text:
Soho House Interview: Chef May Chow and Little Bao (Hong Kong)

Soho House:

Chef May Chow pairs traditional ingredients from Hong Kong with Western cooking techniques to create her stuffed, steamed buns – fans queue around the block for the slow-braised pork belly bao, served with leek and shiso red onion salad and hoisin ketchup.

We sat down with Chow to find out more:

Q: Where’s the best place to eat in Hong Kong right now and what is your favorite dish on the menu?

A: I love The Chairman because of my favourite dish, which is steamed crab with aged Shoaxing wine, chicken oil and flat rice noodles.

Q: How did you get to where you are today and who inspired you?

A: I had a very singular vision about the kind of food I wanted to cook and who I wanted to be very early on in my career. I have to thank Matt Abergel (owner of Hong Kong’s Yardbird) because without his guidance during my restaurant development, Little Bao wouldn’t have been possible. He was honest when he believed something wasn’t good enough and I trusted his opinion.

Q: Tell us about Little Bao and the inspiration behind it.

A: Little Bao is my life translated into a restaurant. It takes inspiration from the best of both Chinese and American culture but most importantly it’s a place to have fun – so expect good food; loud, upbeat music and great cocktails.

Q: How has your background influenced your cooking?

A: I grew up in a traditional Chinese family and I’m influenced by Chinese culture. When I moved to the US, I was influenced by the freedom of speech and, of course, the food. My cooking draws on both cultures and I love taking traditional ingredients and putting an original spin on them.

Q: What made you decide to open your own restaurant and how did you go about launching it, finding funding and finding the perfect venue?

A: I always knew that I wanted to be a restaurant owner because I felt I had a story to tell through food. The opportunity came when I was offered a booth at a market. The response was great and I started to daydream about opening a restaurant.

I developed a business plan and gained financial support from my family and friends. We scouted for a Hong Kong location for over six months and I ended up taking over a space that was occupied by a hideous Thai restaurant. That was the first right decision I made because it was in my favorite neighborhood in Hong Kong.

Q: Have you ever faced any sexism in the industry?

A: I’m such a positive and happy person that I don’t feel that I’ve ever felt discriminated against, especially in a city like Hong Kong. I am quite an empowered woman and I generally see sexism as ignorance but I don’t experience much of it.

Q: What advice would you give to other pop-ups who are looking to launch their own restaurant?

A: I started as a chef working in restaurants, so my story is slightly different because I already had a basic understanding of the DNA needed for a successful restaurant.

The first step is to develop a detailed business plan and have legitimate solutions for all the questions that crop up. How do you make sure there is consistency in your service, food and experience? Have you developed your service manual? How will you make sure food and drink cost is controlled? Where is the best location for your target market? Who is your target market? Who is your competitor? What is your PR and marketing strategy? What music should you play? How much funding do you need?

Most importantly, though, listen to the people who will provide you smart insight.

Q: How do you think the London food scene measures up to Hong Kong?

A: Both Hong Kong and London have great food scenes but I think while Hong Kong offers the best of every type of Chinese cuisine, London has a bigger array, from great modern British food like St. John and Gordon Ramsey to fantastic Middle Eastern and Indian cuisines. London also has a wonderful farmer driven open market that Hong Kong doesn’t have.

Washington Post: How it feels when white people shame your [Asian] culture’s food, then make it trendy

Washington Post (by Ruth Tam):

When I’m craving comfort food, I’ll take my father’s ngau lam over mac and cheese any day. Although it takes the better part of a day to prepare, his Cantonese braised brisket stew always soothes my stomach and my soul.

I love the cooking process almost more than the flavor. My father cuts a square of cheesecloth and adds cinnamon, star anise, cloves, peppercorn, ginger, orange peel and a sweet root with no English name to its center. He ties it into a neat bundle and lets me hold it to my nose before dropping it into a rich broth in which brisket, tripe and tendon simmer for hours until tender.

Before all the ngau lam ingredients converge in a giant pot, the brisket, tripe and tendon must be blanched. It gives off a hot, heavy stench that permeates every room of the house and adheres to every fiber.

My childhood home in suburban Chicago always smelled like whatever we were cooking. Visiting us meant cloaking yourself in the scent of haam daan ju yoke beng, a dish of steamed pork and salted egg, or the perfume of mapodoufu, tofu and minced pork with a spicy chili and fermented black bean sauce.

I didn’t mind the smells growing up because I wasn’t aware of them. That is, until a high school friend declared my house smelled of “Chinese grossness.”

The comment clung to me like the smell in my home. My embarrassment hit a peak when my father installed a 5-foot-long fish tank in our family room so he could steam fish at home — extra fresh. I tried to pretend the blue fish swimming around in the murky green water were pets, but the lack of tank accessories gave away our true intentions, stunning my white friends.

My hunger for my family’s food was overpowered by my desire to fit in, so I minimized Chinese food’s role in my life and learned to make pasta instead. Little did I know that Americans would come to embrace the dishes and cooking styles that once mortified me. The Cantonese foods of my childhood have reappeared in trendy restaurants that fill their menus with perfectly plated fine-dining versions of our traditional cuisine. In some cases, this shift has been heartening. But in too many others, the trend has reduced staples of our culture to fleeting fetishes.

The shame associated with immigrant foods (until they become foodies’ favorites) isn’t unique to me or Chinese dishes. In her new book, “Maangchi’s Real Korean Cooking,” Korean cook and YouTube star Maangchi writes fondly of Korean soup soy sauce. In South Korea, all of her neighbors would boil their own. In the United States, though, the soup was received differently:

“I remember boiling my Korean soup soy sauce when I lived in Missouri, and my apartment manager knocked on my door. ‘What’s that smell? I got a complaint from your neighbor.’ I was so embarrassed that I didn’t make soup soy sauce again for a long time, even after I moved back to Korea.”

Even now, as an accomplished cook in New York City, Maangchi doesn’t boil soup soy sauce in her home. Instead, she takes it to a creek at the base of the Henry Hudson Bridge and boils it in a portable gas burner “where no one will complain.”

This experience is so universal that it recently became canonized in pop culture. New York chef Eddie Huang retold the story of his daily lunchroom shaming in a scene from “Fresh Off the Boat,” an ABC sitcom based on his memoir. When young Eddie takes a carton of noodles out of his lunchbox, his white classmates react with disgust: “Ying Ming’s eating worms! Dude, that smells nasty!” Back at home, Eddie demands his parents start packing him “white people lunch.”

The lengths to which immigrant families have gone to hide the way we feed ourselves break my heart. But something has changed. In cities big and small, Asian dishes and flavors have become popular among foodies at chic eateries. Foods that were once considered too strong, too spicy, too smelly or too obviously-from-an-animal for my white friends are now on Restaurant Week menus nationwide.

A month ago, I saw a kimchi burger on the menu at Macintyre’s, a new bar in Washington’s upscale Woodley Park neighborhood. It’s just two miles north of Drafting Table, which sells a duck-and-hoisin-sauce grilled cheese. And a few blocks from there is Masa 14, which features crispy chicken wings and meatballs on its “Dim Sum” menu. Downtown, Wolfgang Puck’s The Source offers lobster bao buns and “Chinoise-style” chicken salad.

In one way, this is a positive change. Now that I’ve gotten over my fear of stinking up my kitchen, the growing number of Asian grocery stores means I don’t have to visit home to get ingredients for homemade Chinese food. Greater acceptance of international eateries allows immigrants, professional chefs and otherwise to explore their culture and dual identity proudly, instead of behind closed doors or at the edge of the Henry Hudson Bridge.

Gravitating toward “new” cuisines is understandable, and when done well, immigrant food can provoke discussions about personal history and shared diasporas. I’ve seen this happen at restaurants such as China Chilcano, which describes the history of Chinese and Peruvian fusion that influences its menu, a bare minimum that many restaurants ignore.

But while some eateries get it right, the United States’s take on “ethnic” food often leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Recently, I discovered I can order bone broth, like my grandmother used to make, in New York City — the same way I would order a cold-pressed juice.

“2015 is the year of bone broth!”  the “Today” show declared in January. “These days, the hottest food trend is a steaming cup of soup.” The morning show touted bone broth as a newly discovered wonder food of “Paleo dieters and wellness enthusiasts,” making no mention of its grounding in Chinese culture.

In the United States, immigrant food is often treated like discount tourism — a cheap means for foodies to feel worldly without leaving the comfort of their neighborhood — or high-minded fusion — a stylish way for American chefs to use other cultures’ cuisines to reap profit. The dishes of America’s recent immigrants have become check marks on a cultural scavenger hunt for society’s elite. One conspicuous example is an upcoming eatery in Washington’s Petworth neighborhood that packages discount tourism and high-minded fusion into one menu. The as-yet-unnamed restaurant seeks to re-create Southeast Asia’s “expat experience” — not for Asian residents in D.C. but for D.C. residents who crave the feeling of visiting Asia with other foreigners.

“When you travel in Southeast Asia, you have two experiences: the cultural experiences with the temples, food, and people, and then a phenomenal traveler’s culture, too,” chef Alex McCoy told Washingtonian. “That’s the inspiration for this place. We want to introduce people to Thai cuisine, but frame it in the eye of a traveler.”

This cultural appropriation stings because the same dishes hyped as “authentic” on trendy menus were scorned when cooked in the homes of the immigrants who brought them here. Fashionable food from foreign cultures may satisfy a temporary hunger, but if you’re trying it for shallow reasons, you’ll be culturally unfulfilled in the long run.

