The Stale Taste of 'Fresh Off the Boat'

“I’m an American because I eat spaghetti and Chinese because I eat chow mein.”

Forty years after the editors of “Aiiieeeee!” extracted and pushed back against this basic formula from early Asian-American literature, “Fresh Off the Boat” finds 11-year-old protagonist Eddie Huang eating the proverbial spaghetti.

Of course, he’s 11, and any 11-year-old in a new school is going to do—or eat—what he must to fit in. But as “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian American literature, showed in 1974, there is a history behind the Asian American character that needs to be addressed; essentially, we divide our lives into the Asian and the American, slipping in and out of separate identities, unwilling or unable to reconcile the two. Even as the first television show featuring an Asian-American cast in 20 years, “Fresh Off the Boat” is rehashing an old, troubled story of duality, one characterized by the strange, mixed taste of offense and catharsis.

The real-life Eddie Huang, whose memoir inspired the new ABC sitcom, is ambivalent about the show’s material. Network television demands that it tiptoe the line between Chinese-American relatability and white sensibility (its heralding as “Asian-American” television disregards the fact that it cannot profess to speak to the Korean- or Japanese- or Indian- or Filipino-American experience) and it does so with a wide grin that often obscures the real anxiety of growing up yellow in a white society.

Take, for instance, Eddie’s parents: Taiwanese immigrants who move to Orlando to run a Western-themed family restaurant. Both speak perfectly fluent English, but the exaggerated accents they adopt make any pithy encouragements they give their three sons mere caricaturized fortune cookie slips. It doesn’t help that both fit into the character molds that every white teenager imagines for their Asian friend’s parents: the mother is rigid, obsessed with money, and insists that her children do not stand out, while the father is hapless, goofy, and constantly under the derision of his stern wife. It’s exceedingly recognizable and almost insultingly reductive.

Still, it’s a funny show—the pilot episode alone reckons with situations that all non-white viewers have encountered (“You speak English so well! Where are you from? No, where are you really from? How do you pronounce your name?”), but without any untangling of the pain of those moments. Rather, we see Eddie trading his Chinese noodles for Lunchables, and we never learn what his real name is after he cuts off his teacher’s introduction to call himself simply “Eddie.”

And in the most disturbing scene of the episode, a black student shoves Eddie in the cafeteria, then tells him, “Get used to it. You’re the one at the bottom now. It’s my turn, chink!” After Eddie beats him up, he earns the respect of his white classmates, supposedly ascending one rank in the racial hierarchy of his elementary school. What the hell?

I can’t profess to know what the remainder of the show will entail—perhaps Eddie will reconcile with his bully and they will go on to overthrow the blonde boys who relentlessly mocked Eddie’s homemade, Chinese lunches. Perhaps the simple fact that the show is being produced is a step in the right direction. But I can’t help but feel that it’s not a very big one—Eddie and his comically lovable, pudgy face already seem quite attached to the “white people food” packaged so conveniently in a small re-heatable box.