Fresh Off the Boat (28 page)

After the first two weeks on Loveboat, we had “Family Day.” We were supposed to go out for the day with our families in Taipei. Most people still had some family in Taipei, but I didn’t. While my mom and dad were born in Taiwan, the rest of their families were from mainland China. By the seventies, there was just more opportunity in America than in Taiwan so most of my family left.

In Taiwan, people would always ask about your family heritage since everyone’s journey to Taiwan was different. Some were Native Taiwanese, Hakka, some were Japanese-Taiwanese,
Wai Sheng Ren
(Chinese-Taiwanese), etc. And on family day at Loveboat you could expect to tell your family history at least once an hour. Luckily, Ning came to my rescue.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

“Nothing, I’m gonna go play basketball.”

“Aww, do you not have family?”

“Naw, not here.”

“Ha, ha, orphan boy!”

“Whatever …”

“Well, do you wanna come eat with my family?”

“What are you guys eating?”

“Sushi!”

“Really? Sushi in Taiwan? Why would you do that?”

“Whatever, go play basketball, orphan boy …”

THE SUSHI SPOT
wasn’t more than a garage on the street level of an apartment building. Cook downstairs, live upstairs. You walked in and on the right side was the standard blue Japanese curtain with octopus cartoons. Behind the curtains was the kitchen, barely four feet by three feet. Ning’s aunt and uncle were really good people. They didn’t pry about my family, didn’t seem to mind that I was wearing my Orlando Magic jersey backward, and ordered a ton of food. It was par for the course for the Juang family.

The sushi was very cold. In Taiwan, they keep the sushi at a temperature several degrees lower than in Japan or America. Sometimes, you’ll even get thin ice chips on the surface of sashimi. The chunks are significantly larger and cut like two-ounce slices of New York strip. Thick, wide, and blocky. I didn’t like it. To me, sushi is about mouthfeel and texture. When you serve the fish close to frozen and in bricks, it defeats the purpose.

The sushi sucked but Ning was cool. While other girls were obsessed with dick, going out, cliques, and ladder climbing, she was totally oblivious. Part of it was naïveté, but another part of it was just that she didn’t buy into the things people told her were important. She lived in her own cocoon, a cocoon filled with anime, bubble tea, and fantasy novels. I was dismissive at first, but then we started playing Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros., and smanging. It was like returning to some version of me that had gotten lost over the last decade, since I was a kid with my brother Emery, crawling through the house and playing Mortal Kombat at 2
A.M
. with the sound off while my mom was asleep. Emery and I’d read comics, watch kung fu flicks, and not give a fuck about this girl or that party or who had beef. I realized that I missed that.

It’s not until I’m writing today that I realized why we got along so well. We were both wolves in sheep’s clothing. We’d realized early on to “play
dumb.” I dumbed out destroying everything in my way, but Ning did the opposite, built a pleasure dome and kept to herself. Before I met Ning, it was only in the really hard times that I looked at myself and forced myself to understand who I really was and not get lost in the act. But I didn’t have to act around her, I could just be.

Ning also got me back in touch with my identity. While I was out drinking Mad Dog 40/40 and running over frat boys with Mitsubishi Monteros, she went to Chinese school on weekends all the way up until her senior year of high school. Instead of sneaking into bars or clubs, she was going to Bubble Island with her girlfriends. We kept making fun of each other, but as they say, opposites attract. I had become so obsessed with not being a stereotype that half of who I was had gone dormant. But it was also a positive. Instead of following the path most Asian kids do, I struck out on my own. There’s nature, there’s nurture, and as Harry Potter teaches us, there’s who YOU want to be. Every part of me was something I sought out and encountered. And that summer in Taipei, I looked around and saw myself everywhere I went. Pieces of me scattered all over the country like I had lived, died, burned, and been spread throughout the country in a past life. Here I was coming home to find myself again in street stalls, KTV rooms, and bowls of beef noodle soup. All the things instilled in me from a young age by my family and home, rehydrated and brought to life like instant noodles. They never left, they just needed attention.

I REMEMBER SITTING
in the Taipei airport the day I left Taiwan. Ning had a flight around the same time so I walked her to her security gate and said goodbye. I wasn’t big on goodbyes. I remember she had a giant backpack, shorts, and something orange on, but I wasn’t sad. I knew I’d see her again. She already planned to come visit me in Florida when she got back. But I was worried about Taiwan. Who knew when I’d come back? There was a part of me that dreaded going back to Florida. It was like going back to work.

I knew that in a matter of days, I’d be back to the land of slanted-eye or ching-chong jokes. After those months in Taiwan, I started asking myself:
Why? Why the fuck do I have to be Q-Tip cryin’ Sucka N!gg@? I was sick of explaining myself, sick of being different, and sick of Florida. I felt something weird and new: I was happy. Reconciled. I learned my lesson from America and didn’t want to go back. But in truth, in Taiwan, I was different, too. I had to explain myself to people in Taiwan just like I did in Florida and I realized that if I stayed, I’d have a whole new set of hurdles to face. And I was already buggin’ out because I was about to miss the Redskins’ second preseason game after Danny Wuerffel set the world on fire in the first one. I was stuck in the middle.

The airport honestly felt more like home to me than either Taiwan or Florida, and I enjoyed every moment. There was fried chicken, beef noodle soup, hamburgers, Coke,
Apple Sidra
, fried rice, and doughnuts. Something for everyone. I guess it’s the only place I didn’t have to explain anything. Everyone was in-between. The relief of the airport and the opportunity to reflect on my trip helped me realize that I didn’t want to blame anyone anymore. Not my parents, not white people, not America. Did I still think there was a lot wrong with the aforementioned? Hell, yeah, but unless I was going to do something about it, I couldn’t say shit. So I drank my
Apple Sidra
and shut the fuck up.