Instead of attempting to expand our palates with best-restaurant lists and foodie fads, we should find deeper ways to explore the diversity of dishes that have come to the United States.

We need food writers like Monica Bhide, who appreciate not only diverse tastes, but also the cultures that produced them. We need more cookbook authors like Maangchi, who documents traditional recipes so fans of Korean food can participate in culinary rituals. We need more publications like Lucky Peach, which treats immigrant food with the same complexity that is bestowed on the all-American burger. And we need more films like “The Search for General Tso” that examine our relationship with “ethnic” food.

Americans are increasingly interested in where food is sourced. Surely, that interest should extend to a meal’s cultural roots as well as its biological origins.

My dad’s ngau lam is not gross, but I never want it to be given the “fad” treatment. You should try it the way he likes to prepare it — after he blanches the cow stomach, adds the bag of spices and lets it cook for hours.

The best meals are more than the sum of their ingredients; their flavors tell the stories of the rich cultures that created them. When the same respect is afforded to immigrant food as traditional “American” food, eating it will sate us in more ways than one.

Audi customer Siobhan Yap offered free lunch after car gets damaged, racks up epic $1100 bill

audifeatFoodBeast/Next Shark:

An Audi dealership in the U.K. offered a 27-year-old woman a free meal to make up for her new car being damaged in the showroom, but when she presented them with her bill, they were completely floored by how much she spent.

Siobhan Yap had recently purchased a new Audi A3 convertible from Audi Watford outside of London for about 20,000 pounds, or just over $30,000. Before she picked up her new car however, a delivery truck accident left the brand new car damaged.

audidealerTo apologize for the “inconvenience caused,” the dealership offered to pay for a  free meal for two. What they didn’t know was that Yap would go HAM with her free meal.

Yap took her mother out to the Michelin-starred L’Atelier de Joel Robuchon restaurant in Covent Garden in the heart of London.

restaurantFor their epic meal, they enjoyed four glasses of rosé champagne, two $106 bottles of wine, a $54 black truffle tasting dish, scallops, risotto and $132 in cocktails, among many other dishes for a total of 21 different items.

recieptAudi was expecting a modest bill of about 100 pounds, which works out to just over $150. Instead, Yap slammed them with a bill for 714.61 pounds, which works out to $1103.93, including a 13% tip.A Watford Audi spokesman explained that the bill was an ”excessive expenditure for two diners” but they were “keen to make amends” by agreeing to cover half the bill. The spokesman continued:

“We believe this is a fair and reasonable amount given the circumstances, and we stand by the decision taken.”

However, Yap apparently doesn’t think she went overboard and Audi actually skimped on their promise to pay for half the bill which would be about 357 pounds. She  explained:

“I asked for a courtesy car in the first instance which they said they did not have. They only gave me one because I kicked up a fuss with the MD.

I received a sum of £250 but I have had no further contact with them. The statement that they offered me half is incorrect.”

The New Yorker: “Home Cooking- Funny families on ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ and ‘Black-ish.’ ”

If “Fresh Off the Boat” emphasizes family warmth, it’s complicated by sharp details.

If “Fresh Off the Boat” emphasizes family warmth, it’s complicated by sharp details. (Illustration by David Saracino)

The New Yorker (by Emily Nussbaum):

Like many pioneering TV series, ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” a sitcom about a Taiwanese-American family running a Western-themed chophouse in Orlando, Florida, débuted to impossibly high expectations, hand-wringing, and prickly waves of preëmptive backlash. In an unusual twist, this hazing came from the man whose life the show was based on.

In an essay in New York, Eddie Huang, the celebrity chef, Vice TV host, and author of the memoirFresh Off the Boat,” merrily trash-talked his own collaborators, including a Chinese-American producer, whom he called an “Uncle Chan,” and the showrunner, Nahnatchka Khan, an Iranian-American. “What did you buy my book for?” Huang yelled, frustrated that the show had bowdlerized his story, which included whippings by his father, an immigrant restaurant owner. “Just make A Chinks Life . . . With Free Wonton Soup or Soda.” Thousands of words in, Huang tossed out a few lines of praise, but the impression he left wasn’t great—if he saw his sitcom as a sellout, who were viewers to disagree?

At the heart of this rant was the question of what makes TV bold: Huang wanted something pungent, like an FX anti-hero dramedy, or like the nineties sitcom “Married with Children,” the type of show that would underline (and maybe glamorize) his violent youth, his charismatic dick of a dad, and the roots of Huang’s own flamboyant persona. That desire wasn’t sheerly egotistical: Huang was eager to push back at the cliché of Asian men as passive, genitally cheated nerds (“the eunuch who can count,” as he puts it in the book)—a Long Duk Dong stereotype still visible on shows like CBS’s “2 Broke Girls.” Huang wanted “Fresh Off the Boat” to “go hard,” like his nineties hip-hop heroes. In the process, he was claiming TV’s own bad-boy role, the provocateur who shoves authenticity down the throat of The Man. Think Roseanne; think Louis C.K. and Dave Chappelle.

In reality, of course, the bad-boy provocateur very rarely gets final cut on a network family sitcom—it’s a genre more prone to compromise than a Senate bill. Even the edgiest shows have limits: Al Bundy never hit Peggy, after all. So it’s no surprise that, aesthetically, “Fresh Off the Boat” fits right into ABC’s sweet-tempered slate of comedies, which includes the subtly retrograde “Modern Family,” the wonderful “The Middle,” “The Goldbergs,” “Black-ish”—a smart new show that I’ll get to in a moment—and the unfortunately bland “Cristela.” Like all these shows, “Fresh Off the Boat” is brightly lit, with an A plot and a B plot. The jokes aren’t dirty and nobody gets his butt whipped. The parents—patriotic restaurant-manager dad, Louis (Randall Park), and proudly alienated mom, Jessica (the terrific Constance Wu)—love one another. There’s even a “Wonder Years”-esque voice-over, performed by Huang, and an ensemble of adorable children. It’s a comedy the whole family can watch together—which may be either an insult or a compliment, but is definitely a business plan.

Yet, even in its half-dozen early episodes, those burnt first pancakes of sitcoms, the show has a radical quality, simply because it arrives in a television landscape with few Asian characters, almost none of them protagonists. Khan, the showrunner (who wrote for Seth MacFarlane, and who produced the wicked ABC sitcom “Don’t Trust the B—— in Apartment 23”), is her own sort of provocateur, an expert at slipping rude ideas into polite formats. She uses the Asian-American family to reset TV’s defaults. The characters aren’t the hero’s best friends; they’re not macho cartoons or eye candy, either, as on some cable dramas I could name. This can be an unpleasantly clinical way to talk: it places the critic in the camp of the bean counters, not the gonzo rapscallions. But simply watching people of color having a private conversation, one that’s not primarily about white people, is a huge deal. It changes who the joke is on. “Fresh Off the Boat” is part of a larger movement within television, on shows that include the CW’s “Jane the Virgin” and Fox’s “Empire”—a trend that’s most influential when it creates a hit, not a niche phenomenon.

Reading the book, then watching the show, you get why Huang was frustrated: without a cruel bully for a father, Eddie’s taste for hip-hop feels more superficial—in the book, it’s an abused kid’s catharsis and an identification with black history. But, if the show emphasizes family warmth, that theme is complicated by sharp sociological details: the only black kid in the school calls Eddie a “Chink” and smirks at his hip-hop T-shirt; Jessica grabs every free sample at the supermarket, then gives the employee a hilariously dismissive wave; Louis hires a white host to attract customers (“A nice happy white face, like Bill Pullman,” he explains firmly). There’s no violence, but there are specific immigrant perspectives, shown through multiple lenses.

In one of Khan’s most effective gambits, we see Eddie through his mother’s eyes as often as we see her through his. In the book, Jessica is a brazen, mysterious goad to her son; on the show, she’s a full character, Eddie’s equal in cultural alienation, even if her escape is Stephen King, not the Notorious B.I.G. In one of the most interesting early episodes, mother and son are both drawn to Honey, a trophy wife who lives next door. Eddie sees a hot MILF he can show off to the boys; Jessica sees a kindred spirit who will eat her “stinky tofu” and bond over “Dolores Claiborne”—then pulls away when she realizes that Honey is the town home-wrecker. The show hits every awkward angle of this triangle, including a surreal fantasy sequence in which Eddie, inspired by his hero Ol’ Dirty Bastard, sprays Capri Sun on gyrating video vixens. (His mom intrudes, complaining that he’s wasting juice, while his father offers the women free samples from the restaurant: “Come on, Fly Girls. Try a rib! Tell a friend.”)

In the final scene, at a block party, everyone’s loneliness collides, as Eddie gropes Honey, and Jessica sees her neighbor’s humiliation. Opening her heart to a fellow-outsider, Jessica seizes the karaoke mike to serenade Honey with an awkward, earnest rendition of “I Will Always Love You.” The sequence doesn’t “go hard”; it goes soft, quite deliberately. But somehow it still manages to find strangeness within its sentimentality. “Fresh Off the Boat” is unlikely to dismantle the master’s house. But it opens a door.

ABC’s other new family sitcom, “Black-ish,” created by Kenya Barris and Larry Wilmore (who left to do “The Nightly Show,” on Comedy Central), has had fifteen episodes, giving it more of a chance to grow than “Fresh Off the Boat”—and in that time the series has transformed from hokey formula into one of the goofiest, most reliably enjoyable comedies around. Early on, the show kept aggressively re-stating its thesis: Andre (Dre), a successful adman, is worried that his four kids aren’t black enough. Growing up rich in a white suburb, they don’t remember a time before Obama; Andre Junior is a nerd, not a thug. Andre’s biracial wife, Rainbow, an anesthesiologist, is less concerned about race. Each week, Dre tries to toughen the kids up, terrified that if they don’t get “blacker” he’ll have failed as a father.

