Fresh Off the Boat (10 page)

Around this time, my cousin Allen started to change. I’d see him in the summers, in D.C. during holidays, weddings, etc. Something was different. He looked tired. Aunt Beth was always hard on him, comparing Allen to other cousins or his sister, and even at his house she’d yell at him for joking around with me or not getting better grades. I didn’t understand. He was the coolest dude I knew, played on the football team, always beat me at Tecmo Super Bowl, or this board game Hotels. To me, Allen was invincible, but as with all great Asian men, his moms was like fucking kryptonite. I saw this woman literally suck the marrow out of his life. Aunt Beth didn’t mean wrong, she was just doing what Asian moms think they’re supposed to do: ride their kids, make sure they do their homework, stay out of trouble, go to an Ivy, and be either a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. When we were kids, she’d throw Allen’s crayons on the floor and make him pick them up. As we got older, the crayons became board games, then video games, then CDs, but the process was the same. Anything Allen liked besides school was thrown to the ground. Well, except for the
Sports Illustrated
Swimsuit Issue. Aunt Beth was so out of the loop in Allen’s life that she didn’t even know he was into girls. When she found the issue, she was so happy and told people, “I’m so glad he’s not gay!”

A few years later, my cousin Angela, Allen’s sister, started dating this guy Tom. He was Chinese, too, and from California. Aunt Beth kept talking about how great Tom was because his parents owned a burger stand in California, saved their money, and sent Tom to Northwestern, where he was going to study to be a doctor. During winter break one year, Tom
and Angela came to stay with us. Tom was the first Uncle Chan I ever met. He was so proud about starting the Asian frat at his school, being pre-med, and basically everything that Asian parents wanted us to be. The first night, we all went out to dinner at Atlantic Bay Seafood. I remember Angela ordered a Midori sour. I wasn’t drinking yet at this age, but even I knew it was some bullshit. She took one sip and turned bright red. By that time, I had snuck off to the bar to watch Monday Night Football with the bartender and we just laughed at her.

I didn’t want to eat with my parents anymore. I’d take my food and go watch whatever was on ESPN during dinnertime. My parents said it was rude and I’d get my ass kicked for it, but I didn’t care. Dinner had become the time for everyone to be picked on in roundtable fashion and I hated it. I knew what they were going to say before they were going to say it, and I quit. We went back to the house that night and I hung out with Emery in his room. I remember we had just gotten 2Pac’s
All Eyez on Me
album and we were listening to the shit when Tom came in.

“You know, guys, this is garbage.”

“Say what?”

“This hip-hop stuff. It’s garbage.”

“Man, you, your parents, your burger stand is straight garbage, son!”

“You know, I’m going to let that go because this is a phase. You’ll grow out of this.”

Tom was wrong. It wasn’t a phase; I never stopped listening to hip-hop. From the day my mom bought me the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s “Nightmare on My Street” to the moment Allen put
The Chronic
in my tape deck to the day the next Nas descends upon planet Earth and blesses us with another perfect hip-hop album, it will never stop. That was all I knew. I was a Chinese-American kid raised by hip-hop and basketball with screaming, yelling, abusive parents in the background. If that makes me a rotten banana, well, tell it like it is.

D
ave had no shoes. This was something I noticed was very common with white people down south. They went everywhere with no shoes. Their parents would drive barefoot, then throw a pair of sandals on the asphalt as they walked out of the car and into Publix. I didn’t get it. The bottoms of their feet were all red, there were little pieces of gravel between their toes, and somehow they didn’t care. I mean, Dominicans hate socks and love Aventura, but at least they still got Jordan 7s on.

“Hey! I’m Dave.”

“Wassup, I’m Eddie.”

“You guys just moving in, huh?”

“Yeah, we moved in yesterday so unpacking now.”

“Welcome, dude! You play football?”

“Nah. I’m a big Skins fan but I never got to play.”

“Oh, you’ll love it, good ol’ American fun!”

“You play basketball?”

“Nope, just football and roller hockey.”

Then Dave invited himself and his stank-ass feet into our house. I liked the guy, but I knew that as soon as my mom saw him walking around on the
carpet with his dirty-ass bare feet, she would bug. Everyone knows to take their shoes off in an Asian home, but the fuck you supposed to tell Huckleberry Finn when he rolls in barefoot? There’s no answer for that. It’s unprecedented behavior on our continent, unless you’re a wounded samurai that got his wooden
chancletas
stolen.

