by Eddie Huang
“What about your family?”
“I’m glad you finally asked.”
She laughed…and I was relieved. Not because she laughed but because she was in control.
“They all live in Scranton. Younger brother, younger sister, I got my grandparents on my dad’s side, they’re the best.”
“You go back a lot?”
“Yeah, every other week.”
“WHAT?”
“Yeah, I see them every other week.”
“You see your parents every other week?”
“Yeah! Why is that so weird? Don’t you talk to your parents?”
“I mean, I try not to, but eventually Evan gives me the phone while I’m on the toilet and I talk to my mom.”
“That’s terrible.”
“No, if you met my mom you would understand. She would run my life from a toilet if she could, and she tries. Once a month. When Evan gives me the phone.”
“You should really call your mother more.”
Some women are Jedi. Dena was the type that even if she wasn’t interested, she’d split the bill, give you advice in passing, smile, wink, and let you charge it to the game. Effortless control is maddeningly attractive.
“So what do you do?”
“I cook food at this restaurant in the East Village.”
“What restaurant?”
“It’s a small Taiwanese sandwich shop. We make pork buns and stuff.”
“What’s a pork bun?”
I was so happy that she had no idea. Baohaus was celebrated, my memoir was finished, and in a week I’d be shooting the first episode of my show for Vice. I’d wanted it all, but everything burned brighter in this new terrain. The only skin I’d ever known was peeling. Someone had to know me before it was all gone, before I was all brand new…
“It’s like a Taiwanese taco or hamburger with pork. It’s whatever.”
“Do you like it?”
“Yeah, I love cooking. It gets boring making the same dish over and over, but when I figure new things out about it, I really like it.”
“What is it you like about cooking, though?”
I used to be quick with this one, but after the last few years, constantly talking about food, it felt mechanical.
Dena was cool, though, and I didn’t want to put up another wall. If anyone was going to know me, I had to remember how it used to feel. I found my center and let Dena in.
“I’m tired of cooking, but I still love it. When it’s done right, cooking is art in the most accessible, immediate, and satisfying way. Anyone can do it, anyone can appreciate it, and it’s extremely democratic. It doesn’t cost me much in terms of money or time, there doesn’t have to be pageantry, but it can give you a lot. I can express anything with food. When it’s done really well, it’s the perfect manifestation of existence. I mean, what else in the world literally sustains us and represents us all at the same time?”
She stirred her drink, bit the straw, and smiled. I’d revealed too much.
“You’re a smart one, aren’t you?” she said, sizing me up.
“It’s relative. By definition, morons wipe standing up.”
“You wipe standing up?”
“I’m by definition a moron.”
—
The date ran seven hours. We ended up on a bench for an hour, watched Saturday Night Live for another two hours in the crib, and after the first thirty minutes I never thought about making a move. It was the date I’d always wanted in high school. Back then, I’d talk to girls about family, about the “essence,” and how I was gonna flip the script on the world ’cause I bumped my head as a child.*7 It led to incredible first dates, no hand jobs, and the friend zone. Once I got to know these girls, I didn’t want to go hard in the paint, and they thought I wasn’t interested. I respected them.
And while I’d spent the last six months making up for it, attacking anything that moves, dunkin’ on girls like Darryl Dawkins, it wasn’t fulfilling. Why would you want to dominate someone? Why would you want to control someone? Alfred Hitchcock had it wrong. It’s not about choppin’ these women down in the shower, attacking them with birds, or poking your phallic camera through the rear window. I knew this much.
But I was too scared to go back to the idealistic juvenile who had nothing in his possession but a moral compass and a hard-on. Those days before women were just bodies and condoms were just bags. Like Macbeth contemplating a sea of blood—looking back at a gang of non-compostable latex washed up on the shore—I turned and walked farther into the sea. I tied up my timbs to make sure I didn’t slip, pulled out my smif-n-wessun and went in to catch wreck.*8
—
The next day, I played everything back in my mind. Usually I’d be basking in the glow of a win, but I discovered there are games in this world that are inexplicably not basketball and take nonlinear forms. I was confused. On her way out she told me that she’d had fun and that she’d call. But she left in record time and didn’t even wait for me to close the door behind her. I got Billy Crystal’d.*9 When things went wrong in those days, I blamed Evan.
