the fact that hypebeasts worshipped the culture because it gave them an identity, at least they followed the narrative. Like jam band groupies or roadies, having hypebeasts was better than not having supporters at all. I remember hanging out at Union seeing the same kids coming in, unfolding shirts, picking the shittiest, most expensive pieces off the rack while all of us kept from laughing. But at the end of the day, you need the hypebeasts because they drive the culture forward and allow you to keep creating. You just can’t bet your culture on their consumption because their loyalty is fleeting.

  It wasn’t that my brand changed; the critical mass for the culture dispersed. Part of that was because of the way distribution changed with the introduction of Internet retailers into the scene. The retailers—most notably Karmaloop—put the physical stores out of business and the culture lost its gatekeepers, the ones who kept standards high and poseurs out. At every boutique, even if it was owned by some old head, he’d have a kid that helped him with buying that’d tell him “yeah this” or “naw that.” Karmaloop, on the other hand, would carry only the big-name, played out, stigmatic brands that set the original style for the culture, but not the smaller brands that were actually moving it forward. For every John Cusack America’s Sweethearts blockbuster, you need a Grosse Pointe Blank or Better Off Dead.

  Karmaloop had more buying power than any physical store. They’d purchase your entire stock for the season, locking you into exclusivity, and then undercut all the physical retailers. Nima, on the other hand, would buy your shirts like they were weed. Gimme forty-eight shirts, here’s the money, enjoy. No strings attached, no sendbacks, just paper. Shortsighted kids didn’t understand that we voted with our dollars. Instead of supporting the brick-and-mortar stores that started the culture, they would try things on at stores and then cop online. Once the brick-and-mortar stores dried up, Karmaloop squeezed designers by cutting deals and making unsold merchandise returnable. This arrangement buried brands because they’d spend mad bread just to produce the order and then took an L when things didn’t sell. Designers were idiots: they became creditors for this piece-of-shit company that ate the entire culture whole.

  Watching what happened to our culture, I told myself I’d never let it happen to me. It’s too important. Sometimes you need to borrow some of the master’s tools to survive. I remembered a quote from Catcher in the Rye: “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” I mean, two things I’m not and that’s perfect or humble. Somewhere between Nima and Salinger, there I was, a kid that wanted to stunt for a cause.

  With Hoodman on the slide, I started selling weed again. Although I made good money at the law firm, I knew it wouldn’t last and tried to stack as much paper as I could. I got the work from some people in Crown Heights that had a grow house in Queens. To lower my personal costs, I moved from Chinatown–Little Ita
ly to Fort Greene and lived in one of the row houses on South Oxford and Atlantic. The houses were nice, but a thousand dollars a month less than what I was paying in the city. After work, I’d hang out with the people in the park and play ball on weekends.

  There was this ill spot called Cake Man Raven. Everyone knew him for red velvet cake and people from outside the neighborhood lined up to cop a slice, but I stayed on the pineapple or coconut jawn. Through the cake shop, I met the other people in the neighborhood that hustled out of a town house on South Oxford and Fulton owned by these twins. The twins were twenty-year-old kids who grew up in Fort Greene with their mom in a three-story brownstone that became a million-dollar property when the neighborhood gentrified, but they treated it like a trap house. I told them to clean it up, stop hustling, and sell the joint if they needed bread, but they didn’t listen. The house was full of roaches, empty Henny bottles, and blunt trash everywhere. These kids didn’t even have a garbage can so blunt guts just got thrown on the ground like peanut shells at Five Guys.

  To this day, Fort Greene is my favorite neighborhood in any of the five boroughs. I met a lot of creatives like Damian Bulluck, who was early at Fader; Kelvin Coffey, who edited XXL; and Jay Lew, who was one of the illest photographers in New York. Dustin Ross lived down the block and started Studio Booth. Right on top of an African clothing store called Moshood was my boy Jesse Hofrichter, who’d gone to Cardozo and worked at a big firm but produced music and rapped in his spare time. All of us in Fort Greene were just doing our thing, maintaining any way we could. But Fort Greene wasn’t Williamsburg. The creatives weren’t twenty-year-olds from Nebraska who came because they grew up shopping at Urban Outfitters and wanted to live on the Bedford stop. Fort Greene was and is a real neighborhood. The neighborhood still had a strong black community and I thought that any time there’s a Seventh-day Adventist Church in the neighborhood, you can only gentrify it so much. Loved that church. But I was wrong. Even our barbershop, Changing Faces, got phased out; cot damn shame you can’t even get a decent cut on Fulton St. anymore.