The problem with the show, initially, was that Andre himself felt so off-putting—childlike and abrasive, a man-baby in the Homer Simpson mode—that it was hard to buy his marriage or his success, let alone his lessons. Rainbow, played by the fantastic Tracee Ellis Ross, was trapped in the gruesome role of wife-as-mommy, the sighing goody-goody. It’s hard to even remember that version, though, because, once “Black-ish” settled in, it began, like so many smart sitcoms, a quiet reinvention. Andre got more insightful; Rainbow became a glamorous dork with a temper and her own loose-limbed charisma; the kids clicked, too; and Andre’s workplace became a reliably hilarious setting for him to brainstorm about his troubles. It helped that he began to acknowledge his own outsized personality, too, rather than presenting it as interchangeable with authentic urban blackness. “I’m a lot,” Andre says, about his parenting. “If they can get past me, they can get past anything.”

A funny Valentine’s Day episode featured a date night that went downhill—a sitcom chestnut that paid off, miraculously, owing to sharp dialogue and the couple’s great chemistry. Andre and Rainbow sniped over his mispronouncing the word as “Valentimes.” They revisited a childbirth scenario so awkward that the doctor asked her, “You mean he’s actually part of your life? Because plenty of women successfully raise children alone.” They argued over whether or not Andre saw Gene Hackman at a roller rink. (“You think everyone is Gene Hackman!” Rainbow fumes.) In the best tradition of the mainstream sitcom, the show felt both new and familiar, giving the show’s marriage emotional roots.

As these relationships became more organic, “Black-ish” also got looser with its ethnic humor, with plots about Andre competing to be a black Santa Claus (he loses out to a Mexican woman) and microaggressions on a baseball field. When Rainbow notices a gray pubic hair, Andre tells her, “You look distinguished, going all Frederick Douglass down there.” When their daughter dates a French boy, a co-worker of Andre’s says, “I cheated on my husband with a French-Canadian. His Frenchness was so powerful that I forgot he was Canadian.” Andre’s mother tells Rainbow, “You are too hard on the kids. If I didn’t know you were mixed, I’d swear you were Chinese.”

In the show’s most outrageous episode, a ski trip becomes an outlandish parody of Martin Luther King Day. Rainbow throws sardonic air quotes onto “Doctor,” because King had no medical degree; Andre Junior admits that he’s never fully absorbed King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, because “I always kind of zone out when people start to tell me about their dreams.” The jokes overlapped, turning flippant, wild, verging on misfire—an elbow in the ribs of boomer earnestness. In a safe sitcom structure, it was a different kind of risk: inside jokes in an outside voice.

A look inside Eddie Huang’s Chinese New Year feast, topped off with Hennessy Milk Tea

Eddie Huang’s Chinese New Year menu was complemented by an endless amount of Hennessy’s Red Ram cocktail.

The Daily Meal:

Chinese New Year… If you’ve never celebrated before, here’s a look at one Chinese chef’s interpretation.

Last week, a few days in advance of the real start of the Year of the Goat, Baohaus chef Eddie Huang hosted a New Year’s celebration in partnership with Hennessy, a label which will be especially familiar to anyone who’s attended his or her share of Chinese weddings.

Huang’s menu for the evening, a six-course affair put together in the tiny kitchen of No. 7 Restaurant in Brooklyn, featured lion’s head chicken soup, Hainan lobster salad, chili miso-braised fish, and Szechuan roasted black garlic chicken. As an interlude, guests were treated to a traditional lion’s head dance typically reserved for boisterous Chinatown streets around New Year’s.

The evening’s sponsor made sure that every glass was full of Red Ram, a cocktail created especially for the evening. Eddie, who has partnered with Hennessy in the past, even created a Hennessy Privilege Milk Tea (paired with egg tarts from Taipan Bakery in Chinatown) that actually made this author appreciate milk tea (black tea sweetened with condensed milk).

When we sat down with Eddie to talk about his love for the holiday, he brought over a full plate of roasted chicken and recalled his early role in the kitchen.

My mom worked, so she would call me on the way home, and I would get things ready so that when she got home, she could just cook. I was always my mom’s prep cook.”

Quickly, that role expanded to one of household handyman.

My mom bought a pressure washer and had me pressure wash the house. She would see other people get services, like this guy pressure washing or this guy cleaning the pool, and she would be like, ‘What chemicals do you use? Where do you buy the machines?’ and she would be like, ‘Guess what? You’re now pressure washing the house and cleaning the pool.’

There are lots of things you wouldn’t think kids can do until parents force them to, I offer.

Mulan joined the army,” Eddie says in agreement.

On Fresh Off the Boat, the ABC sitcom inspired by Huang’s memoir of the same name, we’ve yet to see a young Eddie face these challenges. The chef has made it clear that the resemblance between the show and its source material continues to diverge. Will there be, for instance, an episode of the show that features this holiday — the most important one of the Chinese calendar?

I don’t know if any of this will be on the sitcom because they never do any of the real s–t on that show, but on Vice we’re gonna do it. You’re on Vice right now.”

And, lastly, who in Huang’s family is known for being the most generous giver of the all-important red envelope?

Haters Gonna Hate: An Interview with Constance Wu of “Fresh Off the Boat”

Haters Gonna Hate: An Interview with Fresh Off the Boat's Constance Wu

The Muse:

Constance Wu is living the dream of every up and coming actor—landing the lead on a hit sitcom on a major network with a rapt audience. But Wu’s role as Jessica Huang, Taiwanese mom of three boys on Fresh Off the Boat, is more than just a sweet gig—it’s historical, as FOTB is only the second Asian American-centric sitcom in 20 years after Margaret Cho‘s All-American Girl in 1994. Add to the pot the outspoken opinions of the show’s creator Chef Eddie Huang, who went from bashing the show to supporting it in a matter of days, Wu’s first big break is breaking color lines and studio systems. But the 26-year-old is taking all of it in stride because haters gonna hate, you know?

For your first sitcom, your comedic timing is great without trying too hard. How do you strike that balance with Randall Park, who plays your husband Louis Huang, and the three boys Hudson Yang, Forrest Wheeler and Ian Chen?

This is only the second comedy I’ve ever done and it didn’t work until I stopped trying to be funny. That’s the trap. Whenever you’re trying to be funny, it becomes cloying and manipulative. My goal with my performance is to be as true as possible.

People think that Jessica’s accent is funny but no one writes jokes about her accent. The humor comes from the writers giving me very funny situations and lines. What makes her so refreshing is that she has an accent and doesn’t know perfect English but she doesn’t think that’s a reason for her not to have a voice and a very loud one at that. That’s what’s interesting and fun about her and playing against Randall and the boys because we’re all just trying to have a good time and tell a specific story.

Speaking of the accent, some felt it was very controversial for you to portray Mrs. Huang with her Taiwanese accent. Why do you think accents in general are so divisive when it reflects actual humans?

Asians have been so rarely represented in mainstream media and historically, especially in the early stages, the accent was used as a humor tool with jokes written about it. But now I would challenge people who say that Jessica’s accent is stereotypical and ask what does that mean? An accent is not a stereotype, it’s just a set of linguistic phonetic changes that happen when your mother tongue has a different set of phonetic constraints than the newer language that you are now speaking. Stereotype enters when that accent is used for the purpose of humor. Of course there are people who are laughing at my character’s accent for very coarse reasons, but we aren’t writing jokes about the accent. It’s an important shift to make.

Recently, a lot of Asians actors want to neutralize their roles on television and say ‘This person is playing a character who happens to be Asian and that has nothing to do with their identity.’

That is a trend that is flying across all minorities, it seems…

My grandfather was an illiterate bamboo farmer and my dad really had to work himself up academically to get a full ride scholarship and a Ph.D in biology in America. He didn’t have a leg up anywhere, he had to work to get that. To even say that that type of journey has nothing to do with my place and opportunities now is dishonorable.

I don’t think that identity is purely determined by race and if a story wants to focus on other things that are important to the narrative, that’s great. But it’s not harmful to say that ethnicity plays an important part in identity and that that part of the story matters. It’s not fodder for humor, it’s just another unique and beautiful element of humanity. Hopefully, we celebrate that. And we’re also a comedy! We want that comedy to be great and warm in our show, which Randall and I both found important.

How’s Fresh Off the Boat been as your first TV experience, between participating in the first Asian American sitcom in 20 years and the tumultuous process creator Eddie Huang had making it?

Eddie and I are new to network television. Before this show I’d done one guest star on Law & Order when I was in college. The network system is established, so being a newbie in this already established constrained situation, we struggled to find our footing. There can be the danger of gratitude becoming complacency which Eddie wasn’t willing to let happen. I think he had to realize which battles he needed to lose in order to win the greater war of representation. Even for myself as an actor, there were certain parts that I was uncomfortable with in terms of lines I was given.

As someone new to television, I wasn’t sure how openly I was allowed to express my opinion. I certainly didn’t want to tread on the toes of people who have more experience than I but I didn’t want to let that inexperience be why my voice and opinion were not valid. Straddling that line was nerve-racking. I didn’t protest too much, instead I found a way within my character work to make it work.