W
hen I came back from Taiwan, I was on a mission. Somehow everything was coming clear, like juices dripping from a turkey timer. I saw that my interests in hip-hop, basketball, food, comedy, and writing were symptoms of a larger interest: finding a place for myself in the world or making one. School helped me give that larger interest more precise names—racial identity, social justice—and I was determined to figure it all out.

I finally felt free. For years, I knew what I wanted to do but felt guilty because I knew my parents wouldn’t approve. They wanted me to be a business major, but I knew it wasn’t for me. I fought them, I argued, and hated them because so much of my life was stunted due to their wants and desires. Once I understood why, I stopped reacting with anger. They were so cute and delusional trying to come up in the world using the master’s tools. Luckily, I got my Audre Lorde on and realized you can’t tear down the master’s house with the master’s tools.

Instead of living my life trying to please them, I started to jux them.

Sometimes being honest isn’t good for anyone. I knew I wasn’t going to give in to my parents, but I also knew they’d never understand, so I had to be a trickster. I did what I wanted to do, made a plan for myself, and
kept them in the dark. I said the things I needed to say so they could sleep at night. Every semester, I’d sign up for one class that I could show them a textbook for, like marketing or business administration. On my own time, I took a ton of classes in different departments: anthropology, sociology, English, Asian studies, film, women’s studies, African-American studies, and even theater. I ate the shit up. All of a sudden, I loved school. I didn’t even want to get fucked-up anymore. I started to read every book I could get my hands on and joined the school paper to practice writing. I couldn’t believe how long I had been kept in the dark but as I opened each book I saw there were other people like me who saw the things I saw. I gave up trying to find friends at college and befriended dead people between the margins. For years, I just didn’t know how to express it but reading things like Teresa de Lauretis, Audre Lorde, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Toni Morrison, I got it.

The most important professor in my entire life was Dr. Jennifer Henton. She was a strong black woman from Philly with a voice like Marge Simpson. All the kids at Rollins hated her. No one recommended her classes, everyone said she was difficult, and no one really got good grades in her class. But I looked at the syllabuses for her classes and thought to myself, These are all hit records! Syllabuses became like playlists for me those days. I was just into school and got mad excited thinking about all the new shit I’d learn every semester. The first class I took with her was a film criticism class with a feminist angle. At first I had no idea how I was going to relate since I still called bitches hos and hos bitches, but I signed up anyway. The class was housed in a cottage on campus with a round table in the center of the room. Dr. Henton looked like a cat lady holding an Alcoholics Anonymous session. I knew because I was taking anger management and alcohol/drug abuse classes every week as part of probation.

She was fragile and soft-spoken, but once we got into the course work, I’d never seen a woman go so hard. She changed my entire view of women. Where she saw bias, misogyny, racism, classism, and the like, she pointed it out, and never felt like she needed to curb her opinion for people when she was right. She reinforced a lesson my pops tried to teach me with his
hands: NEVER EVER EVER back down if you’re right. If you have evaluated all the perspectives, gone around the round table, and come back around with the same opinion, then walk right up to the offending party and tell ’em why you mad. I realized that as wild as I’d been up to that point, I still curbed my opinion ever so slightly because I was surrounded by conservative white people at Rollins.

ONCE WE HAD
a debate about emasculated Asian men in Hollywood. Dr. Henton busted out a book called
Screening the Asian Male
and it made total sense, but the idea of the emasculated Asian wasn’t new to me. My cousin Allen was the first to point it out to me one day when we were still kids:

“Yo, you notice Asian people never get any pussy in movies? Jet Li rescued Aliyah, no pussy! Chow Yun-Fat saves Mira Sorvino, no pussy. Chris Tucker gets mu-shu, but Jackie Chan? No pussy!”

“Damn, son, you right! Even Long Duk Dong has to ride that stationary bicycle instead of fucking!”

“You see!”

I never thought a professor would back me up, but Dr. Henton literally put the topic onto the syllabus! We talked for hours about how Asian men should be getting pussy in movies and I couldn’t have agreed more.

THEN THERE WAS
Dr. Maurice O’Sullivan. He was the longtime English chair and if not the most respected, clearly the most pugnacious. He went by “Socky,” short for Socrates, and he was definitely the gadfly of Orlando Hall. You see, most professors don’t engage. They start conversations, let the kids play, and referee. Dr. O’Sullivan was a different animal. He’s the old dude at the YMCA that will dunk on twelve-year-olds just ’cause he can. Every class, this dude knocked me out in the first round. No matter how prepared I was, he tore me apart. If I tried to use something from Shakespeare, he would undercut me by having an equal and opposite quote from another Big Bill work. He always got me because he had a
deeper well to draw from. He also had a wit and sense of humor. He was my kryptonite. Bird and Magic, Hakeem and Shaq, Yao and Dwight, Mo and Me. But I went home, thought about what Dr. O’Sullivan said, and came back every day to get my ass kicked. I remember I turned in a satire as a book report once and he said to me, “Eddie, nice try. Tragedy is easy, comedy is hard, you’re not funny.” I laughed and went back to the lab.

Prof O was from an immigrant family like me. He told me that back in the day, Rollins charged him with teaching African-American literature because he was black Irish. All my arguments, strategies, and opinions were old news to him. Every work I referenced was available to him. I was twenty and he was sixty-plus. He had kids, a lifetime of memories and experiences, how the fuck was I going to beat this dude? Not only was he smart like the other professors, but he had logos, ethos, and pathos. Most professors got the logos and ethos but been in the ivory tower too long to have a handle on pathos. Then I realized … I gotta hit this motherfucker the one place he’s weak and play his strength against him: age.