  I DIDN’T FIT in any category, to be honest. I worked at a big firm, played ball after work, and hustled with the kids in the park late night. This Dominican cat Richie lived across the park from me and should have played D-1 ball but never filled out his papers. Instead he was the manager at Target but knew he could do better. Reluctantly, I hustled with him. That was always a predicament for me. I pitched, but it was short term. I never got too hot and I did it for insurance money. These kids looked at it as a career. I took Richie on the train one day to sign up for a JUCO that he could play ball at, but he changed his mind last minute and we just ended up going to Harlem to meet a new connect in the Taft Houses. No matter how talented Richie was or how much shit he talked about what he could do, deep down he just didn’t believe it’d happen. He was living day to day: you talk about your dreams, you boast about your talent, and you cop the Foamposites the day they come out because life is simply a collection of small victories. I didn’t want to go out like that.

  MEANWHILE, THE RECESSION was working its way from the zoom airsoles to white-shoe law firms. On the day we were laid off, Major Abshed and I got stupid high at the crib. At first, Major Abshed’s sense of responsibility had kicked in and he worried about how he would pay bills, but he quickly realized that he could go home and regroup. And I realized something, too. It was the first day of my life. I was born again. My money wouldn’t last forever, but I had six months to set the rest of my life in motion. That night, I wrote down six things.

  1. Quarterback the Redskins

  2. Play for the Knicks

  3. Do stand-up comedy

  4. Write screenplays

  5. Continue working on Hoodman

  6. Own a restaurant

  Those were the six things I wanted to do with my life. Clearly, quarterbacking the Redskins or playing for the Knicks weren’t options, but surprisingly, three through six were. There was something powerful about that, too. I was relieved that the things I needed to do were possible. In a way, I was proud of myself. The aspirations I had for my life weren’t things that I needed anyone for. The goals weren’t tied to how I looked, who I knew, or what others thought about me. Every single one of them had to do with some sort of physical or creative expression that was within myself: football, basketball, comedy, writing, designing, and food.

  That week, I got to work and signed up for a “bringer show” at the Laugh Lounge on Essex Street. The promoters of the show were some weird B&T Jersey fools that dressed like Ellen Degeneres. I had to start somewhere, y’all … I had five days before the show so I started writing. I didn’t need to watch too much stand-up because I’d already been watching my whole life. My favorites were always Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Rodney Dangerfield, and Mitch Hedberg. I noticed that as a comic, you don’t go up there and cover every aspect of your character. You pick out the most interesting/hilarious facet of yourself and turn that shit up to a hunned. After thinking about it for a few days, I realized there were a few sides to me so I made another list.

  1. The smelly Chinese kid who didn’t think he was good enough.

  2. The kid who thought life was unfair and determined to come up on some Malcolm-X-read-books-and-flip-the-script-on-’em shit.

  3. The cynical nihilist who thinks it’s all bullshit and the only thing left to do is get paper.

  After laying it all out, I played psychologist. I figured the persona that would hit hardest onstage and create the best humor would be #3, the cynical nihilist who just wants to get paid. I called myself Magic Dong Huang and started telling jokes about the Hmong Deer Hunter and Binghamton Shooter. I called them delivery boys gone wild and explained how it was actually good for Asian-American identity. The humor came from the ridiculousness of some fool named Magic Dong Huang telling people that it was a good look for Asians to strike fear into the hearts of Americans since all they let us fuck with at this point was Hello Kitty and Yu-Gi-Oh. My only goal as a comedian was to stomp the life out of the model-minority myth and present a side of me to audiences that crushed their expectations of what it was to be Asian-American.