Then last week I emailed our show runner Nahnatchka Khan about a live reading I gave in episode nine or ten. In the first takes, I was trying hard to be clever and improved these funny lines and then on the last take—the scene was with Hudson (Eddie’s character)—for the first time, I actually heard what Hudson said to me, which was ‘You did good mom,’ and I had a genuine response to it. So I emailed Nahnatchka and wrote ‘When I’m doing that series of takes and I’m trying really hard to be clever and funny, and I know that it came off, but if you don’t mind, could we use the last take because I have plenty of times during the series where I’m clever and funny. The last one was the only take in which I actually heard what Hudson was saying to me.’ She emailed me back like, ‘We did use one of your clever takes and we just re-watched it and you’re right. The last take you did was good and it was lovely for a different reason and if that really means something to you, we’ll change it.’

I was stunned because I thought, ‘She’s been doing this forever but this means something to me. So I’m gonna say it with as much respect as possible and if she says ‘No’ at least I tried.’ But she said yes and added ‘Don’t be afraid to ask things like that, I really want to run this with an open door.’ Because Eddie has been so vocal from the beginning—and in the beginning, maybe they didn’t listen to him as much—I think it’s making the system change a bit. People were quick to stigmatize the conflict that Eddie was expressing but that’s just people trying to do better and figuring out how. And of course he’s gonna be sensitive about the show, it’s about his family.

You spoke earlier of stereotypes and a bit of the Tiger Mom trope arises in your portrayal of Jessica Huang when she begins tutoring her three boys after school. Was that something you had to negotiate?

We have real source material in Jessica Huang. I don’t think I should play against a stereotype just to fight the war against stereotypes. Because I’m playing a role that carries the show and a character that has an arc, occasionally elements of Jessica’s personality do fall into a Tiger Mom stereotype. But I’m playing them because they are true to her, not because I am exploiting a stereotype. I’m never doing that. You have to serve the truth of the character and Jessica Huang does what she digs, whether or not it falls into a stereotype.

Chris Rock said that if Tom Hanks does a project, he’s free to fail, but if Denzel Washington does something, he’s representing the entire black race. How are you handling the pressure of being the first Asian American family on network television in 20 years?

I feel that pressure but it’s not something that’s manifesting itself in my work. Sure, there is a burden of representation but the burden shouldn’t be to represent every Asian ever. The burden is to represent an Asian story with as much truth as possible that it touches something in other people and strikes up a curiosity for an experience that is different than your own. Then that gets the ball rolling for others to make individual stories based in truth, intelligence and compassion. My job is not to give you a watered down McDonald’s version of an Asian family so that your next door neighbor thinks, ‘Oh they’re just like me.’ I’m not like freaking out, haters gonna hate, lovers gonna love. People like authenticity and courage, that’s why people like Eddie. Haters will always hate, they’ll see a beautiful flower and be like ‘Ugh, look at that flower!’

Fresh Off the Boat airs Tuesdays at 8/7 Central on ABC.

Fusion: ‘Fresh Off the Boat’ uses black culture to talk more candidly about Asian culture

Fusion: (by Molly Fitzpatrick)

It’s clear from the first ten seconds of Fresh Off the Boat, the new ABC sitcom about a Taiwanese family moving from Washington D.C.’s Chinatown to Orlando, Florida, that 11-year old Eddie Huang is an anomaly and he just doesn’t fit in.

In the opening scene, the camera pulls back to show his tiny figure swathed in the baggy, brightly colored clothes synonymous with the hip hop uniform of the time, and little Eddie struck a now-familiar pose: he defiantly crossed his arms high across his chest and nodded, not unlike the way Kool Moe Dee and Run D.M.C. used to do at the end of a knowingly dope rhyme. This universal symbol of defiance was now being deployed to signify a little kid’s discomfort with his recent relocation from Washington D.C.’s Chinatown to the bright, bland landscape of suburban Florida. Young Eddie fully intends to shock with his wardrobe, using it to intimidate bullies and parents alike. A massive part of Eddie’s real life and onscreen cultural assimilation rested heavily on his affection for hip-hop culture.

But if there’s a difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, which one was this?

I went to Los Angeles in November to have a warm weekend with an old friend. On our last night in town, we went to see a benefit show at comedy hotspot Nerdmelt. Towards the end of the show, a buttoned-up white guy got on stage. He was nerdy in a way that reminded me of the nerds I grew up with in the 80s—light-washed jeans hemmed a little too high, a bulky, gray sweater with a generic winter pattern printed around the shoulders, and the kind of plain white, shell toed sneakers that you buy when you care more about cost than fashion. His short brown hair was pulled to the side, the way boys used to do on picture day in junior high with one of the hundreds of black plastic combs the photographer pulled out of a box for each student. It didn’t feel like a costume, but it could have been.

The first 5 minutes of his set were entirely comprised of his telling the audience he was going to “smack dat ass.” He made his voice deep when he used that phrase, like Geoffrey Holder or Barry White, and said “smack dat ass” over and over again until I wasn’t sure if I was watching a comedy routine or if I was part of an elaborate prank. I wasn’t annoyed by the repetition; I was surprised that the entirety of this comedian’s joke so far was that he was a white man affecting a black man’s voice, and that his act was predicated on the asynchronous visual of his being a white guy talking like a black guy. It made me deeply uncomfortable; I crossed my arms and sunk lower in my chair, waiting for him to finish. As far as I could tell, I was the only black person in the audience. I was also the only person not laughing.

I had a similarly uncomfortable feeling when Eddie stepped out of the dressing room to the beat of MC Breed’s “Ain’t No Future in Yo’ Frontin’” at the start of the pilot, begging his mom to buy him the pinky ring, stacks of gold chains, and Starter jacket he was trying on at JCPenney’s. Was the only thing funny here that he was biting a cultural style that didn’t necessarily belong to him? And if so, what’s so funny about it?

I liked these first episodes of Fresh Off the Boat, and I’m not just saying that because ABC cuts my paycheck. It’s as funny as any other family-oriented sitcom and shocking in all the right ways — a fellow student lobbed the word “chink” at Eddie in a lunchroom scene in the very first episode. It’s moments like this that remind you about the different set of rules minorities are often asked to follow and how uncommon it is to see them showcased on TV; when Eddie’s parents came in to discuss the racial slur, they flipped the usually apologetic script and asked the principal how he could allow such language in his school. It was a teachable moment that preferenced the wisdom and anger of Eddie’s parents instead of bolstering the racist system they were trying to work within. They were just parents sticking up for their kid, but that’s harder to do when part of your parenting includes an extraordinary effort to assimilate to white culture. There hasn’t been a primetime sitcom starring an Asian family in 20 years (the first one was Margaret Cho’s short-lived All American Girl in 1994, also on ABC), meaning an entire generation of Asian-Americans have grown up without seeing their faces or their cultural values represented on the small screen in a big way. This scene, from the moment Eddie is called a racial slur to the second his parents are done talking to the principal, does more to evoke the multi-layered, intersectional reality of most immigrants and minorities, that constant push and pull between wanting to fit in and wanting to break out, than almost anything else on TV right now.

But the efficacy of their parenting and disconnect from American pop culture (at least generationally) comes to a head when Eddie displays a love for hip-hop, and particularly his clothes. While his parents happily sing along to Ace of Base, Eddie is a renegade in a Nas T-shirt. When his mother asks, “Why do all of your shirts have black men on them?” Eddie responds, “It’s Notorious B.I.G. Both me and him are two dudes with mad dreams, just trying to get a little respect in the game.” The joke lands (here’s a little kid talking like a streetwise adult about “the game”) but an unspoken discomfort is wedged in there, too — why are you wasting your time on black culture when whiteness is the clear pathway to respectability? Why are you rallying so hard against cultural assimilation? This is complicated by the fact that his mother, Jessica, is also having a hard time with their move to Orlando — when she first meets the mob of blonde, white, rollerblading neighborhood moms she asks if they’re all sisters, and Eddie’s insistence that he take Lunchables to school instead of noodles has her uncomfortably entering an American grocery store for the first time in an attempt to have help him fit in. Eddie’s family is a Matroyshka doll of outsiders; his dad is a wild west-loving Asian steakhouse owner who left D.C. to escape the oppressive cultural values that would have him working for his brother-in-law forever, his mother doesn’t fit in with the cookie-cutter Barbie version of the stay-at-home mom, and Eddie doesn’t fit in anywhere.

In this way, it’s easy to understand how hip-hop is crucial to the development of Eddie’s personality and outsider status. He’s trying to find a pathway to respectability on his own terms, which fits in completely with the hip-hop ethos. In a tense cafeteria moment, a potential fight with a loudmouthed white kid is diffused when he sees Eddie’s Notorious B.I.G. t-shirt. He perks up and says, “I bought Ready To Die the day it came out!” to which Eddie replies, “You bought it? I STOLE it.” He’s using the language and posture of hip-hop to cement his social status as a subversive badass when he needs it most. A black kid sitting nearby witnesses the exchange, and scoffs incredulously, saying, “A white dude and an Asian dude bonding over a black dude?” as if it’s the craziest thing he’s ever seen.

2015 Winter TCA Tour - Day 8

But it’s not too farfetched, considering what I remember about the year I graduated high school. In 1995, hip-hop was already mainstream, and having fictional Eddie shop for his hip-hop uniform in JCPenney is indicative of how mainstream the genre had become. Snoop Dog and Dr. Dre were on the cover of Rolling Stone in 1995, and Tupac was on the first cover of 1996, following Ice T’s cover in 1992. Notorious B.I.G. had four top singles on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1995, and that was the year the Grammys added the Best Rap Album category. White suburban kids were already huge consumers of hip-hop and rap, which may have been why Eddie’s mom found it particularly troubling to see him walk around in Wu-Tang Clan t-shirts — suburban parents were terrified by the rise of hip-hop. They were similarly upset about heavy metal, but its loudness reminded them of a loose connection to rock music. Hip-hop was completely foreign to them, and brought with it a violence they couldn’t access or explain. It was also, at times, absurd and funny and just good music, but the parts that put people on edge glorified and discussed a very real kind of violence. No one wants to see their baby boy lip-synching to songs about shooting someone in the face, least of all the white parents who largely moved to the suburbs to escape that kind of urbanized violence.

