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littlecornerreads 's review for:
Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir
by Eddie Huang
Once again, my dad knew something I didn't. Looking back, I realize it wasn't just that I was Asian. I was a loud-mouthed, brash, broken Asian who had no respect for authority in any form, whether it was a parent, teacher, or country. Not only was I not white, to many people I wasn't Asian either.
(In case you were wondering, this book contains explicit language, drug and alcohol use, depictions of violence and racism, descriptions of drug dealing, and abuse)
TL; DR- after striking out with both his book and sitcom, I think my best bet at supporting Eddie Huang will be through his food.
I tried supporting Eddie Huang through his sitcom and had mixed feelings, so I thought I'd have better luck going starlight to the source. That a mistake. If "based off the book" is code for "we kept the name of the title and the characters," the producers did a brilliant job because there's really no resemblance between the two...which is probably a good thing because the book is not really sitcom material. (I wonder who read this and thought, "I'm going to turn this into a sitcom!" Because I just don't see the connection...)
According to my friend Merriam-Webster, a sitcom is about a group of characters who are involved in different funny situations. This is about as far from funny as you can get, and it's not very lighthearted either. I get why they made such dramatic revisions to the book before putting on air. There's a reason somebody said > an accurate portrayal of this book would have to be on HBO. I mean, Eddie's life is not exactly family-friend. Even if you were to look past the adult nature of the book's content though, the actual memoir is a bit of a mess.
I appreciate Eddie Huang's hustle; he's obviously doing something right if he has a published memoir and has a groundbreaking TV series based (however loosely) off of it. Good for him. This just isn't for me.
Eddie Huang is not your stereotypical Asian American, and he'll be the first to tell you that. He is unapologetically himself throughout the book. He's a brash, no frills kind of guy and could not care less about offending you or shattering you expectations of a good, quiet Asian. He's obviously smart and has a BA in English and won the Barbara Lawrence Alfond English and Zora Neale Hurston Awards, but that never really translated onto the page for me.
The whole book feels fragmented. Just as Eddie bounces around from school to school, he takes the reader from story to story without building a cohesive narrative. Sometimes it doesn't even feel like a story of someone's life. It's more like a rambling inner monologue spilling out onto the page. The memoir reads like someone took some drugs and had a stream-of-consciousness journaling session. He'll go off on random tangents and start waxing poetic about food, hip-hop culture, or whatever else he wants. Entire paragraphs are devoted to lists of his specific interests at different points in time, and he describes basketball, street wear, and hip-hop in painstakingly detail. He also name drops like crazy. Everyone and their mom gets a shout out in this book. Seriously, if you've ever spent any extended period of time with Eddie Huang, your name is in this book. The problem is, they're not even names people care about.
It's a shame because, Eddie Huang is an interesting, albeit controversial, individual with a compelling story to tell. He sees race, inequality, and injustice through an interesting lens but his perspective gets lost in this hot mess of a book. I want to hear more about Taiwanese gangster making it in America with steak houses and seafood restaurants. I want to hear more the guy who bled out all over an English paper he was determined to finish after getting in a brawl with some childhood enemy. I want to hear more about the attorney dealing drugs on the side. I want to hear more about the streetwear designer campaigning for Obama. I want to hear more about little brother who thinks opening a gua bao restaurant is stupid but drops everything to help open it anyway. That is the kind of memoir I want to read, not this a mess of stories cobbled together with hip-hop lyrics and lists of what was hot during the 90s.