Interviews
"You Want to Know You Have a Home": Eddie Huang on "Double Cup Love"
Even before Eddie Huang's first book, the memoir Fresh Off the Boat, was published, my fellow booksellers and I couldn't turn the pages of the advance copies fast enough, couldn't stop shouting his raucous and very, very funny lines at each other in the office, couldn't wait to introduce readers to one of the sharpest new American voices we'd heard in a while. Ferocious, indelible, pushing boundaries: Huang's profanity- laced, searingly authentic stories of food and family made a perfect fit for our Discover Great New Writers program.
Soon, of course, we weren't the only ones talking about Eddie Huang: in addition to coverage in The New York Times, New York magazine, and others publications, Fresh Off the Boat was adapted as an ABC sitcom. Having ditched a legal career to start the restaurant BaoHaus and make a name for himself as a trailblazing figure in the world of food, Huang proved a restless innovator, savvy entrepreneur, and transfixing storyteller whose journeys of redefinition and engagement with his immigrant heritage bring readers along for a nonstop gonzo ride.
Eddie Huang recently returned to the stage at Barnes & Noble's Union Square store to celebrate the publication of his new book, Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China. Joining Eddie in conversation is Michael Davies, president and CEO of the television production company Embassy Row. The following is an edited transcript. — Miwa Messer, Director, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers
Michael Davis: So, Eddie, your first book, Fresh Off the Boat, a smash hit, loved the book. International smash! BaoHaus, your restaurant, incredibly successful. You're doing all kinds of television work, writing scripts, writing movie scripts. What on earth prompted you to write another book? What inside you did you desperately need to get out?
Eddie Huang: We actually admit to this in the book. I have to give credit to Marc Gerald, my visionary agent. Because when we wrote Fresh Off the Boat and while we were doing the press rounds before it came out, he was like, "I need to sell your second book, because if you don't sell it now, you're not going to get as much, and also I need to lock you in and make sure you do this." So Marc was a genius to lock me in before everything happened. And then, there was a date hanging over my head. I was actually really upset that I had sold this book, because I didn't know what I was going to do. But life has a way of finding you. Like, in the third chapter (you guys will get to the third chapter) it talks about how I had signed up for something that I wasn't sure I was going to write, and then, as we went to China and got into it, my life changed. I fell in love with this woman from Scranton, Pennsylvania, and I realized what the book was about.
MD: The book is about so many things. It's a tapestry of your life, myriad things stitched around it. It's part love story, part travelogue, part cookbook, part family saga again, part description of how hard it is to watch Internet porn in China (it's very difficult). Talk about balancing all of those themes while writing this.
You seem to have a relationship to food where, in the article in the New York Times, you talk about how to some extent the cooking stuff is a cover; the food is for show, it's not really substantial.
EH: I always realized that in America, people were like, "Asian cats, we will trust you with our laundry, we will trust you with our food." I was just like, "Well, I don't think I can send a memoir based on laundry, but if I cook really good food and people like it, then they'll come and they'll ask me questions, and they'll be curious about my culture, and then I'll have an opportunity to speak about these things."
We were very strategic. When I opened BaoHaus, my mom and dad were like, "Don't do it; we've been in the restaurant business; you can't do it; we don't believe in you." I even mentioned in the first book, my dad purposely upset me and he poked me. He was like, "You should just go intern for David Chang or something; he'll teach you some things — because you're not ready for this." I was like, "Fuck you, man." So we opened it. I think a week later I signed a lease, and I was like, "Fuck you, Dad." Then my brother came up and helped me out. But we both were like, "We're not in this to sell sandwiches forever." I respect people who are cooks for life. But I had so many things to say about the Asian-American experience and how hard it was to create your place in this country, and baos gave me that freedom. Baos were the thing that, like, unlocked it, and people started to pay attention to what I could do, and it enabled me to talk about these things. But I always wanted to write.
MD: And you've written a love story. And like all Shakespearean love stories, this one starts in a Brooklyn dive bar with sizzurp.
EH: Yes, it is a fantastic southern American wine and spirit.
MD: So Dena is an Italian American from Scranton, a background slightly different than your Taiwanese-Chinese- American self-described "human panda" from New York City by way of Orlando by way of D.C. You spend much of the book lamenting trying to come to grips with these different backgrounds. In a conflict still going on? Did you resolve that?
EH: You know, what I realized is that a lot of times . . . Therapists will tell you this, but at the time I didn't have the money to go see a therapist. Now they're telling me these things. I'm like, "I didn't have to write this book; you could have just told me this shit." They're like, "You project." I said, "I'm projecting, but what I was projecting was my own insecurity about being Taiwanese-Chinese-American." Because when you go to Taiwan or you go to China, everyone has comments on how you hold chopsticks, or how you wipe a table, or how you receive a receipt. You never really feel completely Taiwanese or completely Chinese. You always are called "American," or you're like a bit of a fraud in your mind.
