Fresh is the word: Checking in on Fresh Off the Boat

I was all set to dislike ABC's Fresh Off the Boat before its premiere. It wasn't because it was going to take celebrity chef Eddie Huang's candid and raunchy memoirs about his hip-hop-soundtracked childhood in Orlando in the '90s (which I've read only one or two excerpts of) and water down that book for network TV, which was what Huang, the show's off-screen narrator, said he was initially frustrated about while he consulted on the writing and filming of the Lynn Shelton-directed Fresh Off the Boat pilot (I wish Huang did a little more research about ABC sitcoms before he signed up to do business with ABC: someone should have reminded him it's the home of The Middle and The Goldbergs, not Louie and You're the Worst). I was all set to dislike the show for a different reason: it was going to be another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational differences with their elders.

As someone who's watched a shit-ton of Asian American indie movies, that kind of story was, for a long while, the only kind of Asian American indie flick that was getting made, whether it was Red Doors or American Chai. We're so underrepresented or poorly depicted in everything else in pop culture, and this shit is the best we can do on our own? It was becoming as much of a tired formula as Katherine Heigl rom-coms or "Die Hard on a boat!"--or "Die Hard in an office building!" The earnest indie drama about Asian American assimilation became so grating and hackneyed that graphic novelist Adrian Tomine spent the first five pages of Shortcomings hilariously tearing it apart.

"Why does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?," grumbles Shortcomings' main character, Berkeley movie theater manager Ben Tanaka, after sitting through yet another Asian American drama about generational conflict.

My beef with the assimilation story has been more like "Can we get something else other than the assimilation story, like a story outside the family? Maybe a movie or show about an Asian American guy handling the many absurdities of the dating scene on his own? We do have lives outside the family, you know." That's why Emily Kapnek's Selfie was such a breath of fresh air--it was mostly about the love life and workplace dilemmas of John Cho's modern-day Henry Higgins, a pharmaceutical marketing whiz who gives rebranding advice to the show's social media-obsessed Eliza Doolittle counterpart, Karen Gillan's Eliza Dooley, and not once did the show insert Henry's parents into the narrative--and that's why its cancellation still stings. So after ABC deleted Selfie, I thought, "Alright, so the show I've longed to see on network TV for over a decade didn't last. I don't like the fact that you're yet another assimilation story, Fresh Off the Boat, but you better be damn well as funny as Selfie was."

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat is genuinely funny as it glimpses at the complexities of identity, and its slightly skewed take on the coming-of-age sitcom is what sets it apart from the overly earnest assimilation stories Ben Tanaka and I don't care for. That's mostly due to the guiding hand of showrunner Nahnatchka Khan, the veteran American Dad writer whose signature creation is Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Khan's sharply written mismatched-roommates comedy revealed James Van Der Beek to be a skilled comedic actor and featured the great unsung pairing of Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker, who were often so hilariously expressive without dialogue that I could easily picture Ritter and Walker as silent movie comediennes, and I even wished for Khan to do an entire Don't Trust the B---- episode as a silent movie.

All I wanted from Fresh Off the Boat was for the show to retain the weirdness Khan brought to Don't Trust the B----, and it's been doing that frequently. Part of the effectiveness of the surreal gags about the hellishness of the back of the school bus Eddie (Hudson Yang) and his friends ride while pretending to be comatose in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" is due to the episode never showing what goes on in the back of the bus, as if it's too unpleasant to show on network TV. A classmate character's obsession with an NES game based on the 1980 movie 9 to 5 is a dead-on riff on how NES games would be spun off from the strangest licensed properties, whether it was Home Alone or Wayne's World. And there's a great little scene in "Persistent Romeo" where Evan (Ian Chen), Eddie's youngest brother, screams like a little girl for what feels like two hours after he loses to Grandma Huang (Lucille Soong) during poker. I don't know if it's a reference to this '90s moment, but that would be wonderful if it were. Something about male characters screaming like little girls while their expressions remain absolutely blank always kills me (it must have killed a Fresh Off the Boat crew member too because he can be heard audibly chuckling on the set off-screen while Evan screams).

It helps that Fresh Off the Boat takes some of its stylistic cues not from All-American Girl, the last network sitcom to center on an Asian American family (not counting the TBS show Sullivan & Son), but from the often enjoyable '80s period piece Everybody Hates Chris, which itself took stylistic cues from Everybody Hates Chris co-producer Howard Gewirtz's Oliver Beene, a 2003 Fox sitcom that took place in the early '60s. I remember watching All-American Girl in the '90s and being underwhelmed by it like so many other Asian American viewers, mostly because its version of Margaret Cho--whom Huang actually turned to for advice while initially struggling with the changes that were being made to the depiction of his own life as an 11-year-old--wasn't the Margaret Cho I was familiar with from her raunchy stand-up act. The dominant creative voice on All-American Girl actually belonged not to her, but to a veteran of the lily-white Empty Nest, a huge sign that Cho's show was doomed.

