Ever since I immigrated to America, I tried my hardest to be American. I made it a point to make friends from every ethnic background, instead of just Asian friends. I fought so hard to not be grouped in with the other Asians in college. I didn’t want to be the Chinese kid who only hung out with other Chinese kids; I thought that was so lame and stereotypical. But after the Crazy Rich Asians shoot, I finally got it. It wasn’t about choosing to hang out with people of the same skin tone; it was about hanging out with people who shared the same point of view because they had gone through the same experiences. One of my favorite lines in the Crazy Rich Asians script was “I didn’t have to explain myself that I’m Asian here, I’m just another person.” During the Crazy Rich Asians shoot in Singapore, everyone saw me as who I am. I wasn’t just the Asian kid; I could just be the funny guy, instead of the Asian guy who is funny. I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. It was the first time in seventeen years that I didn’t have to prove to anyone, or myself, that I was more than the token Asian guy.
Crazy Rich Asians made me want to get in touch with my roots instead of running away from them. I flew to Hong Kong after we wrapped filming in Singapore. I went back to the motherland with a newly found sense of pride in my culture and myself. It had been so long that I got the same culture shock when I arrived in Hong Kong as I did the first day I arrived in Los Angeles. Instead of eight-lane boulevards filled with cars and strip malls, the streets in Hong Kong were packed with a sea of people and shops in a concrete jungle. The alleyways told the history of Hong Kong, with classic BBQ ducks hanging from the restaurant windows, century-old flea markets selling household items and mysterious fortune tellers preaching to the superstitious. I was captivated by the image of an old man wearing a wifebeater pushing an old wooden dolly in front of an ultramodern fifty-story glass building. The old Chinese culture blends perfectly with the new Westernized world. The city felt alive. In LA, I can walk for fifteen minutes and not see a single soul in a land of strip malls. In Hong Kong, you can’t help but bump shoulders with the hundreds of people crossing the streets with purpose. There’s an adventure in every corner of this controlled chaos. Even with all the people and stimulation in the streets, I felt a sense of ease in Hong Kong. It felt like home.
Some of the crazy beautiful supporting cast of Crazy Rich Asians. LEFT TO RIGHT: Jing Lusi, Chris Pang, Gemma Chan, me, Harry Shum Jr., Fiona Xie, Sonoya Mizuno, Nico Santos, Carmen Soo, Remy Hii, Victoria Loke, Constance Lau, Ronny Chieng. Who wouldn’t want to be Asian?
I was still a big-city Hong Kong boy at heart. I never really lost my Asian-ness; I just covered it up with an American façade. In Hong Kong, I didn’t have to answer the question “Am I Chinese or am I American?” anymore. I was just another person. I was just me. The weight of being an immigrant and the weight of being defined as an Asian American were gone. Things that seemed like stereotypes in America were just normal in Hong Kong. Instead of an Asian guy eating weird chicken feet at the stereotypical dim sum, I was just a guy having lunch. I had forgotten that there was a place in this world where I wasn’t judged for my ethnicity, and I was the norm. I felt at peace.
I visited longtime family friends at the Shanghai Club, where they served some of the most authentic Shanghainese cuisine. I visited my grand-uncle Frank, who has always been a baller wearing Italian suits. He took me to an exclusive membership-only restaurant called the American Club. I know it was ironic to fly seven thousand miles to Hong Kong just to go to the American Club, but that was the best rib-eye I’ve ever had on any side of the world. It was dry-aged USDA prime beef mixed with the culinary skills of the top chefs in Hong Kong.