But the reason white parents felt terrorized by hip-hop is the same reason I still get uncomfortable when I see someone outside of black culture using the language and posture of hip-hop culture, why the hairs on my arm stand up when white women describe their friendships as “ride or die,” and why Iggy Azalea incurred the wrath of Azealia Banks —hip-hop and rap were born of a specific place, and made for a specific group of people. It was music that was socially stigmatized precisely because of who was in control of the message as well as what they were saying, with lyrics portraying with brutal honesty the systemic racism that created ghettoized conditions to begin with. Hip-hop has since gone global, but in 1995 we were still on the cusp, enough so that people in my predominantly white suburban town commonly used the word “wigger” to describe any white kid in my high school wearing a Cross Colours jacket and listening to Ol’ Dirty Bastard. You weren’t just someone appreciating a style of music or a way to dress—you were a white nigger. You were racially transgressive.

There is a difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, the crux of which are the historical lessons of dominant culture and the power structures that uphold them. As Tami Winfrey Harris said in her 2008 article on the topic:

A Japanese teen wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of a big American company is not the same as Madonna sporting a bindi as part of her latest reinvention. The difference is history and power. Colonization has made Western Anglo culture supreme–powerful and coveted. It is understood in its diversity and nuance as other cultures can only hope to be. Ignorance of culture that is a burden to Asians, African and indigenous peoples, is unknown to most European descendants or at least lacks the same negative impact.

It matters who is doing the appropriating. If a dominant culture fancies some random element (a mode of dress, a manner of speaking, a style of music) of my culture interesting or exotic, but otherwise disdains my being and seeks to marginalize me, it is surely an insult.

I don’t think that 11-year old Eddie is insulting, and he’s certainly not part of the dominant culture, which is why this question of appropriation/appreciation in this context is an interesting one. From a cultural standpoint relating to power, Young Eddie has more in common with black culture even if that’s not how he understands his fondness for rap T-shirts. He’s effectively powerless. Perhaps that’s why Eddie Huang has such an affinity for black culture, both in real life and on the show. His struggle seems to be as much about race as it is about just being an outsider, and, as he explains in the pilot, “If you were an outsider hip-hop was your anthem, and I was definitely the black sheep in my family.” He was trying to find a stronghold by honoring the parts about him that he already knew were unique, and hip-hop helped him express that. Huang has (now famously) railed against the TV show for being void of anything resembling his actual experience:

I didn’t understand how network television, the one-size fits-all antithesis toFresh Off the Boat, was going to house the voice of a futuristic chinkstronaut. I began to regret ever selling the book, because Fresh Off the Boat was a very specific narrative about SPECIFIC moments in my life, such as kneeling in a driveway holding buckets of rice overhead or seeing pink nipples for the first time. The network’s approach was to tell a universal, ambiguous, cornstarch story about Asian-Americans resembling moo goo gai pan written by a Persian-American who cut her teeth on race relations writing for Seth MacFarlane. But who is that show written for?

The show is missing is the violence that shaped Eddie’s young life, and consequently, his affinity for hip-hop culture. Huang writes very candidly about being beaten by his parents as a child, and a network sitcom will never be able to accurately reflect how that shaped him. It would be an entirely different show on an entirely different network.

Huang gave a TED talk about self-identity in March 2013; he enters the stage singing along to Kanye West’s “You Can’t Tell Me Nothing” but curiously doesn’t mention how hip-hop shaped his identity for the entire 5 minutes he’s up there. It’s not until two months later when he sits down with Ta-nehisi Coates at the New York Ideas festival that he has an in-depth conversation about race, identity and hip-hop. When Coates called him a hip-hop head and asked when Huang first felt like he was a kindred spirit to black culture, Huang made an eloquent connection to his life at home and violence in the music.

“I was drawn to it, and I felt a similarity with it, because I grew up in a home where my parents beat me, right? And I talk about it a lot in the book, and no one needs to feel sad or awkward—that’s what happens in an immigrant home a lot of the time. I’m not co-signing that, I think it’s wrong, but the thing is is that when I heard [Tu]Pac talking about these things, and I heard all this music that was at many times laced with violence, I was a little desensitized towards it. It didn’t put me off. It was not, like, a barrier to my entry. So I would listen. I wasn’t listening for the violence, though, because I think hip-hop is much deeper, but when that’s what you grow up with—parents hitting you and things like that—that’s part of your DNA and fabric whether you like it or not. And a lot of people ask me would you do it different, and I said yeah, I won’t hit my kids like my father beat me, right? But also, they ask me, would you be the same person that you are, and I say absolutely not. And this is the gift and the curse, and I have to be honest about it. I do not encourage people hitting their children, but I would absolutely not be the same person.”

Huang goes on to say that hip-hop made him feel “less weird,” that he could connect experientially to something larger than himself. He also noted that he felt left out of most conversations about race, which were about black people and white people exclusively, until he discovered hip-hop — small things like seeing black culture embrace martial arts in movies like The Last Dragon or the Wu-Tang Clan’s entire oeuvre showed him how someone else appreciated Asian culture. Coates brings up the important point that Wu-Tang’s Asian obsession might have been essentializing that culture, too, and that’s where we come full circle to the idea of what it means to be culturally appropriative once something becomes a global phenomenon. Is there a difference between Tom on Parks and Recreation adoring hip-hop and the rapping granny from an Adam Sandler movie using hip-hop as the punchline to a very obvious joke? The question isn’t what happens to the culture that created hip-hop, but what does it mean to the cultures that embrace it?

How does Fresh Off the Boat‘s hip-hop identity measure up to Fox’s Empire, ABC’s or Black-ish? Both of those shows, in different ways, feature black families looking for legitimacy beyond the constraints of hip-hop culture. In the pilot for Black-ish, advertising executive Dre Johnson is excited about his promotion until he learns he’s been promoted to the head of the “urban” division; in Empire, Lucious Lyon is looking for a way to leave a legacy of success far removed from the shadow of his thuggish beginnings. In both cases, Dre and Lucious still have to work within the boundaries of black culture to achieve legitimacy, like it or not. In the video for the New York Ideas festival, Huang quickly mentions in passing that he is a lawyer, and spends a little more time talking about how much he disliked the constraints of business clothing. That’s the difference between a dramatized version of race and the reality of race; Huang can choose to identify with hip-hop but still go on to be a lawyer and successful business owner. He can hang up the cultural affectations whenever he wants to, simply because it’s something he’s allowed to grow out of. He may not like or prefer code switching, but it’s possible for him. On TV, Lucious and Dre can transcend class quicker than they can transcend culture, and in real life, Eddie gets to do both.

Does hip-hop still exclusively belong to black culture anymore? And does that even matter if it offers a weird little kid some solace? That we’re even able to have this conversation is a result of finally seeing a TV show about an Asian kid having a hard time fitting in. If one of the Modern Family kids suddenly started wearing FUBU and talking with a Bronx accent, it would be an open and shut case of abject racism and posturing, and I’d be yelling about it on Twitter instead of writing about it here. Fresh Off the Boat allows us to consider the experience of being a non-white person in America from a non-white perspective. It opens a window and lets us see how American minorities lean on each other to survive. It’s a little bit like a game of Telephone, but instead of getting a twisted, filtered version of the message about what it means to be a person of color in America after it goes around the rest of the group, you’re sitting next to the originator and getting it straight from the source.

Knowing more about Huang’s background helped me realize that his connection to hip-hop is solid and very much a part of him in a way that hasn’t been made clear on the TV show yet. Unlike the comedian I saw in Los Angeles, it’s also not an affectation; hip-hop music helped Eddie Huang get a foot in the door of what it meant to be American, and what it meant to be different. Those are all still real problems, possibly more so now that America has allowed the far right to pour its poison directly into the melting pot that used to sustain us culturally. It may not be exactly the show Huang wanted, but I can’t help but feel like Fresh Off the Boat is going to help another generation of kids feel like they’re a little less alone.

NY Times: “Eddie Huang Against the World”

NY Times (by Wesley Yang):

On a cold, dark street in Tijuana, Mexico, I asked Eddie Huang a question that many people were sure to ask him in the months to come. “What did you expect?

For the past week in December, Huang had been venting about his tortured ambivalence toward “Fresh Off the Boat,” the ABC sitcom based on the memoir he wrote about growing up as a child of Taiwanese immigrants in Orlando, Fla. He deployed his gift for pithy, wounding invective against the show’s producers and writers — before professing gratitude and love for the same people he just vilified. He described what he took to be the show’s falseness and insensitivity to nuance — before praising its first episode as the best sitcom pilot he had ever seen. He lamented the choice he had made to sell his life rights to a major network — before insisting that the premiere of “Fresh Off the Boat” on Feb. 4 would be a milestone, not just in the history of television but in the history of the United States.

He had a point. “Fresh Off the Boat” would be the first network sitcom to star an Asian-American family in 20 years and only the third attempt by any major network in the history of the medium. Huang chose to sign with ABC in deference to the residual power of network television to alter mass perceptions about race, and he had hoped to portray the Asian-immigrant experience without equivocation or compromise.