“Evan…I need a door.”
“How are we going to put a door in the living room, my g?”
“I dunno, but I think I bugged Dena out by not having a door.”
“You didn’t bug her out not having a door. You’re bugged out because you think it’s a big deal that she didn’t try to stay over.”
“Aren’t they supposed to try to stay over?”
“Some stay, some go, what are you gonna do?”
“If they’re into it, they all try to hang out for a little. Remember that girl from North Carolina that made me take her back out for a drink in SoHo?”
“She was a tourist! You brought her back at like eleven and she didn’t want to go back to her hotel. Plus, when Connie stayed and then left her stuff you got all paranoid.”
“Fam, it’s definitely some trap house shit that I have a bed in the living room and you walk through my dates.”
“I’m not ‘walking through your dates.’ I’m walking to the kitchen or I’m walking to leave the apartment.”
“But you have to walk through my date to do that!”
“Since when are these ‘dates’? This shit is less personal than buying falafel at Murray’s.”
“You don’t understand my situation.”
“Are you listening to yourself? Your situation is that you don’t have a door to your room and I walk by sometimes when people don’t have clothes on. Big deal!”
“I hate you.”
“Whatever, man, I’ll get you curtains to divide your mattress from the rest of the living room.”
“Fine.”
Evan was in many ways the lord of the apartment. I gave him the bigger room, he made slightly more logical interior choices, and he actually had motor skills. I paid for everything, and he installed it.
“What kind of curtains do you want?”
“Polo.” He looked at me like a crazy person, but being the Generation Y-er that he was, he consulted the internet before assuming anything was crazy.
“There are a lot of Polo curtains. What kind do you want?”
“Snow Beach.”
“Dick, they don’t have Snow Beach. They have gingham, plaid, plain, basic shit.”
“Casino.”
“Yo, I’m not gonna help you if you keep making ridiculous requests. This isn’t a Fabolous video.”
“It’s not ridiculous. Ralph should make Casino curtains. He’s basically just assuming that the people who buy Polo Casino shirts don’t have homes they want to match.”
“I’m buying you gingham.”
As Evan got older, he got sick of my requests, stopped finding them humorous, and wanted to be his own man. What he didn’t realize was that no one was stopping him but himself. I had a list of complaints about Evan, and he had a corresponding list with my name on it, but I remembered what Dena said about focusing on what I cared about and started to list all the reasons I loved Evan.
Number one had to be his impersonation of the Vietnamese waiters at Pho Banc and number two was probably the fact that he’d picked up all the slack and taken on every single shitty job I didn’t want to do. We had a social contract between us and shared a single vision: representing our family, our culture, and our experience through a restaurant serving four-dollar sandwiches. Once the shop took off, I started telling our story in books, interviews, and shows, while Evan ran the core business. I had complaints about how Evan did his job, but at the end of the day, he did it. And I was taking it for granted.
I had to stop. Not just with Evan, but Dena, too. When I cared about someone, I’d start to pick at all the flaws, highlight potential problems, and assume that everything would inevitably unravel. Deep down I just didn’t think I deserved anything nice.
Things were different with sports, though. With sports, I believed.
Even after Redskins or Knicks losses when people would tell me, “It’s all over,” “We should be Ravens fans,” “Fuck the Knicks,” I genuinely believed that I could still will the Redskins and Knicks to the championship. In the years they didn’t win it all (every year), I just told myself I didn’t want it bad enough and came back the next year with my helmet strapped on a notch tighter. But—what the fuck do the Redskins and Knicks mean to me? I put more effort into the Knicks and Redskins than anything else in my life and they were BUMS, sucking all my energy and juju into a vortex. Who was I kidding? The Knicks are NEVER going to win the championship, and nothing good should ever happen to Daniel Snyder.
