Jersey Azns, FOBs, and All-American Girls

For most of my life I’d been stuck in the poser-perfect New Jersey suburb where Chris Christie resided while he was still skinny. The town had turned so Asian that all my friends knew Psy was too old, too gimmicky, and had the swagger of a real politician, two years before “Gangnam Style” blew up. Before we stopped in high school, we made yellow a religion, and if you saw me in the hallway you’d call me Bok Choy and the girl on my right Napa Cabbage, and even if we all had peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, we’d gush about Kam Man Food like it was some type of heaven, not a fish-smelling, tabloid-selling, Hi-Chew-having thing in the miniature mall right in front of Costco. We memorized nigahiga’s “How to be Ninja” until we made it classic. The azn-pryde sentiment in my adolescence was so strong it reeked. But after it had passed, I hadn’t thought about it at all, until last July, when I’d given a ride to a seventh-grade family friend and he rattled his Asian Man Philosophies the whole way to his house two towns over. I was shocked by how a middle-schooler could be so daring, so unapologetically political, so willing to marry the personal with the general.

In middle school, more than anything else, I wanted to associate myself with something—even if that something was a gimmick, and even if I had to make that thing up myself. I wanted it to be extraordinary and grandiose, as perfect as power. I thought, and still think, we were at the head of a movement that dissipated because our models were teenagers not adults, our roots were in comedy not in history, and our aims were personal not collective. It dissipated like many other attempts at Asian Pride—the cultish “Got Rice?” song of the 1990s, the young business professionals with import model pasts, and all the other suburbs in or around or away from New Jersey with yellow middle-school kids drawing mochis on their English notebooks.

I’m writing this article after watching the first three episodes of the new season of “Fresh Off the Boat,” and replaying the short cameo of Evan and Emery bringing a dog wrapped in a bow to their daughter-wanting dad, and recognizing some version of my mother in Jessica Huang, and remembering how for the first decade of my life my parents survived on four hours of sleep every night. Not many shows elicit that complex a reaction. If you compare “Fresh Off the Boat” to its 1994 predecessor “All American Girl,” which was both cancelled after one season and disowned by the Korean American community it was trying to represent, you can immediately tell that Fresh Off the Boat is funnier, more relatable, tighter, and just better. Even if both are based on the works of iconic Asian American figures, like Margaret Cho’s comedy routines and Eddie Huang’s memoir—their differences lie in a subtle change at the center of the storytelling, at who’s pointing fingers at whom.

Even in 1994, laughing at other people because you didn’t understand them was classless and unfunny. Stewart’s girlfriend in “All American Girl” quips, in response to Margaret’s mother’s “a way to a man’s heart is through his stomach,” that “actually, Stewart says that a way to a man’s heart is through an incision to the chest, a stabbing of the pectoralis major, and a cracking of the sternum,” and laughs hysterically. The joke is, of course, that like all other Asian men, Stewart is a nerd, and like all other Asian girls, Stewart’s girlfriend finds it irresistibly cute. Stewart only dates Korean girls. Stewart goes to classical music concerts. Stewart is dedicated, as is his girlfriend, to preserving Korean culture. Stewart disapproves of Margaret because she isn’t. Stewart can’t get down at a club. Stewart has the unfashionable middle-length hair parted in the middle. Stewart is a character only people with a white-picket fenced, July 4th barbequed, red-white-blued sense of America would find funny. Stewart is ridiculous.

In “Fresh Off the Boat” however, even if Jessica is exaggeratedly protective and parsimonious, the white people she interacts with are even more ridiculous. Like Honey, who actually tries to be friends with her daughter, or the principal who keeps a chick to pet on his lap. Like the other administrators who keep linking Eddie with new Asian kids at school because of his skin color, but also simultaneously refuses, when asked which one Eddie is in a room of white people, to say he’s the one that isn’t white. Jessica makes sense. She’s funny because you understand her. While Stewart is crazy in a way that is lame and all flounce, Jessica is crazy in a way that’s admirable. Jessica is the anti-flounce. While the joke in “All American Girl” was how unaccepting Margaret’s parents were of her white boyfriend, the joke in “Fresh Off the Boat” is why a suburban white kid finds the need to be punk in the first place. In “All American Girl,” the finger is pointed at the yellow people; in “Fresh Off the Boat,” it’s pointed at the white, and there is an implicit expectation that the audience is yellow and laughing along. That’s where the success of the humor lies—it was a humor constructed by Asian Americans. Because the real Eddie Huang refused to be passive at any part of the creative process; because the show has Asian American producers; because we live in an age that is more likely to recognize whiteness as a race than a norm; because communities today are more likely to advocate.

“Fresh Off the Boat” is proof that Asian Americans, and all minorities, need to write our own stories. We need to write stories with ourselves as both the subjects and the audience. We need to stop expecting other people to write responsible stories about us, and complaining when they don’t. We need to take responsibility not only because it’s empowering, but because it’s the only way we’ll make our stories valuable.

I gravitate towards my middle-school understanding of my yellowness because it was one of the only ones I made myself, even if it was immature or nonsensical or so superficial you could rub it away with spit. At that time, no one was waxing angry about Quentin Tarantino’s representations of samurais or the Deadly Viper Assassins Squad, or shooting rhetorical questions about why O-Ren Ishii had to die first. No one was complaining about Asian sex scenes in movies or blaming the model minority for why we didn’t get into college. No one talked about colonialism or immigration laws; no one even knew about it. No one cared whether you were a Cool Asian, a Nerdy Asian, a Token Asian In A Group of White People, or a Hot Asian. And more broadly, no one cared about the white-washed question Asian Americans seem to believe is essential to describing their experience in this country today—“Am I Asian, or am I American?” We simply and ignorantly refused to be victims. We did it with the defensiveness that builds after a lifetime of being othered. We did it with brash pre-teen impatience. We did it with the courage that came with having a crew. We were what we were, and no matter what you thought, we were going to write ourselves the way we wanted to, the way we thought it should be written.

Christina Qiu ’19, lives in Matthews Hall. Her column appears on alternate Tuesdays.