What did I expect?” Huang responded. “I expected I could change things.” He told me that he thought his story was powerful enough for ABC to allow him to tell it his way. “I thought that people in network television had their own conscience about things.”

Huang, 32, was dressed in an acid-wash denim jacket and a black fur hat with its earflaps folded up, which lent his large, round baby face a not-at-all-coincidental resemblance to a certain East Asian dictator. (Huang likes to give himself nicknames — Kim Jong Trill, the Rotten Banana, the Human Panda, the Chinkstronaut — all of which, like the name of his show, repurpose and reclaim slurs and stereotypes.) He was sitting on the back fender of a Vice Media van, in which a five-man crew was preparing its equipment to shoot. We were waiting for two young female marijuana dealers whom Huang would be interviewing for “Huang’s World,” the gonzo food and travel show he hosts for Vice.

He had, he admitted, been extremely naïve about the realities of network television. By way of explanation, Huang reviewed for me the string of previous triumphs that induced him to overrate his ability to set his own terms in the world. “You have to remember how unlikely all of this was. With Baohaus, for instance,” he said, referring to the basement hole-in-the-wall Taiwanese sandwich shop that took Huang to the forefront of a new generation of hip young New York chefs, “I had never worked in a New York City restaurant. I came out of nowhere. And I did it!” After a brief dalliance with the Cooking Channel, Huang started the Vice show, which at the time was called “Fresh Off the Boat.” “When had there been a television host with an identity like mine — a hip-hop Asian kid? I was the first! And the show was a huge success!” In 2013, he published a memoir, the story that Huang had always wanted to tell, and it became a national best seller. “And so I said, We can do this one more time! But network television wasn’t what I thought it was.”

Huang feels that by adulterating the specificity of his childhood in the pursuit of universal appeal, the show was performing a kind of “reverse yellowface” — telling white American stories with Chinese faces. He doesn’t want to purchase mainstream accessibility at the expense of the distinctiveness of his lived experiences, though he is aware of how acutely Asian-Americans hunger for any kind of cultural recognition. “Culturally, we are in an ice age,” he said. “We don’t even have fire. We don’t even have the wheel. If this can be the first wheel, maybe others can make three more.”

Then, he added, “we can get an axle and build a rice rocket.”

The story Huang tells in his memoir is one of survival and struggle in a hostile environment — a prosperous neighborhood in Orlando. Though the picaresque book is written in Huang’s jaunty mash-up of hip-hop lingo and conspicuously learned references to American history and literature, it is also an extraordinarily raw account of an abused and bullied child who grows to inflict violence on others. The racism Huang encounters in Florida is not underhanded, implicit or subtle, as it often is for the many Asians from the professional classes living in and around the coastal cities where the American educated elite reside. It is open, overt and violent.

Up North and out West, you have a bit more focus on academics, and there are accelerated programs for high-achieving kids,” said Emery Huang, reflecting on the tumultuous upbringing he shared with his brother. “Down South, you’ve got football and drinking, and that’s it. If you weren’t fighting, you were a nerd and a victim.” In response to this bullying, the Huang brothers did not conform to the docile stereotypes of Asian-American youths, in large part because of the influence of their father, Louis. A hardened, street-smart man, Louis had been sent by his own father to the United States to get him away from the hoodlums he had been running with in Taipei. “We wouldn’t get in trouble with our dad if we got into a fight,” Emery said. “We would get in trouble if we didn’t win.”

Huang’s memoir records an unusual life trajectory: from tormented outsider, to angry adolescent who would twice be arrested on assault charges, to marijuana dealer, to high-end street-wear designer (under the “Hoodman” label, which eventually led to a lawsuit from Bergdorf Goodman), to corporate lawyer, to successful restaurateur. The book fixates on themes of pain and punishment. As a teenager, Huang was commanded by his father to kneel and bow to police officers after he was caught stealing from neighbors. Later, he would find himself surrounded by cops with guns drawn after he drove his car into a crowd of frat guys who were menacing him and several friends (after one of his own broke a window at their house).

At times, Huang comes across in his memoir as a dutiful son who admires and reveres his parents and feels the enormous weight of obligation to them — “I wasn’t mad at my dad,” he writes after being forced to remain kneeling on his asphalt driveway for several hours, “I deserved it” — and at others as an enraged teenager, rebelling against constant assaults on his self-esteem to which he was subjected in the home — he recalls “constantly being told I was a fan tong (rice bucket), fat-ass or waste of space.” He finds in hip-hop a language for his alienation, citing Tupac Shakur’s “Me Against the World” as the cathartic soundtrack of his youth. (“Our parents, Confucius, the model-minority [expletive] and kung-fu-style discipline are what set us off,” he wrote. “But Pac held us down.”)

In Los Angeles later in December, while driving with Huang in his canary yellow Porsche Boxster to his Malibu apartment, I asked him what his parents thought of his portrayal of the abuse they inflicted on him.

My parents have never acknowledged that it was abuse — because in their culture and their country it wasn’t,” he said. Huang believes that the psychological and physical harm that was done to him was largely a matter of context. “I think the abuse had extra meaning that I gave to it, because I saw that it wasn’t happening to other kids.” For a time, every Friday afternoon, Huang said, social workers would take him out of class to inspect him for cuts and bruises. “And I knew that I was weird and different and was made to feel like I had done something wrong, like there was something wrong with us.”

The book proposal for “Fresh Off the Boat” was sent to publishers not long after an excerpt from Amy Chua’s memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The commercial prospects of Huang’s proposal were almost certainly enhanced by this coincidence: Chua’s book indirectly addressed the chief preoccupation of the American upper-middle class — getting their children into top-tier colleges — and therefore generated one of the infrequent moments in which Asian-Americans aroused the fascination of the wider American public. Chua made Asian-Americans matter just long enough for Huang’s proposal to sell as a counternarrative to hers.

The Journal excerpt, titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” gave what Chua would later claim was a misleading impression of the overall arc of her book, which chronicled the crisis that ensued when her younger daughter revolted against “Chinese” parenting methods that might seem “unimaginable — even legally actionable” to Western parents. But the marketing campaign, of which the excerpt was a part, appealed to an underlying (and not entirely unjustified) concern among white American parents that they had grown too indulgent toward their children. Huang found the book repellent. “She Kumon-ized our existence,” he told me, referring to the popular Japanese after-school learning program. “This is something that 50- and 60-year-old Asians are still dealing with.”

When I spoke to Huang’s parents, they didn’t deny his claims, but they emphasized that there was a cultural and generational gap. They were young at the time, they said, and they had reverted to parenting practices they saw in Taiwan. “I wanted to make them tough,” his father said, “and I think that I did.” Emery, however, claims that his brother’s harsh depiction of their childhood in the book seemed “sugarcoated.”

Still, Huang is quick to say that he never thinks of his parents as bad people. “I do think about getting hit, though,” he said. “And I definitely am the way I am because of it. I am quick to react. I am quick to protect myself. I am very comfortable with people yelling at me. And I am very comfortable telling people exactly what I think. I am very comfortable getting personal.”

This mixture of love and loathing toward parents will be familiar to generations of immigrants of every color, but Asian-Americans feel this tension with an unusual acuteness, in part because Confucian tradition is so explicitly directed toward the breaking of individual autonomy in favor of the demands of the family. This tension is compounded by the fact that, as a result of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eased national-origin quotas, Asians began arriving in the United States in large numbers just as the cultural upheaval of the 1960s was drastically loosening American manners and mores. Today the means that many Asian-Americans apply to achieve academic success (a narrow emphasis on rote memorization and test preparation) could not be more out of step with the attitudes and practices of the socially liberal elite that Asians aspire to join. The ensuing cultural dissonance generates an awkward silence around the topic of Asian-Americans — Asian-Americans don’t want to portray their parents as backward, and white liberals don’t want to be seen as looking down on people of other races and cultures whose parenting practices seem primitive. Huang hates this silence.

It is no paradox that Huang’s brazen attitude resembles nothing so much as that of his brash immigrant mother. As we arrived at his apartment in Malibu, Huang casually mentioned that his mother had on more than one occasion turned the wheel of her car sharply into oncoming traffic to terrorize her children into compliance. But Huang would later insist that he owes everything he has become to her. “Every morning, whether it was weekdays or weekends, she would get me up and start demanding: ‘What are you going to do with yourself today? What is the plan? What is the itinerary?’ ” Huang credits this with instilling in him the drive that made him relentless in his pursuit of success.

In fact, his mother’s haranguing inadvertently helped jump-start his writing career. In 2010, his attempt at a second restaurant, Xiao Ye, received a zero-star review in The New York Times. The restaurant’s menu included facetiously racist items, including an “Everything but the Dog Meat Plate” and “Princeton Review Bean Paste Noodles.” In the write-up, Sam Sifton lamented that “if Mr. Huang spent even a third of the time cooking that he does writing funny blog posts and wry Twitter updates, posting hip-hop videos and responding to Internet friends, rivals, critics and customers, Xiao Ye might be one of the more interesting restaurants to open in New York City in the last few months.” Huang’s blog went viral when he published an email his mother sent him after the review came out.

Trust me, you much keep your bar license active just in case you need it,” his mother wrote. “You do not even understand your own strength or the whole scope of this business, and you are not even willing to listen. YOU MUST GET BURNT BEFORE YOU WILL HEAR YOUR MOM. Please calm down, analyze yourself, and be honest. You have a lot of potential, but you must make good choice and stick to it with the best choice. With all the staff, and your korean friend, no one was able to point out or warn you the mistakes, or problems you have???????????????????