But then, in America, it's very clear that people see you as, "You're Taiwanese, you're Chinese, you're different; you're an alien." So I think for a lot of first- and second-generation American immigrants, we don't have a home, so to speak. The diaspora is kind of nomadic, and I started to realize, though, that there's a lot of us here, and there's a lot of us that feel the same way, and the phenomena going on is third culture, where in every city, in every country, there are people like us who are immigrants, and we've created a common culture: What creates community are shared problems. That's what I think the diaspora has around the world, whether you're Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Chinese, Taiwanese. We have shared problems being immigrants, and we've created culture around this, and I think it's beautiful. Because shared problems create community, but what makes us individuals is the personal solutions that we find, and that's what the book is about.
MD: I won't ruin the whole end of the love story. It's actually not in this book. It's in an epilogue on New York magazine's website. But while this is a love story, the majority of the book takes place with you in China and your partner here in New York City. You took the trip with your two brothers, Emory and Evan.
EH: Yes.
MD: Talk about what sparked the idea for the voyage.
EH: Well, the idea came because I just felt like Fresh Off the Boat is incomplete. It's one part of the story. It's about my family coming to America and creating our place, like a lot of immigrants have. But have you seen the movie Belly? In the movie Belly, is, like, "I've got to go back to Africa." I always related to that aspect of Belly, and I was like, "My story is incomplete if I don't go back to the motherland." So I just reversed it, and I was like, "Let's get back on the boat. Let's go back to China."
MD: Fresh off the boat, back on the boat.
EH: Yeah, back on the boat. The original title was "Back on the Mothership," but people at Spiegel & Grau told me that middle-aged white women prefer titles with "love" in them.
MD: So you went with Emory and Evan. One of the book's most compelling narratives — your fraternal bond. You write that your mom used to tell you, "One chopstick, I'll break you; two chopsticks together, they're tougher, but eventually I break you; three chopsticks, if you stick together, unbreakable." Describe her thinking there.
EH: Not true. I have broken three chopsticks. But my mom's thing is really unity in the community. My mom was the biggest proponent of family. She loves family. She always tried to keep us together. I've got to give her credit. I grew up, and I meet a lot of people who are kind of estranged and they don't talk to their brothers. I beefed with Evan three hours before this and tried to smash his computer. Then we were cool. We both calmed down, I went to the gym, and we're best friends, and we came here together. But it is this, like, eternal bond that my family believes in, and we've like cultivated and we've worked on.
I think relationships don't fall out of the sky. A lot of times you read about romances, and you hear about them, and it's like, "Oh, you're the one and I met you and yadda-yadda." It's work. You've got to respect love. You've got to put in time. You've got to work for these relationships. I see all my homies over here on the right side. Yo, we could be friends, too. But these are my friends. I've known them twelve-plus years in the city, and it's like we work on these relationships.
MD: On the topic of family, you've already read something about your father, and just the respect and the love that you have for your dad. There's also a great story about your lifetime of playing driveway basketball games against your father.
EH: Yes.
MD: Take us back to Orlando, a city we both share in our past, circa the late '90s. Tell us about the first time you beat him at basketball.
EH: Man, my dad playing ball is like Draymond Green, except he doesn't breathe out of his mouth. But my dad is a hack. Right? Once I turned like sixteen or seventeen, I should have been beating my dad. But the problem is, he'd hack me, he'd push me in the bushes, he'd trip me — he just did not want to give it up. I hated my dad for years, and it was a funny thing, though, because he just would not let me beat him. Even though I probably should have beaten him fair and square, he did everything to be the king of that court. It wasn't until my first year back from college I could beat him. I'd gone in the weight room, I'd put on some beef, and I came back, and I muscled my pops, but I did it in a mildly disrespectful way. Like, I elbowed my dad, I pushed him — I fought him like he fought me. And he didn't appreciate it, but I think we both learned a lot, and that is one of my favorite chapters in the book.
At least in my family, my parents never gave me anything. Like, if I was going to win anything or get one off on them, I was going to earn it. I think it's a beautiful thing my dad did, always pushing me around, always kind of like putting me down and making me come back. Because he built strength. Whether it was basketball or working in his restaurant as a line cook/manager, he always gave me something to work on. He never told me I was fine. He never told me I was good. He kept giving me things. He was like, "I'm going to make this kid beat me." Like, on the basketball court, I had to take him off the court. And I think for parents and OGs, it's like you don't feel like the world is in good hands until the next generation can literally take it from you. I think that's your job as young cats.
MD: We touched briefly on China earlier — did this trip to China change your relationship with China itself? Did you come away feeling differently about it?