That day I turned in my player pass, canceled my plans, gave Evan tickets to a Knicks game I was taking another girl to, and made a decision. Take all the energy you invest in negative things like Daniel Snyder, James Dolan, and Marcus Samuelsson, and put it back into something worthwhile. I picked Dena.
* * *
*1 Codeine promethazine—sizzurp.
*2 James White is a Chinese Vine star who is on a search for a white wife; he ends many of his Vines with the tag “I like it.”
*3 I used to jerk off watching The Nanny when I was a kid. What up, Fran Drescher? Love you, ma.
*4 Visvim early adopter, pre–Emile Haynie, pre–John Mayer $450 prices.
*5 This dude John Hollinger has this system that takes into account everything a basketball player does on the court and tries to spit out one single Player Efficiency Rating. The idea that all your contributions on a court (or a planet) can be captured by one number and then contrasted against everyone else’s number is interesting, insulting, and humbling—if inaccurate.
*6 The IT band is on your thighs, ma.
*7 Flipmode is the greatest. Holla at Baby Sham. Holla at Spliff Star. Holla at Rah Digga. Busta you cool.
*8 Smif-n-Wessun, “Timz N Hood Chek.”
*9 When Harry Met Sally.
China
I gotta level with you for a second. I wasn’t sure why I was going to China. It all started at the press lunch for my first book, when this old head asked me: “Fresh Off the Boat is a coming-of-age memoir, a foregone conclusion. What I want to know is what’s next?”
This was a common question back then—people want to be on that next shit before they can even shake the sand out their crotch from the first wave. But I scrambled for an answer.
“Well, I think the logical bookend would be to flip it upside down, reverse the family’s migration back to China and ask the same questions.”
“And what are those questions?”
“I mean…it’s like the Marvel Comics ‘What if?’ joints. What if I was born in China? Could I have created my own place in China like I did in America? Can I ever be Chinese again? Are kids like cognac blunt wraps? Could I just honey-dip them in the Chinese wilderness and make us X.O. again?”
“Ha ha, I never thought I’d hear about reverse migration and cognac blunt wraps in the same sentence. Well, good luck.”
I made a note to myself, went home that night, and a week later emailed the idea to my editor and Obi-Wan Kenobi, Chris Jackson:
Undercover Brothers (lol, prob not the title, but funny)
I want to go undercover as a bao vendor with my brothers in China. We will go back, make baos, sell them on the street, live with locals, and report. There are multiple layers but I feel like my personal quest is to see how my food and I will be received in China as an American-born Chinese-Taiwanese. There will be struggles to get the business started, learn how to finesse the system. Are there commercial kitchen laws? What are the food and business standards in China and how do they compare to the U.S.? Not on a global Target Beijing to Target Atlantic Ave scale but on a Baohaus to Beijing food cart vendor level. I want people to know what the day-to-day life of a Chinese street cart vendor is. There are all these chefs talking about backpacking in countries, coming back with recipes, then trying to re-create some trattoria or izakaya they found abroad. I’m doing the reverse. I’m not trying to feed White Brooklyn. I’m trying to feed brownish–yellowish–chronic bronchitis Beijing and other cities like it. Classic Eddie Downward Assimilation story.
My dad always said, “When China blows the whistle, its children will come home.” I want to know if that’s true. Can I claim China? Am I a poser? Can I actually come home and be Chinese? What does that even mean?
It sounded good on paper. The book was sold to the publisher in early January 2013, and my tickets were booked for July. But for months, I ignored the business and ignored my plans for China. All the space was filled by Dena.
It was her.
I just couldn’t believe it.
Everyone’s told you how it’s going to happen. At first sight, at third sight, at last sight, out of sight…but when it’s real, it’s got nothin’ to do with sight. It’s out of body and you just ride it. That’s what I was feeling thirty thousand feet in the sky, flying over the Mongolian steppe, eating a bag of cocktail peanuts, watching Crazy, Stupid, Love. She wasn’t even with me, but I knew. I couldn’t wait to tell her.
