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bookishheather 's review for:
Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir
by Eddie Huang
Fate introduced me to this book via the upcoming ABC show of the same name, supposedly based on this guy's memoir. But who was this guy? We haven't had a sitcom centered around Asian-Americans since 1994's All American Girl with Margaret Cho. And I had never heard of this person. I enjoy a good Asian American memoir though, so off to the library I went.
It so happens that Eddie Huang is quite a character. Owner of a hot restaurant on the lower east side of Manhattan called Baohaus, he apparently has racked up several years of television work through VICE media and appearances on Food Network even before his restaurants started getting media attention.
The book had me believing he's a little like a real life G Fresh from Orgasmo, and the memoir explains how he grew and learned to embrace all things street. (I ended up needing to look up several words on Urban Dictionary.) As he sees it, embracing street culture makes a ton of sense given the common struggle of minorities in the United States. So in addition to G Fresh he's also got a fair amount in common with Malcolm X. He's also clearly incredibly well-educated and a hugely independent thinker.
Overall I guess outlining his 'hustles' over the years (selling porn, weed, and fancy sneakers), talking about his G life that led to a couple of arrests, and the street language didn't really appeal to me very much as I read, but everything else really did. The book was still pretty engaging. It's refreshing to see someone intensely proud of not fitting a model (as in 'model minority'). It'll be interesting to see if the ABC show covers the darker side of the childhood years, and/or if the show will last long enough to get into less sitcomy aspects of his life.
It so happens that Eddie Huang is quite a character. Owner of a hot restaurant on the lower east side of Manhattan called Baohaus, he apparently has racked up several years of television work through VICE media and appearances on Food Network even before his restaurants started getting media attention.
The book had me believing he's a little like a real life G Fresh from Orgasmo, and the memoir explains how he grew and learned to embrace all things street. (I ended up needing to look up several words on Urban Dictionary.) As he sees it, embracing street culture makes a ton of sense given the common struggle of minorities in the United States. So in addition to G Fresh he's also got a fair amount in common with Malcolm X. He's also clearly incredibly well-educated and a hugely independent thinker.
Overall I guess outlining his 'hustles' over the years (selling porn, weed, and fancy sneakers), talking about his G life that led to a couple of arrests, and the street language didn't really appeal to me very much as I read, but everything else really did. The book was still pretty engaging. It's refreshing to see someone intensely proud of not fitting a model (as in 'model minority'). It'll be interesting to see if the ABC show covers the darker side of the childhood years, and/or if the show will last long enough to get into less sitcomy aspects of his life.