  I talked about how Bin Laden could get more money if he exploited fat-assed Arabic women like Kim Kardashian for his videos. One of the lines was: “Ay yo, Bin Laden, let me tell you about this video shit, son. You got dudes with brown bags on their heads and your boys all standin’ around with AKs! Shit is extra ’mo! You know what you need, son? MOTHERFUCKIN’ CADILLACS. Cadillacs and fat-ass Arabic girls like Kim Kardashian, face down, ass up, that’s how you make a fuckin’ video, b.”

  The subversive joke was that I wanted people to understand how “negative stereotypes” that stigmatized black culture could be used to empower Asian and Arabic people who had been considered model-minority types and vice versa. Our identities in America were polar opposites and by “trading places” we could see how ridiculous it all was. I always felt as if America took half the good traits of a person and impressed them on Asians and the other half on black people, since clearly, no person of color could be a well-rounded, intelligent, confident individual that served him- or herself. Asian men must be emasculated, Asian women must be exotic, black men must be dick-slinging thugs, and black women must be single moms. People think it’s funny, but the stereotypes have the power to become self-fulfilling prophecies if we aren’t aware.

  My favorite set was called Rotten Banana. I talked about being picked on by white people as a kid and how my parents thought kung fu was the answer. I went through a series of jokes creating scenarios that white people could make fun of me for, like my mom sewing “Hollister” onto the back of my kung fu pants so I had something to wear at the beach. I talked about how Asian shawties had flat asses ’cause they were all drinkin’ soy milk. “How the fuck you gonna grow a bubble without whole milk, boo?” After cycling through observations of Asian America, I discovered something. “White people weren’t scared of kung fu, but you know wha
t they were scared of? Black people!” I remember the first time I told the joke, this dred in the back of the room stands up with his drink in the air and screams, “THEY’LL FEAR US!” The whole room went buc wild and I dropped Jada’s line: “I’m in the hood like Chinese wings!” At the core, the set wasn’t about black, yellow, or white, but bullying. It applied to any and everyone who was ever picked on and felt like they were the Other.

  Not surprisingly, Asians were put off by my sets. By this point of my life, I was used to it. Some of us understand how powerful self-deprecation is, but others want no part of it. The Asians who organized events and experienced the bamboo ceiling would always encourage me to come back and perform in Chinatown, but I hated seeing those crunchy-ass Asian women turn sour every time I told the soy milk joke. I ended up doing a lot of urban shows at places like Latin Quarter and Laugh Lounge. My boy Imagine would introduce me as Duck Sauce and the hood loved it so we flipped the script. I would tell Chinese food jokes and started making and bringing fried rice and chicken wings during the cocktail hour before shows. People loved it and a manager that was helping me at the time suggested that I get an appearance on Food Network since they were always casting on Craigslist.

  So one night in the spring of 2009, I went on Craigslist to find a casting for Food Network. There were tons of them every week and this week’s was for Ultimate Recipe Showdown. All I had to do was submit a bio and a party food recipe. Since all I did was sell tree I had a lot of time on my hands to work this shit. The next day, I got high with Richie and went to Whole Foods baked out of my face. Besides soup dumplings, my favorite dish was Mao’s red cooked pork but I always liked beef more than pork, especially oxtail. I would have done oxtail, but it’s not the type of thing that makes good party food. Sniffing around the display case, I saw a bunch of different cuts that I never tried to cook at home. For most people, you go back to the same cuts of meat you grew up eating. Richie and the other Dominicans I knew liked blade steak and flank steak. My family stuck to oxtail and shank but served cuts from the rib and loin at our steakhouse. We knew what customers wanted, but we never ate it at home. For my recipe, I decided to experiment with different cuts. I knew that I wanted something flavorful with good texture for a braise. I always liked the look of skirt steak rolled up in the display case on a piece of butcher paper with texture more similar to skate than beef. I had skirt at Mexican joints and Sammy’s Roumanian, but never cooked it myself. I was curious about it so I asked the dude at the counter for three pounds of skirt and took it home to red cook.