As a man that usually went Ric Flair, in this case I went Rick Ross. #TearsOfJoy running down my face listening to Gosling tell Emma Stone how he always wanted a friend. Someone he didn’t have to seduce and smash and then passive-aggressively ask to leave. Someone to share fluids with, then eat dried plums from Ten Ren Tea while watching Knicks in 60 because the only way to enjoy the Knicks is with wifey, sipping from a plastic mug full of high mountain oolong tea, exchanging sweet nothings as J. R. Smith goes 0 for 19 on the way to another epic night at Greenhouse.*1
Dena was from Scranton, a.k.a. Dunder Mifflin headquarters, and her Scranton-ness connected us. People from Scranton are similar to Chinese Americans in this way: They don’t expect anything good to happen to them. They believe in hard work, but not because they expect any tangible positive results. They suspect that their hard work and sacrifice will most likely disappear into the ether somewhere between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but that’s no excuse to stop trying. Just because you’re neither Pittsburgh nor Philadelphia doesn’t mean Billy Joel isn’t going to write a song about you one day, and you should always be ready for it. They take pride in their food (Exhibit A: Old Forge Pizza), family, and tradition but are pretty sure that nothing is going to make it better than it was before when it was the Electric City or Middle Kingdom. They had coal, we had opium, and Derek Zoolander tells me they both cause black lung. I was willing to risk it.
Dena had me sprung like Mystic Pizza Julia Roberts—her sharp features, flashing smile, and townie vibes got my dick so motherfucking hard. Even after all my years shunning everything suburban and Americana, I couldn’t turn my back on a 1980s pizza pie romance because let’s face it, there is nothing more romantically exotic to a Chinaman than Julia Roberts, the hooker boots from Pretty Woman, and motherfucking pizza. I couldn’t deny that this specific slice of Americana was something I wanted to eat the rest of my life.
Wait. Why do I always do that? Why did I always reduce attraction to the physical and racial? I
had a gift for turning everything in my life into jokes about bodies and bodily functions and race without any conscious effort or deliberation. It was partly because bodies and bodily functions and racism are real and I never wanted to look away. But part of it was my own fear. The Tao of my life was self-deprecation, but Dena was the first girl I tried not to project my insecurities onto. She never made me feel insufficient or different.
(But when I talk quietly with my homies I still tell those pink nipple jokes. It’s a disease. Like eating gummy bears when everyone is asleep and then asking why I have tits in the morning.)
I wondered what Dena was doing at that moment. Knowing her, she was probably flipping through Pinterest,*2 listening to Nancy Wilson, or eating tacos from a truck in Spanish Harlem, but I hoped she was taking a shit. I genuinely hope she ate a taco and took a shit while her mans was thousands of miles away in a plane crying, eating peanuts, watching Gosling do his thing, telling himself he’d found the one, because for Dena and me, it started with a hurricane and a poop.
After the first few months we were together, I’d try to accidentally walk into the bathroom in the morning while she was losing weight. Hurricane Sandy gave us our moment. We’d been dating a solid three months when the hurricane appeared on the horizon. I lured her to the apartment in Stuy Town with visions of Korean hot pot, Game of Thrones, and a Swedish foam mattress. For months, we’d hung out a couple times a week, never back-to-back days, nothing official, but I knew. She was playing it very defensively, assuming the worst and never even hinting long-term. But Hurricane Sandy had us locked down. Back-to-back days were inevitable. For days, we couldn’t go outside because lower Manhattan was flooded and powerless. After holding it in for a good seventy-two hours, she had to go.
I knew it was going down. How could it not? We ate Korean hot pot over a butane burner three times a day. There was no way she could pretend like she didn’t poop! So while she did her work, I knocked on the door.
“I’m in here!”
“I gotta shave! Lemme in, Dena.”