Eddie Huang can lay claim to a number of accomplishments: he has written a couple of bestsellers – one of which spawned a hit television show – owned restaurants, designed clothing and helmed an edgy, investigative TV series, an episode of which saw him tossed into an Italian jail cell. But Huang says he can count on one hand the number of times he has felt any degree of autonomy. “Three,” says Huang, 39, who lives in Los Angeles, in the United States. “There are only three things I’ve ever really had complete control over. My restaurant Baohaus; the books I wrote; and Boogie , although that is the first time I had to learn to play with others who had control over me.” Huang is referring to his directorial debut, released on March 5 by Focus Features, which tells the story of Alfred “Boogie” Chin, a basketball wunderkind living in Queens, New York, and his family’s quest for a college scholarship to help pave his way to the NBA. Huang wrote the screenplay in five days with no plan or outline, but ended up incorporating the themes that have defined his life – basketball, feeling adrift in a country where he has always been in a minority, and domestic abuse. Boogie is played by Taylor Takahashi, a 28-year-old who was working as a personal trainer and yakitori chef when the first-time director thrust a neophyte into a role that could essentially make or break his filmmaking career. But that kind of risk-taking is part of Huang’s MO. His 2013 memoir, Fresh Off the Boat , was also, in its own way, iconoclastic. Writing as the American-born son of Taiwanese immigrants, he revealed how he upended the notion of the perfect Asian child. Growing up in Washington and Orlando, he got into fights, listened to hip hop when it was a weirdly non-Asian thing to do, and envisioned a life for himself beyond the stereotypical expectation of getting into an Ivy League school. There were parents who did not want their children hanging out with Huang, who was often derided as “not really Chinese”. I knew it was wrong, that your mom shouldn’t be throwing boiling hot water at your dad and your dad shouldn’t be dragging your mom across the floor Eddie Huang “My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America,” he wrote in the book. “How something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness.” The family he wrote about in the book was not the same family that showed up when Fresh Off the Boat ran as a TV series from 2015 to 2020. In that show, Eddie and his brothers, Emery and Evan, live a happy life with their parents, Louis, a goofy, kindly, sympathetic restaurateur, and Jessica, ambitious and competitive, yet loyal and loving. They reside in a cheerful middle-class suburb with an eccentric wheelchair-bound Mandarin-speaking grandmother, and other than the preponderance of porcelain rice bowls on the dinner table, the brothers are as American as the boys from Malcolm in the Middle . “That show never felt authentic to me. Me and my family were watching it and laughing. It’s a joke to us,” says Huang, who watched the “fantastic and honest” pilot, and made it through about half of the second episode before turning it off. It was far too much of a contrast to his actual life, the one his autobiography was about, and he has not been shy about sharing details of the abuse that took place under his roof. “My mom would hit my dad and my dad would hit my mom and there was crazy stuff going on all the time,” recalls Huang. “It got to a point where I knew it was wrong, that your mom shouldn’t be throwing boiling hot water at your dad and your dad shouldn’t be dragging your mom across the floor and your mom shouldn’t crash the car into the garage with the kids in it.” He says that level of dysfunction is rampant in Asian households, but remains cloistered, a secret that nobody can talk about: “At family functions, my cousins had [bruises]. But we’re not allowed to say anything. “We’re told, ‘It’s for your own good, it’s because you were bad, we had to teach you a lesson.’ I really felt like I deserved it.” It wasn’t until Huang watched Good Will Hunting (1997) that he felt able to confront and acknowledge the demons of his childhood; he was 16 and at his aunt’s house when the film came on. “I have no connection with white people in Boston, but I absolutely adore that film,” says Huang. “It was the first film that I saw that spoke in a real way about domestic violence. I felt seen. “That movie might just have saved my life, because I didn’t feel like an alien any more. I think that’s all that people really need in this world, to feel seen and not alone. “I have a lot of friends who are in rehab, who go to meetings. It’s not even about the programme. It’s just about being around other people who have had the same experience, so you know you’re not alone.” With Boogie , Huang aims to right the wrongful stereotypes he believes have been perpetuated about Asians by popular culture. Boogie’s parents seem to hate one another, and there is a lot of smacking around and yelling; the only thing they can connect on is their love for their son and their shared vision for his future as an athlete. Huang aimed to put forth as visceral a story as he could, so there is no small amount of grit and strife, high school rivalries playing out on inner city basketball courts, the whole piece given a jarring and subversive energy by the music of rapper Pop Smoke, who also appears in the film, and who was shot to death in his home last year, aged 20. “In popular culture, Asians are seen as a group of people that do quite well on standardised tests and education and finances, but we’re really not whole human beings here,” says Huang. “There’s a lot of structural racism. I faced a lot of outright physical racism and hated growing up in Florida. “Fresh Off the Boat , the TV show, made light of it all. I get that it’s a comedy, but there was a lot of pain in my book that was stripped out of the show, and they made a really cookie-cutter version that was easily digestible so that it wasn’t challenging for white people to watch.” Boogie really only came into being because Huang was so disillusioned with his preceding gig. He had a reputation as a renegade foodie, and had founded the successful