I walked down the street I grew up on, Tin Hau Miu Road. The twenty-five-story yellowish apartment building still looked exactly the same. The giant tree on the block looked just as big as on my first day of elementary school. Maybe it grew proportionately to my size. I walked down the steps to the Tin Hau temple. I used to be so scared of the statues of Chinese mythological characters in front of the temple when I was a kid; now they just looked like ugly cartoon characters. I sat down in front of the temple and was immediately bitten by a mosquito, a familiar pest in the humidity of Hong Kong. The itch reminded me of my childhood summers. I went over to the Chinese pharmacy for some herbal mosquito cream. The pharmacy had everything from Tylenol to Chinese herbs to a glass container filled with dried scallops, a signature Hong Kong delicacy. The place smelled like fish jerky wrapped in a Band-Aid. I strolled past the sneaker store where my dad bought me my first pair of Jordans. It was a pair of Jordan XIIs that came out in the 1996–97 NBA season when Michael Jordan defeated the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals. Those fresh J’s made me easily the coolest kid in my school that year. On the same street, I found one of our favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurants that specialized in beef brisket soup. They have been perfecting the brisket for forty years, and it’s the only thing they make in that restaurant. A bite of that tender brisket brought me right back to my first soccer practice in nearby Victoria Park, where my mom rewarded me with that brisket soup.
Everything was just as good as I remembered.
Just a few months before the trip, I reconnected with a couple of my grade school friends from Hong Kong through Facebook. My old classmate Ku Chun came across my stand-up set from The Arsenio Hall Show on YouTube. In the set I talked about being from Hong Kong, so he looked me up on Wikipedia and found my Chinese name. I was indeed the same kid he sat next to in third grade. So Ku friended me on Facebook, and through him I also reconnected with Darren Tse, one of my best friends from Hong Kong. I couldn’t believe they managed to find me after all those years. I tried to stay in touch with them when I first moved to America, but it was the year 2000. It was before Facebook, FaceTime calls and even MySpace. I had to use my mom’s international phone card to chat with my friends back in Hong Kong. I was only thirteen years old; I didn’t know how to properly stay in touch with my long-distance friends. So we slowly all faded away from each other’s lives. After seventeen years, we were about to hang out in Hong Kong, thanks to Arsenio Hall.
I met up with Ku and Darren at a hotel bar on top of central Hong Kong. When I walked in to find them, I had no idea who to look for. I had no idea what they looked like after all those years. I have seen puberty turn an ugly duckling into a swan, and I’ve also seen it turn a cute kid into a Ninja Turtle. I almost went up to two random dudes and gave them a hug. Then I heard “Jimmy!” I turned around and saw the same kids I played tag with in third grade. They were still the same guys. Ku was still the bad boy with a cool haircut; Darren was still the nice kid with a gracious smile. Chatting with them in Cantonese brought back all the memories we had in grade school. We chatted about our jobs, girlfriends we’d had and our other old friends from school. I thought I’d walk into the bar as the cool dude who made it in Hollywood, but I was pretty sure they were both making way more money than I was. Ku now runs a successful arcade business in Hong Kong, and he has a healthy collection of Ferraris and Lamborghinis; and Darren works at one of the top investment banking firms, and he just bought a multimillion-dollar condo in Hong Kong. They were the real Crazy Rich Asians; I was just an actor pretending to be them. But all that didn’t matter; we were just happy to see each other after all these years.
When I came home to LA from Hong Kong, I felt like I had left my real home to come back to the place I called home. Before I was ever an immigrant, before I was an Asian American, I was just a kid who didn’t know what either of those things meant. I’ve spent my entire adult life figuring out how to American. Fitting in became the only consistent part of my life. And no matter how American I tried to be, I’d always felt like an outsider. And no matter how long ago I left Hong Kong, it would always feel like home. My trip to Hong Kong gave me a chance to define myself as more than just the Asian guy in America, to see past my own ethnicity and evaluate what I’m really about. I am not the thirteen-year-old Hong Kong Jimmy anymore, and I’ll never be the all-American gu
y; I am an amalgamation of both. I am a Chinese American Hong Kong–born immigrant who learned English from BET. If it wasn’t for my family, I would not have emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, and if it wasn’t for the American mindset of pursuing what I love, I would not have been a stand-up comedian. I don’t have to be solely defined by where I came from, and I am more than just where I end up. I am as Chinese as I am American.