Dave came in and started wandering around, touching things, and didn’t notice the footprints he was leaving everywhere. It was nasty, but I thought he was hilarious. I actually couldn’t wait for my mom to notice. Watching Dave explore the house felt like watching some prehistoric Encino Man that just came out of a block of ice. He was curious about everything, the way I was at Jeff Miller’s. Compared to other white people, he wasn’t the least bit judgmental. He just kept picking stuff up, turning it over in his hands, and then putting it back down again, covered in fingerprints. There was a genuine curiosity I appreciated. When he wasn’t picking stuff up, he tossed his football in the air over and over like an old Chinaman with his Baoding balls. He was looking at the house, but I was watching him. Then Mom came home.

“Xiao Ming! Ta de jiao zang si le!”

(Translation: EDWYN HUANG, his feet are disgusting.)

“What’d your mom just say?”

“Uhh, she just said hello.”

“Hmm, that’s a lot of words for hello!”

“Let’s just play football, dude.”

My mom had this habit of speaking Chinese in front of Americans. She didn’t give a fuck that they probably thought it was rude. I was caught in the middle. There’s a part of me that loves immigrants who throw niceties to the wind and just speak their tongue all day, every day. The older generation never felt integrated in society anyway so they don’t care if you see them as “rude.” I mean, cot damn, “rude” is probably a compliment compared to the shit people used to say to them. This is our language and it’s your problem if you don’t speak it, right? But another part of me feels, “What’s Dave got to do with it?” He’s just a nice kid that wants to see what a Chinese home is like. More than that, he just wants to see if the new kid plays football.

Dave was two years older than me and we didn’t talk much about anything besides football, but for the next three years he was my best friend and every day after school, we played. Football took over my life. I got John Madden Football for Super Nintendo and started copying the plays from the game—literally diagramming them on a piece of paper—so Dave and I could practice them with our brothers. It was always Dave and me versus Billie G. and Billie F. plus whoever else wanted to play in the neighborhood. There were a bunch of other kids who would play, but in four years, never once did Dave and I get split up.

The Billies were a couple of douche bag Zack Morrises. Pretty-boy cheap-shot artists. Crunchy in the face types. Billie G. is a pro wakeboarder now and he’s still the biggest cock and balls you’ll ever meet. I was the smallest and slowest out of the four, but Dave and I won most of the time because we were smart and nasty when we had to be. Billie G. was the most athletic—fast, tall, jumped high, all that good shit. But he had no plays, and Billie F., while also athletic, was a huge pussy with alligator arms.

Dave used hustle and worked to play Billie G. to a draw every time. Billie G. was like Randy Moss, the callous but supreme athlete, and Dave was Darrell Green, all heart. I played quarterback and covered Billie F., who was faster than me, but he’d hear footsteps and get shook. I bumped him a lot, ran him off his routes, and hit him hard when he did catch the ball. Dave had trouble getting open against Billie G. so we ran a lot of play-action, screens, flea-flickers, all that crazy shit. Anything to get Dave matched up against Billie F. The funny thing is the Billies were dumb as rocks. Their only play was for Billie F. to fade back into the end zone and throw it as far as he could to Billie G.

Our little brothers and the Atkins kids played, too, so we usually had eight- or ten-man games. It usually ended up as the Huangs and Williamses versus the Atkinses and Billie G.’s and Billie F.’s clans. Our ace in the hole was Emery, clearly bigger, faster, and tougher than all the other kids his age. He also hated Billie G. and Billie F., because their moms would make fun of our mom for being an FOB. Billie G. was the boogie man, though. He’d hit you late, chip you with his elbows, and tell mad Chinaman jokes. He terrorized us for years.

In seventh grade, my parents enrolled me at Trinity Prep. I was dumb excited because Dave went there, too. We couldn’t wait to go to school together and he told me about the football team. I registered late for the team because it was my first year at the school, but the coach, Mr. Rock, let me start practicing in early August. They didn’t have enough helmets so I was the only kid without one for the first week.

“Huang, what position do you play?”

“Quarterback.”

“No, really, what position do you play?”

“I play quarterback. I got plays and stuff.”

