Eddie Huang

Edwyn Charles Huang (born March 1, 1982)[1] is an American film director, author, chef, restaurateur, food personality, producer, and attorney.[2][3] He was a co-owner of BaoHaus, a gua bao restaurant in the East Village of Lower Manhattan.[4] Huang previously hosted Huang's World for Viceland. His autobiography, Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir, was adapted into the ABC sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, of which he narrated the first season. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Huang

Huang was raised in Washington, D.C.; Silver Spring, Maryland; and Northern Virginia, but then moved to Orlando, Florida, where his father owned a successful group of steak and seafood restaurants, including Atlantic Bay Seafood and Grill and Cattleman's Ranch Steakhouse. He appreciated African-American culture, especially hip-hop, at a young age. He also frequently got into fights, getting arrested twice on assault charges while growing up.

graduating with a B.A. in English and Film from Rollins

In 2008, Huang earned a J.D. from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University

Huang's first job as an attorney was working in corporate law at the law firm Chadbourne & Parke

Within a year, due to the financial crisis of 2007–08, Huang was laid off, and began working as a stand-up comic and marijuana dealer.

From 2006 to 2009, Huang ran a streetwear company

In December 2009, Huang opened BaoHaus, a Taiwanese bun (割包) shop

In October 2020, Huang announced the permanent closure of BaoHaus.

Another restaurant, Xiao Ye, was less successful and closed after poor reviews

Huang created the blog called Fresh Off the Boat and later published a memoir with Random House by the same name.

Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China was published in 2016.

Huang hosted Cheap Bites on the Cooking Channel at the end of 2011

In 2014, Huang was the host of Snack Off on MTV

In 2014, ABC ordered a television series based on his book, also titled Fresh Off the Boat

Huang was outspoken in his criticism of the development process of the show

In August 2019, it was announced Huang would direct and write Boogie, a coming-of-age movie about a young Chinese-American basketball player's rise to prominence

Wesley Yang: Eddie Huang Against the World (Published 2015)

I asked Eddie Huang a question that many people were sure to ask him in the months to come. “What did you expect?”

For the past week in December, Huang had been venting about his tortured ambivalence toward “Fresh Off the Boat,” the ABC sitcom based on the memoir he wrote about growing up as a child of Taiwanese immigrants in Orlando, Fla.

“What did I expect?” Huang responded. “I expected I could change things.” He told me that he thought his story was powerful enough for ABC to allow him to tell it his way. “I thought that people in network television had their own conscience about things.”

He had, he admitted, been extremely naïve about the realities of network television. By way of explanation, Huang reviewed for me the string of previous triumphs that induced him to overrate his ability to set his own terms in the world.

The story Huang tells in his memoir is one of survival and struggle in a hostile environment — a prosperous neighborhood in Orlando. Though the picaresque book is written in Huang’s jaunty mash-up of hip-hop lingo and conspicuously learned references to American history and literature, it is also an extraordinarily raw account of an abused and bullied child who grows to inflict violence on others

rebelling against constant assaults on his self-esteem to which he was subjected in the home — he recalls “constantly being told I was a fan tong (rice bucket), fat-ass or waste of space.”

“My parents have never acknowledged that it was abuse — because in their culture and their country it wasn’t,” he said

The book proposal for “Fresh Off the Boat” was sent to publishers not long after an excerpt from Amy Chua’s memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” appeared in The Wall Street Journal

Chua made Asian-Americans matter just long enough for Huang’s proposal to sell as a counternarrative to hers.

Huang found the book repellent. “She Kumon-ized our existence,”

Still, Huang is quick to say that he never thinks of his parents as bad people. “I do think about getting hit, though,”

cultural dissonance generates an awkward silence around the topic of Asian-Americans — Asian-­Americans don’t want to portray their parents as backward, and white liberals don’t want to be seen as looking down on people of other races and cultures whose parenting practices seem primitive. Huang hates this silence.

In fact, his mother’s haranguing inadvertently helped jump-start his writing career. In 2010, his attempt at a second restaurant, Xiao Ye, received a zero-star review in The New York Times

*Huang’s blog went viral when he published an email his mother sent him after the review came out.

“Trust me, you much keep your bar license active just in case you need it,” his mother wrote. “You do not even understand your own strength or the whole scope of this business, and you are not even willing to listen. YOU MUST GET BURNT BEFORE YOU WILL HEAR YOUR MOM.*

Huang’s cocky social-media personality kept getting him in trouble, but it only seemed to swell his fame. His inability to censor himself, combined with his talent for speaking frankly and intimately to a mass public, aligned him perfectly with the mood of social media.

He was later named a TED fellow, a potential gateway into the world of highly compensated corporate speaking, but quickly got himself booted from the program when he skipped some of the events to appear on a podcast with the graffiti artist David Choe and the porn star Asa Akira. Choe declared it to be a meeting of the “worst Asians in the universe.” Huang would later denounce TED as a “cult.”

I met Huang in Los Angeles during a time of high tension surrounding his show, a few weeks after he exploded in a Twitter tirade, accusing the network of neutering his book, and a week before shooting would wrap.

Melvin Mar, the producer at Fox who bought the rights to the book, told me that Huang’s arrangement with the studio is atypical. Usually, a production company will pay an author for a book it options and neither seek nor offer further participation. But Huang insisted on being brought on as a producer as a condition of the sale. So, Mar told me, “we decided we would all do this together, like a family.”

The business case for making an Asian-American show is simple: Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country

actually made up of many different nationalities with no common culture or language

Moreover, comedies about nonwhite people generally must navigate a trap-laden path between offending the group represented and neutering the comedy to avoid doing so.

“All-American Girl,” the sitcom starring the comedian Margaret Cho and the last significant attempt to make an Asian-American TV show. The series was disowned by the Korean-American community that it tried to portray and was eventually rejected by the wider audience for being unfunny. It was canceled after just one season, two decades ago.

“Fresh Off the Boat” was meant to be different. Not only is the production staff diverse, but the source material helps indemnify the show against criticism of many of its outlandish elements, which are rooted in Huang’s actual life

In fact, Constance Wu, the actress who plays Jessica Huang on the show, told me that she underplays her character in relation to the actual woman. “I don’t actually think they would believe she was real,” Wu said

Hip-hop had been the emblem of Huang’s alienation from his own household and the violence he encountered at school.

Huang identified with the black kids at school because they, too, were enduring beatings in their households in a way that white kids weren’t.

Huang, who likes to analogize his relationship with Mar to that of the “field Chinaman” to the “house Chinaman.

If there is a class distinction between the two men, it’s this: Mar’s family worked in the bean-sprout business in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, while Huang’s father become a millionaire many times over in Orlando.

When I told Huang that Khan wanted him to sit back and enjoy the ride, he had an immediate response: “That’s what pedophiles tell children.”

Huang hit on a comparison between Hollywood executives and the typical Chinatown restaurant. Each, he said, think they know what people want and strive to give them exactly that. But it never occurs to either of them to sell people the authentic thing itself — Chinese food the way Chinese people make it for themselves or, in the case of Hollywood, stories that don’t rely on formulaic contrivance to be funny.

“I really feel that people don’t always know what’s good for them,” he said. “When you have a strong conviction, you have a duty not to tell people what they want