Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir

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New York Times Book Review Mercilessly funny and provocative, Fresh Off the Boat is also a serious piece of work.

Randall was neutered, Constance was exoticized, and Young Eddie was urbanized so that the viewers got their mise-en-place. This is a HISTORIC network-television show inspired by your life, and it’s going to get Americans excited about us. He learned to appreciate things like education and challenging norms because he was already at a disadvantage from birth being Asian-American in America. It really made me think about how a lot of our heritage and culture is passed down in the food we eat.It describes his growing love and passion for hip hop, his lifelong interest in cooking starting with his mother's Taiwanese cooking at home, and his brushes with the law along with fleeting careers in comedy, law, and illicit dealings. Sell them pasteurized network television with East Asian faces until they wake up intolerant of their own lactose, and hit ‘em with the soy. People need to understand how weird it is for Young Eddie to see macaroni and cheese for the first time. You shouldn’t define things by their title, how it looks, stereotypes, stigmas – Eddie mentions that everything he’s done, all of this interests and passions, his entire life has been focused around this theme. Those three minutes are the holy trinity Melvin, Randall, Constance, Hudson, Forrest, Ian, and I sacrificed everything for.

My story had become an entertaining but domesticated vehicle to sell dominant culture with Kidz Bop, pot shots, and the emasculated Asian male.

Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the twenty-first century. The only way they could even mention some of the stories in the book was by building a Trojan horse and feeding the pathogenic stereotypes that still define us to a lot of American cyclope.