Can I see myself living in Hong Kong again? The people are great, the food is amazing and it’s one of the most vibrant cities in the world. But there is one very important thing that America has to offer. The same thing that made my family and so many others before us immigrate to America: boundless opportunities. That is what makes the American dream uniquely American. When I quit finance to become a stand-up comedian, my parents thought I was a crazy person. And they were right; I would be considered insane anywhere else in the world, except in America. Americans are encouraged to dream big and do anything we set our minds to. The United States is the only country where the pursuit of happiness is the right of its citizens. Jay-Z went from the Marcy Projects to drinking champagne on a yacht and marrying Beyoncé. I went from struggling with the English language to doing stand-up comedy and becoming a Hollywood actor. There might always be ignorant people who wish I’d go back to where I came from, but I embrace America the same way it has embraced me as its citizen. My American dream is as real as it comes.
EPILOGUE
I can now find the humor when I look back at my first day of school in America, but it wasn’t very funny for the thirteen-year-old Chinese boy who had to navigate through the alien world at the time. He was lost, he was scared, he wanted to go home.
It was hard.
Every immigrant has gone through a difficult journey. My story is just one out of a million stories of people who left their home country hoping for a better future. I wish I could go back in time and tell the little thirteen-year-old Jimmy that everything was going to be just fine. He probably wouldn’t even believe what I’d tell him. “Jimmy, you are going to watch a lot of BET and start a rap group called Yellow Panthers. Then you’ll completely disappoint your parents and become a stand-up comedian, used car salesman and strip club DJ. But don’t worry, because you’ll eventually come back around and get on an HBO show called Silicon Valley!” My thirteen-year-old self would probably stare at me blankly and ask, “What is BET? What is stand-up comedian? Who are you?”
From eating at El Pollo Loco salsa bar to the Golden Globes buffet, I managed to stumble through this journey with the perseverance of an immigrant and the mindset of an American. I learned to thrive on being uncomfortable to pursue what I loved. The English language was uncomfortable, so I studied BET until it became my natural tongue. Doing stand-up was uncomfortable, so I hung out at the Comedy Palace until it became my second home. Auditions were uncomfortable, so I spent six hundred bucks a month on acting classes while I slept in some dude’s living room for three hundred bucks until acting became my profession. I never looked at these challenges as barriers; I saw them as opportunities to grow. I’d rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American.
PROUD ASIAN SON
I wrote this book in LA, NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, Paris, London, Edinburgh, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong. I am grateful that comedy and acting have taken me to these places and allowed me to be here today. I have to constantly pinch myself to realize that this is not a pipe dream anymore. No matter how many different roles I play, the inside always feels the same. I’m still the same kid who grew up in Hong Kong, the same kid who didn’t understand “What’s up?” and the same kid who fucked up cooking the rice.
It was the most special occasion to be able to share the big screen with my dad on Patriots Day. I finally felt like a proud Asian son who was able to give back to my family. Sharing the same screen with my dad, Mark Wahlberg and Kevin Bacon was the epitome of the American experience. After the Patriots Day premiere, I finally asked my dad:
“Dad, are you proud of me?”
He replied earnestly, “In a Chinese family we don’t have to say it all the time. You should know that I’m always proud of you.” Deep down, I knew that, it was just nice to hear him say it.
My mom has since moved back to LA, where she lives with my dad in their newly purchased home. It is our family’s very first house. Last year they also got our family’s very first dog, the cutest pug puppy, and my parents named her Toffee, because, well, “It just sounded pretty good, like Jimmy.” When we were looking to get a dog, my dad vehemently said, “I don’t like dogs. You guys can go get a dog, but I won’t help you take care of it.” Two months later, he was making Toffee a home-cooked Shanghainese meal every day. To see the affection my mom and dad have for Toffee, I realized how good I had it when I was growing up. Even though we might never say “I love you” to each other in Chinese culture, there is so much love in these two human beings I truly hit the lottery in life to have them as my parents. My dad once told me:
“Having you as my son is like winning the lottery… Not the Mega Millions jackpot, but like a small twenty-dollar prize.”
Some things never change.
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