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat doesn't have a guy from Empty Nest in charge. Instead, it's the comedic mastermind behind Don't Trust the B----, surrounded by other writers of color like How I Met Your Mother veteran Kourtney Kang and stand-up comic Ali Wong. There wasn't a single authentic bone in All-American Girl's mad-homogenized and heavily micromanaged body, whereas Fresh Off the Boat captures many aspects of Asian American families quite well (like the Huangs' couch being covered in plastic or the Huang parents' "success perm," which isn't just a Chinese thing--it's kind of a Filipino thing as well) and gets a lot of the '90s right, whether it's the music Eddie prefers or the mom jeans look rocked by his cantankerous, Caddyshack-loving mother Jessica. Can we talk about Constance Wu for an hour? She's doing wonders with her role, turning it into something more nuanced than the Tiger Mom caricature that could have emerged in much lesser comedic hands.

Wu is actually much younger than her character, like how Nick Offerman, in real life, is much younger than his Parks and Rec alter ego Ron Swanson, but Ron is such a unique comedic creation that you can't picture anyone else but Offerman playing him had the casting gone differently (except maybe Sam Elliott, who wound up guest-starring as Ron's counterpart in Eagleton), and only Offerman could bring him to life so effectively. I feel the same way about Jessica Huang now. Despite her youth, Wu just brings a certain bearing and dimension--not to mention a certain kind of comic timing--to Jessica that I don't think any other actor could pull off.

Another hero of the show--and this person isn't getting as much praise from the press as Wu--is whoever has been music-supervising Fresh Off the Boat. Securing pricey hip-hop classics by the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard and Snoop Dogg--it's thrilling to hear on a network sitcom all these tracks I grew up with just like Eddie--was probably no easy feat. The show's '90s hip-hop soundtrack is anchored by an original theme song by Danny Brown, whom Huang himself recruited to record the theme, probably just for the thrill of saying that he slipped Danny Brown, who often makes 2 Live Crew look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, into an ABC family sitcom. The brief tune introduces Danny Brown to a new audience and will hopefully get those viewers to become enthralled by the Detroit rapper's storytelling skills in tracks like "Grown Up" and "25 Bucks."

But perhaps my favorite musical moment on the show so far takes place in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle," when Eddie's crush on his neighbor and babysitter Nicole (Luna Blaise, who looks like a teenage Krysten Ritter) is soundtracked by the DeBarge-sampling remix of the Notorious B.I.G./Faith Evans/Mary J. Blige tune "One More Chance." As with all the other existing songs on Fresh Off the Boat, you don't hear "One More Chance" on network TV every day. That "One More Chance" remix is like "I've Got You Under My Skin" to a certain generation. It's that smooth of a song. I could easily imagine Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle ordering bottle service at the Snakehole Lounge to the sounds of "One More Chance" at one time or another. The airing of "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" last week was a stroke of beautiful timing too: yesterday was the date of Biggie's death.



If the show hadn't been able to nab almost all those hip-hop chestnuts that have appeared so far, Fresh Off the Boat would still soar anyway. The writing is frequently sharp (in her piece "Fresh Off the Boat uses black culture to talk more candidly about Asian culture," critic Danielle Henderson put the show's unique Asian American perspective best when she said, "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"), and the cast, with Wu and Randall Park (as Eddie's dad Louis, whose Orlando steakhouse business is actually a Filipino fried chicken joint in Glendale) as the standouts, is an enticing collection of comedy nerd favorites (Park, Paul Scheer) and always-welcome serial guest stars (Ray Wise, C.S. Lee buried under a success perm wig). For a show that's another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational beefs, Fresh Off the Boat is far from stale.

My starting six for Asian Pacific American comic books

Last year, music critic/blogger Oliver Wang invited his readers to post lists of six films that they think would best serve as an intro to Asian American cinema if someone asked, "What the hell is Asian American cinema? School me." Chan Is Missing, a Wayne Wang indie comedy that broke new ground in 1982 for its multilayered portrayal of the frequently stereotyped Chinese American community, showed up on several readers' lists.

