Celebrity chef keeps TV series based on memoir true to life
Eddie Huang fought to make the sitcom based on his memoir of growing up in a Taiwanese immigrant family, more true to the Asian-American experience
Minutes before Eddie Huang was to face the American Television Critics Association for the first time recently, he was getting briefed on what not to say.
"ABC's press people were like, 'Don't talk about race. Don't talk about immigration. Stay positive'," the TV personality, chef and restaurateur recalls. "They gave us this huge, really uncomfortable, 10-minute speech about how certain people on the show had not been positive and that everybody was working really hard."
The problem was that Huang was there to talk about his new ABC show, Fresh Off the Boat, which is based on life as a first-generation American in his family of Taiwanese immigrants. The other problem was that Huang had just written an unflinching, controversial essay in New York magazine about getting his story on network TV. ("The network's approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan [a stir-fried dish of chicken and vegetables] written by a Persian-American [Nahnatchka Khan], who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane," wrote Huang.)
In the article, which was written in a conversational, experimental way, Huang is critical, conflicted and even resentful of the process to get the show on the air. "Producers of Fresh Off the Boat want me to say 'America is great' or they'll replace me," was a Tweet that he repeated in the article.
I think there’s a very important conversation that this show is sparking about the process of representing minorities in dominant culture
"I was like, 'Listen, me telling the truth - me being clear-eyed about this show and about the process - is not me being 'not positive'," Huang says. "That's being real. That's being honest. You're telling me to be positive if I have to lie to be positive."