“Let’s start you at wide receiver, see how that goes.”

Organized football was a lot different than street ball. I always played quarterback in the yard, but standing five foot four in seventh grade, I wasn’t about to start at quarterback. I’m kind of glad there weren’t smartphones back then because a midget Chinaman telling his coach to start him at quarterback would be viral video gold. Almost like Eli Porter
^*
free-styles. Yet, no matter what, in my own head, I was a quarterback.

Playing wide receiver really didn’t start off very well. I always rocked my pants with a sag so I wasn’t very comfortable in football tights. I asked for a size big and when I ran routes, the shits would start falling and my hip pads would flop all over the place. I was too small to run the crossing routes I was good at and I was too slow to run the go routes guys my size needed to. It was a constant struggle in my life, a big man trapped in a little man’s body. Charles Barkley shit. The coaches laughed and the other players gave me a hard time, but I just kept working.

After our first game, it became clear I would never see the light of day at receiver. Coach Rock switched me to defensive tackle and right guard. It made no sense. When they lined us up at offensive line, it looked like Niagara Falls. Tall guy, tall guy, tall guy, Eddie Huang? The fuck you doing here, son? I honestly think Coach Rock thought I was helpless and put me at line so that I’d quit. The first rep I ever took on the line, he put me at left tackle and had Kwame line up across from me. Kwame was the
biggest dude on the team, played defensive end, and was a straight terror on the edge. I started talking to myself.

“Yo, you got this, son. Ain’t nothin’, just get low, get leverage, and send this boy packin’.”

“Blue nine, blue nine, yellow, yellow, hut!”

Kwame fired off the line and I started to shuffle back. Before I could even set my feet, BOOM. He just chucked me with two hands on a bull rush and I went flying. Literally, two feet off the ground, whiplash on my neck, and I tumbled over twice before coming to a stop. Dead fucking meat.

“Huang! Get up, Huang!”

“Whuuuh?”

“Huang, can you hear me?”

“Kwame?”

“No, this isn’t Kwame! It’s Coach Rock. Get up, Huang!”

Coach Rock was stumped. He had no idea what to do with me. I absolutely sucked at organized football. But I never once thought about quitting. In some crazy, sadistic, twisted way, I was having the time of my life. I was part of something. It wasn’t Chinese school. It wasn’t family. It was good ol’ American Fun and I loved it. When the helmets and pads were on, for sixty minutes, I wasn’t Chinese anymore. I was part of the team. Instead of being singled out and laughed at for being Chinese, I was being laughed at for totally sucking at football. It was a relief.

Mom kept trying to get me to stop playing because I came home injured in some form or other every single day. She used to watch me get tossed around by Billie G. in the backyard or wait on the sidelines to play at practice. She would be crying when I came home, but she never told me why until I got older. I had no idea she was watching, because she always hid from view, but my mom was always there. Without ever asking me, she understood that I needed it but wished I didn’t. I wasn’t built for this American life. I was like a lil’ shih tzu tryin’ to run with the pit bulls. That was Dave and me. You see it a lot. There’s the toy dog barking and leading the big goofy dog around. Isiah and Rodman, AI and Dikembe, Eddie and Dave. Life doesn’t always make sense.

Three weeks into the season, Coach Rock introduced new drills into practice. The first one was the Indian Run. The entire team, fifty-plus kids, all ran around the football field. You had to stay in line and the last guy in line had to sprint to get to the front until everyone did it twice. The first time we did it, the team thought to slow down a little bit when it was my turn. Everyone figured I was the slowest and it was to their benefit for me to get it over with as soon as possible since another forty-nine guys had to do it, too. Coach Rock was a wily motherfucker, though, and made the team run even faster when it was my turn. He was on to it. I understood why the guys wanted to slow down and I understood why Coach Rock wouldn’t allow it. It was a pivotal moment.

I looked at the ground, clenched my teeth, pumped my arms, and ran as fast as I fucking could. Couldn’t nobody help me but myself this time … I just kept chopping my feet. Up, down, up, down, up, down. My pads, helmet, pants, were all too big. Shit looked like a yard sale. By the time I looked up, I was a good bit in front of the first guy and snot was coming out of my damn ears. Twenty minutes later, the drill was over and I was over by the fence puking my guts out.