Huang closed the restaurant after repeat visits from the State Liquor Authority, which might have been peeved by his “Four Loko Thursday” deal, when the high-alcohol, caffeinated beverage was sold at a steep discount. (Huang had also floated the idea of an all-you-can-drink deal.) But Sifton grasped something important in his observation that the blog posts and Twitter updates mattered more to the chef than the food did. Huang’s true ambitions always had more to do with writing than with feeding people. He told me he opened the restaurant “because no one wanted to listen to me.”

Huang’s cocky social-media personality kept getting him in trouble, but it only seemed to swell his fame. His inability to censor himself, combined with his talent for speaking frankly and intimately to a mass public, aligned him perfectly with the mood of social media. When the Cooking Channel signed Huang to host a show called “Cheap Bites” — the kind of opportunity that most dedicated chefs would hold on to for dear life — the deal fell apart after Huang lashed out at the network’s biggest stars on Twitter. Huang has no regrets about the dust-up. (“The show looked like trash.”) He was later named a TED fellow, a potential gateway into the world of highly compensated corporate speaking, but quickly got himself booted from the program when he skipped some of the events to appear on a podcast with the graffiti artist David Choe and the porn star Asa Akira. Choe declared it to be a meeting of the “worst Asians in the universe.” Huang would later denounce TED as a “cult.”

Huang’s utter lack of instinct for self-preservation has had the curious effect of preserving himself against any harm. While the established institutions he railed against had myriad vested interests to balance and secrets to hide, Huang has always taken the inherently sympathetic role of the only honest man, refusing to compromise with arbitrary or corrupt authority. This has made Huang a particularly good fit with Vice Media, whose food channel, Munchies, seeks to appeal to young hipsters turned off by bourgeois “foodie-ism” but interested in educating their palates. Tricked out in big sunglasses, high-top sneakers and flashy street wear, Huang’s on-screen persona often resembles an Asian Ali G — easy to mock, were it not a deliberate self-caricature. Much of the pleasure of Huang’s Vice show comes from watching him slyly emerge from his buffoonish character to make incisive comments revealing an agile, literary mind — and then lapse back into the role of the pot-addled numbskull.

I met Huang in Los Angeles during a time of high tension surrounding his show, a few weeks after he exploded in a Twitter tirade, accusing the network of neutering his book, and a week before shooting would wrap. The executive producers were, at this point, careful to emphasize that the show was not a biography of Eddie Huang and his family. It was a loose adaptation “inspired” by, rather than “based” on, Huang’s book. The series borrows the setting and the characters but applies them to a plot that was invented almost entirely by a professional writing staff, led by the showrunner Nahnatchka Khan. Though Huang lived the life depicted in the show, 20th Century Fox Television (which produces the show for ABC) retains creative control over it.

Melvin Mar, the producer at Fox who bought the rights to the book, told me that Huang’s arrangement with the studio is atypical. Usually, a production company will pay an author for a book it options and neither seek nor offer further participation. But Huang insisted on being brought on as a producer as a condition of the sale. So, Mar told me, “we decided we would all do this together, like a family.”

More than anything, the fraught dynamic that emerged between Mar and Huang resembles that of Huang’s actual family. The ambivalence Huang feels toward his parents tends to manifest itself in all his dealings with authority, Mar most emphatically not excepted. Huang sometimes describes Mar as a mentor, someone who has taught him about when to pursue confrontation and when to acknowledge the necessity for accommodation. But these sincere expressions of respect often segue quickly to contempt for the compromises endemic to the entertainment industry. “It’s a system that is kind of similar to the Asian upbringing,” Huang told me. By giving up so much autonomy for his career’s sake, Huang said, Mar “got a second set of parents in network television.”

Mar and Khan met at a symposium for Asian-Americans interested in the popular arts, where they dealt with a familiar crowd of activists demanding to know why Hollywood seemed so uninterested in casting people who looked like themselves. (Mar’s family is from China; Khan’s is from Iran.) “You go to these conferences, and there’s always people saying, ‘You should do more for Asian people,’ ” Mar said. “And my response is, ‘Yes, I agree with you.’ But it’s easier said than done. I have to bring actual projects that are viable and convince the executives that there’s a real business case for making it.”

The business case for making an Asian-American show is simple: Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country, they earn and spend more than the average American and they are overrepresented in the advertiser-coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic. But if the case were really so strong, surely two decades would not have passed without some network making a bid for this audience. Perhaps the reason is that the so-called Asian-American demographic (some 18 million viewers) is actually made up of many different nationalities with no common culture or language.

Moreover, comedies about nonwhite people generally must navigate a trap-laden path between offending the group represented and neutering the comedy to avoid doing so. And they suffer from having to be approved and produced by people who are overwhelmingly white, and thus unfamiliar with the nuances of the stories they are telling, and also intensely wary of giving offense — but all this does is increase the likelihood that these shows will be dull, though still capable of offending their audience. This is exactly what happened to “All-American Girl,” the sitcom starring the comedian Margaret Cho and the last significant attempt to make an Asian-American TV show. The series was disowned by the Korean-American community that it tried to portray and was eventually rejected by the wider audience for being unfunny. It was canceled after just one season, two decades ago.

Fresh Off the Boat” was meant to be different. Not only is the production staff diverse, but the source material helps indemnify the show against criticism of many of its outlandish elements, which are rooted in Huang’s actual life. For example, the ferociously uninhibited and heavily accented mother portrayed in the series might appear to be an offensive caricature if it were a generic “Tiger mom” conjured out of thin air.

In fact, Constance Wu, the actress who plays Jessica Huang on the show, told me that she underplays her character in relation to the actual woman. “I don’t actually think they would believe she was real,” Wu said. “That’s what reality television is for — to show you people who no one would actually believe were real.” To preserve the appearance of reality, the show has had to depart from it — while also claiming that same reality as its license to go as far as it does in presenting a raw slice of immigrant life.

When Mar asked Khan to sketch out her vision for the show, she described what would become the opening scene of the series: a tight focus on someone in hip-hop garb that pulls out to reveal . . . a short, chubby Asian boy. The apparent incongruity (more apparent than real) is at once a joke for the prime-time network audience and a wedge that protects the series from recapitulating “model minority” representations of Asian-Americans. It is also the sore point that offends Huang more than any other aspect of the show.

Hip-hop had been the emblem of Huang’s alienation from his own household and the violence he encountered at school. It provided a language through which to reject the role of the eager assimilator that his own culture seemed to urge onto him. It was, as Huang described it in his book, a means of survival — not some glib, touristic fascination, or even a way of being cool. Huang identified with the black kids at school because they, too, were enduring beatings in their households in a way that white kids weren’t. “It’s a funny position being an Asian in America,” Huang wrote. “You’re the dude who can cross the union line. Your community actually wants you to sell the [expletive] out and work in law, accounting or banking. But I realized then that I wasn’t going to cross the picket line.” (Though he was briefly a corporate lawyer.) “I was down with the rotten bananas who want nothing to do with that.”

Huang’s appropriation of the language of racialized resistance might seem intrinsically noncredible to many white, black and even Asian interlocutors, who — implicitly or explicitly — regard Asian-Americans as the minority group that gets ahead by working hard and eschewing the politics of racial grievance. Not Huang, who likes to analogize his relationship with Mar to that of the “field Chinaman” to the “house Chinaman.” (Mar called this comparison “heightened,” which was his diplomatic way of saying “fantastically overwrought.” If there is a class distinction between the two men, it’s this: Mar’s family worked in the bean-sprout business in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, while Huang’s father become a millionaire many times over in Orlando.)

Huang especially took issue with the second episode in the series, in which a youthful Eddie develops a protosexual fascination with a blond, large-breasted trophy wife who has just moved into the neighborhood. It includes a scene in which Eddie fantasizes himself into a rap video. He “makes it rain” and squirts Capri Sun onto models. Though test audiences found the scene to be innocuously funny, Huang considered the thrust of the episode outright offensive. In his estimation, it denigrates hip-hop culture by portraying it as a vector for adopting sexist attitudes — a perversion of what, for him, had been a vital emotional outlet. His analysis is credible but, as the writers and producers told him, way too abstruse for anyone in the audience to think about.

It’s so interesting, what he’s going through,” Khan told me. “Most people never get the opportunity to experience what he’s experiencing. So now he’s rebelling and manifesting the angst, and that’s what makes him him, and that’s why he wrote the memoir in the first place. Part of me just wants to say, ‘Sit back and enjoy this.’ ”

When I told Huang that Khan wanted him to sit back and enjoy the ride, he had an immediate response: “That’s what pedophiles tell children.”

Even if Huang’s attraction to black culture is played for cheap laughs, to him it is an essential element of his person. It provides the missing half of the fully human entity that the Asian-American who consents to the model-minority myth has to relinquish. A model minority is a tractable, one-dimensional simulacrum of a person, stripped of complexity, nuance, danger and sexuality — a person devoid of dramatic interest. Huang is something else: a person at war with all the constraints that would fetter him to anything less than an identity capacious enough to contain all his contradictions and ambivalence.

At the hotel on our last day in Tijuana, Huang spent the morning managing his Manhattan restaurant, Baohaus, by Skype. Besides traveling 24 weeks of the year for Vice, writing a second memoir and working on the ABC series, Huang continues to manage his restaurant. He often finds himself in fights with one cook in particular, an older Cantonese-speaking veteran of Chinatown restaurants. Huang is as exacting a boss as he is an insubordinate employee, but he is often forced to suffer the rebelliousness of his staff. He and the cook argued about how to properly cut chicken. The cook wanted to slice the chicken, which he believed white people prefer. Huang wanted it done the proper way, diced. “He never really accepts what I tell him,” he said. “And as soon as I turn my back, he starts doing it his own way.