It took a long time for the APA-dominated comics industry to catch up to Chan Is Missing and other equally groundbreaking '80s and early '90s indie films by APA directors. When I was a teen, I frequently thought, "Why aren't all these Asian creators doing comics about themselves or rather, about us? Okay, there's Xombi by a pair of non-Asians over at Milestone Media. But that's it? (NOTE: I didn't know Lynda Barry was one-quarter Filipina at the time.) Are these Asian guys whitewashed or something?"

The lack of APA protagonists was one of many reasons why I lost interest in comics and didn't become a regular reader again until the mid-2000s (mainly because of the strong writing in titles like Y: The Last Man and Gotham Central). It was a great time to come back to comics because that part of the decade saw several APA creators unleashing graphic novels with richly crafted APA characters that were on a par with Chan Is Missing.

I'm looking forward to seeing more APA comics or graphic novels. I was even involved in one of them (Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology). Whether they're semi-autobiographical works that examine APA identity issues or post-racial escapist fare that doesn't address any of those issues at all (but it doesn't matter because look, yo, it's an APA brother as the hero!), here, in alphabetical order, are six essential APA comics or graphic novels, just in time for APA Heritage Month.


1. The All-New Atom (writer: Gail Simone/illustrators: various, 2006-08)
DC's most recent revival of their microscopic superhero only lasted 25 issues, but its wisecracking lead, Ray Palmer's Hong Kong-born protege and successor Ryan Choi, still suits up as the Atom in other DC titles and even the Batman: The Brave and the Bold animated series (some fans of the Choi incarnation fear that after these post-cancellation appearances, the character, whose series tanked sales-wise, might get killed off someday). For this offbeat series, which was partially created by Grant Morrison and collected in four trade paperback volumes, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman writer Simone set up a nifty and inventive premise that raises the question "Do superheroes ever think about the destruction they leave in their wake?" The shrinking technology that Professor Palmer made use of as the Atom has left some nasty side effects on the physics of his hometown Ivy Town and turned it into a Sunnydale-like hotbed of paranormal activity. After his professor mentor mysteriously goes AWOL, Choi defies the wishes of his Hardass Asian Father and assumes the Atom mantle to protect Ivy Town from monsters, size-changing serial killers and a microscopic extraterrestrial warrior race that lives inside Choi's dog Copernicus. Oh yeah, and there's a 30-foot-tall naked red-haired chick (if the My Life in Miniature arc ever becomes a movie, naked Giganta ought to be played by Christina Hendricks--and somewhere, a nerd's pants explode).


2. American Born Chinese (writer/illustrator: Gene Luen Yang, 2006)
Colored superbly by artist Lark Pien, Yang's absorbing third novel centers on a whitewashed Chinese junior high-schooler who's filled with enough self-hatred to fuel an Esther Ku routine, and it ties the kid's struggles beautifully to the Chinese legend of the impish and heroic Monkey King. As a kid who drew his own comics, Yang was prone to some of the same kinds of whitewashed behavior that his novel depicts. He would doodle bucktoothed caricatures of his own people, without realizing they're as offensive as the Asian-bashing cartoons he would later find objectionable as a grown-up (he named the school that's a source of torment for the title character after one of these racist cartoonists, Pat Oliphant). American Born Chinese's bucktoothed Cousin Chin-Kee character was a way for the Bay Area native to exorcise that personal demon (much like Lynda Barry, whom I'll get to later). The confessional feel of American Born Chinese is quite Catholic--Yang himself is a devout Catholic--and the candor with which he tackles self-hatred and identity recalls the earlier and more personal works of another guilt-ridden Catholic, Martin Scorsese.


3. Chew (writer: John Layman/illustrator: Rob Guillory, 2009-present)
Layman and Guillory's clever, funny and sometimes gross Image series imagines a world rocked by a Y: The Last Man-like bird flu catastrophe (was Layman inspired by the footage of struggling Vietnamese chicken farmers in Laura Ling's 2006 bird flu piece for Current TV?). In the Chew-niverse, Poultry Prohibition is in effect, the poultry black market is as dangerous and murderous as the drug trade, and the FDA, suddenly the most powerful government agency in America, starts a Special Crimes division and turns to "cibopath" Tony Chu to bust all the crazies who have emerged since the bird flu. Chu's cibopathy allows him to see the history of any item he eats, from where it originated to who prepared it. So if Chu were the primary on the case of the Barbara Bel Geddes Alfred Hitchcock Presents character who killed her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and got rid of her weapon by serving it to the cops for dinner, Miss Ellie wouldn't have stood a chance. Guillory modeled Chew's often repulsed but brave detective hero after Lost cast member Ken Leung, whose ease with shifting back and forth between humor and seriousness would make him an ideal screen portrayer of Chu (although I have a feeling Leung, who had a bit part in X-Men: The Last Stand as a porcupine man who must be a nightmare in the sack for the ladies, might want a break from playing guys with weird powers). Here's a reason to admire Chew's white scriptwriter: he reportedly refuses to sign off on a screen adaptation if an APA actor isn't cast as his creation. In whitewash-crazy Hollywood (The Last Airbender, Mickey Rourke's possible Genghis Khan biopic), I wouldn't be surprised if Layman ends up in one hell of a fight. Heads up, Hollywood: Chu-style biting might be involved.


4. Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President (writer/illustrator: Kaiji Kawaguchi, 1997-2001)
24 foretold a black president. The West Wing's final season envisioned a Latino one. Kawaguchi's soapy but riveting political manga imagined a Japanese American prez--several years before either of those shows introduced their fictional chief executives of color. Kenneth Yamaoka, the New York senator whose campaign to become the Democratic presidential candidate is the focus of Eagle, bears a few similarities to President Obama. Both are charismatic, self-deprecating former lawyers of biracial heritage who hail from Hawaii and have to put up with racist outrage over their ascension in the political arena. The major difference between Yamaoka and our current president is that Obama doesn't have an adopted daughter and an illegitimate son who fall in love with each other. The somewhat disgusting incest subplot is the weak link in an otherwise thoughtful and intriguing exploration of political strategizing and racism on the campaign trail. (The five-volume Eagle is currently out-of-print, but I unearthed the first two volumes at a local library and absorbed both chunky books in one sitting. Yamaoka's campaign manager Arthur McCoy resembles Human Target star Chi McBride so much that I couldn't help reading aloud some of McCoy's dialogue to myself in a McBride-style rasp.)


5. One Hundred Demons (writer/illustrator: Lynda Barry, 2002)
For her first autobiographical work, which she called an "autobifictionalography," the creator of the alt-weekly fixture Ernie Pook's Comeek took a cue from a Zen monk who would exorcise his personal demons by painting them, and she revisited her own demons from her past. They range from frustration over the travesty that was the 2000 Florida presidential vote recount to regret over choosing lousy boyfriends (the nameless pony-tailed boyfriend in the "Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend" chapter is based on her ex Ira Glass). Many of the novel's most enjoyable or poignant sections involve Barry's days as a gawky, fatherless misfit who bonded with her fun-loving Filipino grandma and was subjected to nonstop verbal abuse from her far less compassionate half-Filipino mother. One Hundred Demons is an interesting precursor to American Born Chinese, and like Yang's novel, it's upfront about the painful side of growing up Asian in America and nostalgic for the delightful aspects of it, such as Barry's Pinoy relatives' impromptu dance parties (the American Born Chinese equivalent is Transformers toy battles with other Asian kids). Barry's rubber-limbed drawing style is especially charming during the chapter about dancing, which finds Barry paying tribute to the "keepers of the groove" and "the babies and the grandmas who hang on to it and help us remember when we forget that any kind of dancing is better than no dancing at all."


6. Shortcomings (writer/illustrator: Adrian Tomine, 2007)
I knew Shortcomings was terrific right when it began with a swipe at overly earnest APA indie films ("Why does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?"). On the subject of Shortcomings, which collects a three-issue arc from his series Optic Nerve, Tomine told The Economist's Intelligent Life, "It became a challenge to create something honest. I didn't want to make a book that said 'it's cool to be Asian,' or 'racism is bad.'" That honesty--best exemplified by Tomine's refusal to make his New York-hating theater manager protagonist Ben Tanaka a completely likable romantic hero who's always in the right and who triumphs in the end--is why Shortcomings isn't just one of the best APA-made graphic novels but also one of the aughts decade's best novels, period. Tomine's downbeat (but not overly dour) and elegantly illustrated novel has often been compared to Annie Hall (which is also about a heartbroken misanthrope who has to brave a city he can't stand in order to attempt to patch things up with the one that got away), but the way Ben sabotages his relationship with his activist girlfriend Miko to indulge a fetish for white chicks and then amusingly suffers the consequences is more Larry David than Woody Allen. While many readers might detest Ben, it'd be hard to find anything to dislike about his mischievous and much less sullen Korean lesbian best friend Alice, whose acerbic exchanges with Ben are among the novel's highlights ("All Asians might look the same to you, but my family would spot your Japanese ass a mile away").