I was called a chink a single time in my life. It caught me off guard and I froze, not knowing how I was supposed to react, and the moment passed. It was at a random middle school where I was somehow coerced into attending a summer reading class. We had some sort of break, and a couple of black kids who were there for mandatory summer school came across me, a Chinese kid proudly wearing his favorite Anfernee Hardaway jersey over a white tee in a school hallway in the dead of summer (relatively) voluntarily.
They were making fun of me, a skinny, short yellow kid wearing the jersey of a skinny, tall black kid. (The irony being that my game was closer to Penny’s than theirs could ever dream of being. While we're briefly on the topic, I've always hated being called Jeremy Lin or worse, Yao Ming, on the court just because of my race, but the worst name I've ever been called was JJ Barea. I was furious. But I digress.)
Fast forward a couple decades to today, and we now have a sitcom on ABC that shows another young kid getting called a chink. He handled it much differently than I did, but he was also under much different circumstances.
He grew up as the token Asian kid in Orlando (after watching The Book of Mormon, I chuckle everytime I hear the word "Orlando"), Florida, and I grew up as one of many Asian kids in Sugar Land, Texas. We both grew up loving Penny Hardaway (who wouldn’t?), but my schools’ student body was almost 1/3 Asian, and I never really felt any sort of racial tension, definitely not to the degree Eddie Huang did.
What it all boils down to is ignorance. Where there’s no diversity, people don’t understand what they don’t understand. Does that even make sense?
I get what Eddie Huang is trying to do, and I understand his frustration with how watered-down the sitcom is compared to his book. Trust me, I’m reading it. There’s a lot of hilarious anecdotes in the book, but there’s also a lot of animosity, hatred, and pain. Nobody wants to watch a sitcom that is a visual depiction of an Angry Asian Man rant, not to mention how exhausting it is to be angry all the time. So it’s tough to expect an ABC sitcom to go as hard in the paint as Eddie’s memoirs did over his own “growing up in America” experience.
That’s what we all need to remember when watching Fresh Off The Boat. It’s a sitcom. There’s no need to break down every little detail of the show or its jokes or its ratings and make it a racial thing. Look, I’m not putting down the show by any means or trying to downplay the significance of having an Asian family front and center on network TV – I enjoy the show (especially Constance Wu) and realize the show is unprecedented – but at the same time, I will watch it the same way I watch every other sitcom, for entertainment value. Let’s not expect every episode to be a groundbreaking, bold statement for Asians in America – the sitcom has enough pressure of its own, you know, just being a sitcom.