I’ve wanted to fire him so many times,” he said. “The problem is, you can’t teach American kids the speed this guy has or his ability to problem-solve on the fly.”

As he thought about it, Huang hit on a comparison between Hollywood executives and the typical Chinatown restaurant. Each, he said, think they know what people want and strive to give them exactly that. But it never occurs to either of them to sell people the authentic thing itself — Chinese food the way Chinese people make it for themselves or, in the case of Hollywood, stories that don’t rely on formulaic contrivance to be funny.

I really feel that people don’t always know what’s good for them,” he said. “When you have a strong conviction, you have a duty not to tell people what they want. At least represent yourself and say: ‘Yo, this is what I’m into, and this is what I’m seeing in the world. Let me take your hand and guide you through it, so you can see through my eyes.’ ”

New York City: “Fresh Off The Boat” premiere viewing party (Wednesday, February 4th)

Angry Asian Man:

As you probably know, the groundbreaking ABC sitcom Fresh Off The Boat hits airwaves next week. Based on the bestselling memoir by Eddie Huang, the show stars the first Asian American family on the network television in over two decades. If you’re in New York, you’re invited to a special community viewing party.

Because this kind of a big deal. Watch the live two-episode premiere, along with a talkback with series star Hudson Yang and proud dad Jeff Yang, and special guests Erin Quill, Grek Pak, Richard Lui and more. It’s happening Wednesday, February 4, starting at 8:00pm at The Circle NYC.

Here are some more details about the event:

Wednesday, February 4
at 8:00pm – 11:00pm in EST

135 W 41st St
New York, New York 10036

Gather together for the special two-episode preview of ABC’s groundbreaking new Asian American family comedy “Fresh Off the Boat,” inspired by Eddie Huang’s bestselling memoir!

FREE EVENT (cash bar) — with Live Talkback featuring Jeff Yang, Hudson Yang, and special guests Erin Quill (original cast, AVENUE Q), Greg Pak (writer, BATMAN/SUPERMAN; STORM), Richard Lui (anchor, MSNBC) and more to come!

Special Thanks to Our Hosts Bobby Kwak and The Circle NYC!

This is going to be fun. But like it says, the venue is likely to reach capacity, and seating is first-come, first-serve, so make sure you get there early. For further information about the event, refer to the Facebook event.

Controversial Tweet about Eddie Huang’s “Fresh Off The Boat”

The official Twitter account for ABC‘s upcoming spin-off comedy series Fresh Off the Boat is in some hot water after posting a controversial ad depicting various cultural hats. Chef Eddie Huang, whose memoir serves as the basis for the forthcoming comedy series, expressed his distaste for the ad, calling it “plain offensive and ridiculous.”

Receiving criticism from audiences for its stereotypical nature in particular for its “bamboo hat” reference, the Twitter ad has since been deleted as executive producer Jeff Yang confirms. While it is no secret that Huang has expressed his frustration on getting the television series on air, the chef praises ABC’s efforts in pioneering a story that has yet to be told on major networks.

Check out the tweet below…

View image on Twitter


Content-Type: application/http; msgtype=response

WARC-Identified-Payload-Type: text/html

WARC-Type: response

text:
Libercrats want to know who owns the ammo and how much ammo you have in your possession!

I was having lunch with a friend at a local eatery nine months ago and we were discussing our views on gun control.  When I shared with him the idea of controlling ammo sales he was speechless.  What better way to render guns useless to citizens and leave them defenseless.

Gun owners are alarmed over what they're witnessing in Washington, DC and state legislatures across the country. Realizing they could not succeed in disarming American citizens, Liberal organizations and their political representatives have decided to allow armed citizens to possess all the guns they wish. The hitch is, according to political strategist Mike Baker, the so-called gun-grabbers have decided to track ammunition for those guns by encoding the cartridges and maintaining a database.

Ammo control laws will also stipulate that uncoded ammunition will be confiscated either voluntarily or through coercive means, according to Baker.

There are a number of states that have proposed legislation not to control guns, but to control the ammunition those guns utilize, claims Baker.

Basically the new state laws would provide that, after a specific date, all handgun and “assault weapon” ammunition manufactured or sold in the state shall be coded by the manufacturer, and would include a list of all calibers covered by the coding requirement.  It would mandate the disposal by a certain date of all non-coded ammunition listed, whether owned by private citizens or retail outlets.

At the federal level, H.R. 408 introduced by Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ) a new law would require firearms manufacturers to provide ballistics information on all new firearms to BATF, which would retain the information in a National Firearms Ballistics Database. Critics claim part of this bill will be used to mandate encoding ammunition, which is part and parcel of "ballistics" information.

"[Lawmakers] should ignore the media hype on the firearms issue and pay attention to what the public – their constituents – are saying on the matter,” gun rights expert John M. Snyder stated.

“According to an August poll conducted by Zogby International for Associated Television News, the American public rejects the notion that new gun control laws are needed by a two-to-one margin,” Snyder continued.

“Maybe the House of Representatives should have taken a reading of public opinion on this issue before rushing headlong without a roll call vote to pass a bill before the recess,” said Snyder, who is a firearms advisor to the National Association of Chiefs of Police.

Legal experts say that the US Constitution's Tenth Amendment prohibits the federal government from making and enforcing such laws and that controlling ammunition and other such activities are relegated to the individual states.

As a result, such legislation is pending in 18 states: Alabama, Arizona, California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maryland, Mississippi, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington.

Most, if not all, of these states are using a model law created by a left-wing organization Ammunition Accountability. Perusal of that organization's web site provides visitors with a recommended law for use by states seeking to control guns by using a "backdoor" approach.

For instance, the Ammunition Accountability web site features an article appearing in the Seattle Weekly about one group's mission to push an ammo control law through the Washington state legislature.

According to the web site "news" story, the idea for coding ammunition originated when the three proponents of ammo coding "heard the story of a police shooting where two officers fired their weapons, but only one hit the suspect. In an investigation of the shooting, both officers were put on leave, since there wasn't an immediate way to determine which one of them had fired the bullet."

While state legislatures differ in the wording of their proposed laws, basically they all require that any and all ammunition be encoded by the manufacturer and they will maintain a mandatory data base of all ammunition sales.

"We of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms oppose this backdoor approach to gun control," Snyder, an official with that gun rights group, told

The sample legislation stipulates that, “each year in the United States, more than 30 percent of all homicides that involve a gun go unsolved; handgun ammunition accounts for 80 percent of all ammunition sold in the United States; current technology for matching a bullet used in a crime to the gun that fired it has worked moderately well for years, but presupposes that the weapon was recovered by law enforcement;” and “bullet coding is a new and effective way for law enforcement to quickly identify persons of interest in gun crime investigations.”

Ammunition coding technology works by laser etching the back of each bullet with an alpha-numeric serial number.  Then when a customer purchases a box of, for example, 9mm cartridges, the box of ammunition and the bullets’ coding numbers would be connected to the purchaser in a statewide or national database.

The code on the bullet can be read with a simple magnifying glass and then be run through a statewide or national database to determine who purchased the ammunition and where.

The rationale being used by proponents of such laws is that cartridges can be used to trace a gun owner who committed a crime such as murder or assault with a deadly weapon, according to the National Association for Gun Rights' Executive Director Dudley Brown.

But opponents of ammo registration laws counter that this will only increase the incidents of criminals collecting spent cartridges and depriving police of other evidence such as fingerprints on a cartridge left at the crime scene.

"NAGR's strategy is simple: make the enemies of our firearms freedoms pay for every inch.  While many so-called "gun rights groups" work to curry favor with politicians and the media, NAGR is working aggressively to hold politicians accountable and to put a stop to gun control," said Brown.

"Liberal gun-grabbers are a cunning lot," said Mike Baker. "Instead of concentrating on disarming citizens of their weapons, they're attempting to render those weapons useless by controlling the ammunition. First, they'll keep records of ammunition sold and collect uncoded ammo, then they will be in a better position to restrict the sale of ammunition to law-abiding citizens. It's a cunning approach to disarming Americans," he said.

Jim Kouri

E-mail me when people leave their comments –

You need to be a member of Tea Party Command Center to add comments!

Join Tea Party Command Center

  • I would say that they way liberals think they would see it as a control measure to insure that the wrong people do not have ammo for their guns.  Libercrats think they know what's best for us when it comes to protecting ourselves from threats. Why do they need armed security in Washington?

  • Would not the restiction of ammo be and "infringement" on our 2nd amendment, I say it is.

This reply was deleted.

warcinfo:
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-31
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for July/August 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-216.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: https://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/


text:
Kōrero: Country schooling

Adult education, Feilding

Adult education, Feilding

Participants in the first WEA (Workers’ Educational Association) summer school at Feilding in 1938 listen to a lecture from Winston Rhodes. In the 1920s and 1930s further education became popular in rural areas, and an adult education centre was set up at Feilding Agricultural High School in 1938.

Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi

Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand Workers Educational Association Collection
Reference: PAColl-7687-1-01

Permission of the Alexander Turnbull Library, National Library of New Zealand, Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, must be obtained before any re-use of this image.

Ngā whakaahua me ngā rauemi katoa o tēnei kōrero

Te tuhi tohutoro mō tēnei whārangi:

Nancy Swarbrick, 'Country schooling - Wider options: 1900s–1930s', Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/mi/photograph/16510/adult-education-feilding (accessed 31 July 2021)

He kōrero nā Nancy Swarbrick, i tāngia i te 24 Nov 2008