steamed-bun eatery Baohaus in Los Angeles and New York (the outlets recently closed down). His Huang’s World documentary series, which ran for a couple of seasons on Viceland in 2016 and 2017, afforded Huang the opportunity to eat his way through Jamaica and Peru, showcasing those food cultures through a prism of social commentary, be it forest conservation or post-independence economic struggles. In Sicily, he thought it might be fun to talk to a group of nationalists who were anti-immigration and wanted to stop the North Africans from coming in. Over a meal, Huang pointed out that the rice in the arancini they were dining on came from Africa. “I basically communicated to them how false their narrative was, that their identity as a pure white country was patently false. It did not go down well at all.” A fracas ensued, the nationalists demanded the footage. The producer was happy to hand it over while Huang refused. The police were called, and Huang was tossed into a Sicilian jail. While Viceland and the US embassy worked to get him released, he taught his captors how to make American hamburgers (they asked). Huang was so appalled by his producer’s readiness to cave in that, once they were all out, he spearheaded what he describes as a “mutiny”, asking his colleagues to walk off the show. “All of us cared about the work we were doing, we thought it was an important story, and we thought it would be difficult to work with a producer who was ready to give up footage. We didn’t want to work with him any more.” The sentiment was, ‘Why is it so hard to do the right thing?’ If you’re right, you’re right. Why is it you have to bow to so many people? Eddie Huang The network higher-ups did not appreciate Huang’s stance, he was suspended for a month, and when he came back to work the show had changed; the decision was made to excise any political perspective and focus solely on the food. (This would never happen to Anthony Bourdain, obviously, but then again raging at your on-screen guests was never really his thing.) “It was heartbreaking,” says Huang. “I left the office in LA that day crying. And then I went home and started writing Boogie . I had no idea what it was going to be. I just started writing down all my feelings. “The sentiment was, ‘Why is it so hard to do the right thing?’ If you’re right, you’re right. Why is it you have to bow to so many people?” He finished the screenplay five years ago, and then began the process of selling it, with the usual amount of passes and rejections. This was before the success of Crazy Rich Asians (2018), when there was still a prevailing sentiment in Hollywood that Asian stories were not necessarily profitable. But once he got the greenlight, auditions for the protagonist began in earnest. He saw hundreds of actors, but Huang was hard-pressed to find one who could nail the part. “There’s a lot of pain in the film, and none of the actors we saw were able to access that. They didn’t have the experience. In the Asian community, our parents don’t encourage us to pursue the arts. They sign us up for piano, violin, tennis and swimming, but not acting. They’re not sending us to Lee Strasberg.” Huang and Takahashi had already met by that point; Huang plays in a basketball league, Takahashi showed up one day, and “he was really good. I said to him, ‘You take my spot, you’re better than me.’ But he would not take my spot. “And I thought, ‘This is a really nice kid, there’s a real generosity to him. Most people want to play to score and be a hero. But he had so much confidence as a player and he comes to play in an almost meditative way. It’s like dance for him.” Eddie has been my personal icon for Asian-American representation. I saw a lot of myself in him, through Huang’s World and his books. His is a unique and intelligent voice Taylor Takahashi Before long, Takahashi went to work as Huang’s assistant; he sat in on pitch meetings, cooked alongside him at events such as the DVD release party for Crazy Rich Asians . It ultimately dawned on Huang that perhaps Takahashi was the Boogie that had thus far eluded him. “As a writer-director, you have to trust the actors to take this story and run with it, and it becomes their story,” Huang says. “Taylor is real. If things don’t feel right to him, if they don’t feel good in his gut, he just won’t do it. You can’t get him to do anything he doesn’t believe in.” For Takahashi, signing on for a lead role in a feature film with zero screen credits was a leap of faith, but it was his belief in Huang that gave him the confidence to follow through. “Eddie has been my personal icon for Asian-American representation,” says Takahashi. “I saw a lot of myself in him, through Huang’s World and his books. His is a unique and intelligent voice. He can speak to something as diverse as hip hop or politics. Until I started working with him, I had no idea he was so big in the entertainment industry.” Meet Simu Liu, the actor playing Marvel’s first Asian superhero Takahashi is aware that the way forward, should he choose to pursue a career in entertainment, has been somewhat eased by the work of Huang and other notable Asian actors, among them Randall Park, Awkwafina and Ali Wong. A film like Boogie , Takahashi says, with its raw, unvarnished view of everyday struggles, could shatter long-held stereotypes: “It’s more a normalisation of Asian-Americans, and will allow people to see us in a different light, that we’re just like everybody else.” In the meantime, Huang is already on to his next project; he is behind Chinos , an animated series that will show on HBO Max, and that Huang describes as a way for him to “tell multicultural, intersectional immigrant stories from the margins”. It is set in a neighbourhood in Los Angeles that is home to a large population of Mexicans and Asians, and in creating it, Huang drew a lot from his own experiences growing up. Bit by bit, he says, with this and other shows from him and other creators, the presence of Asians in Hollywood will be “not just representation, but authenticity”. “Right now, there’s still a lot of tokenism and puppeteering. You know who is writing the narrative by just checking the credits. But the world is heading in the right direction.”