EH: Every time I travel to any country, it changes my relationship with myself, my home country, and then that country. I remember going to Toronto recently, and I was like, "This feels like an entire city of Queens." It's very diverse, it's very ethnic, the food is flames — but people are really nice. And they live in houses that look like Flushing, Queens, or Forest Hills. So Toronto really changed the way I viewed . . . Drake and Queens . . . I was like, "He's just a nice actor."
But also, China, the thing is China is changing, and the things that you see as China, they're just fading away. It's constantly like China is breaking through that plaster mask that I remember reading about in in high school. Walls that there were there are being punched through — there isn't a new building there necessarily, it's just erosion and destruction and change. But it's beautiful. China is in a period now where people put their heads down. That government had a plan to pull a billion people out of poverty. Everybody around the world judged this plan, and yes, there were human rights violations, terrible environmental issues, and a lot of the authoritarian politics you have to question. But when you go now, you see the results of their plan, and they have a lot of their industries, they own their own telecom, they have their own energy — they have a lot of their own properties. I was like, This is smart, in a lot of ways, what they did. Because they incubated this entire society, lifted a billion people out of poverty, and protected it.
But the thing now people are fighting for is they want more interaction with the outside world. A lot of people in China feel like goldfish, where they can see the world but they can't touch it. That's going to change, and that firewall will eventually come down. It's a very interesting thing to see, but . . . I think there are a lot of things to question about China, but there's a lot to learn. I think that we should really pay attention.
MD: The fourth pillar of the book is food. Your trip to China allowed you to immerse yoursel in the cuisine of Chengdu and Shanghai, everything from crayfish to a hotpot. The latter caused some tense moments on a bus trip towards the end of the book. You didn't just eat. You also set up shop and cooked yourself. What was your goal as a chef during that trip, as a cook? Was there any goal?
EH: My goal as a chef was to cook the food that I ate at home. The food that I ate in my mother's home, the food that I've been cooking in my home, my apartment that I share with my brother. Then going to China and asking, "Are we doing this right as Chinese people? Is this Chinese food?" I realized everyone ate it, and they said, "There is nothing like this." That's what's interesting, too. You eat one dish in your different aunts' homes and uncles' homes. They all cook it differently. But for some reason, because I'm an Asian born in America, I always question if mine was OK. I never question if my aunts' were OK or my uncles' — even though they were all different. I questioned mine, because no one ever kind of cosigned my existence.
So going back, they were like, "Look, it's different; we've never had anything like it. But it's absolutely Chinese, and we can see the things that you are doing here, we can see the references, and we can see literally the fingerprints and conditioning of your experience from D.C. to Orlando to Taiwan to China. We can tell where your parents are from, we can tell where they were born, and we can tell your American influence as well." So really, your DNA is in the food. It really, really is.
MD: The great Orlando influence on Chinese cuisine.
EH: The Orlando influence.
MD: What were the most memorable meals you ate while you were there? What did you eat that blew you away?
EH: Most memorable things I ate. The pigfoot soup with soybeans and seaweed. It doesn't sound incredible. It is the most luscious, delicious soup I ever had in my life. It's just like pure collagen and sea salt and seaweed and soybeans. It's delicious.
I had a roasted rabbit's head. I'm not saying this to gross you out. The roasted rabbit's head really was the most delicious thing. You pick the bones around the head, the crevices; it's really, really good. It's like eating a lamb shank, but like crispier and thinner. It's like finer, fibrous meat.
Tea-smoked duck. Incredible. I had great tea-smoked duck. The boiled crayfish was really good.
But the dish I enjoyed making the most was my Taiwanese beef noodle soup. To serve Taiwanese beef noodle soup in Chengdu and be received the way it was — that was a watershed moment. It's really cool to go home and hear, "You did all right, kid; you did all right."
You want to know that you have a home. You want to know that you did right by where you're from.
MD: In the last few pages of the book, you write: "It isn't acceptance that extinguishes us; instead, it awakens us."
EH: Yes.
MD: Was that the big takeaway ultimately from the experience?
EH: I went through a real funky period after Fresh Off the Boat came out in 2013. It's been well documented how I kind of flamed out in 2014.
MD: Well, by your own choice.
EH: I was beefin' with VICE a lot. And I was struggling, because I'd been an underdog, I'd been fighting my whole life, and I did not deal well with being accepted. I didn't deal well with people not questioning me and not challenging me. And I learned: Challenge yourself. You have to accept who you are. You have to accept the life that you've created. And you have to accept how humans and your character and spirit will evolve. Tony Kushner wrote this thing about shedding skins. I just really hung on to my old skin, and I didn't want to let it go. But the thing I learned through this journey to China and writing this book is: When your skin is ready to go, you have to let it go.
MD: In some ways, the positive of that is that second albums are notoriously hard. But you dealt so badly with the success of your first album, it gave you all the material to go and use again in your second.
EH: Yes, definitely. There was a lot of pain. And honestly, the funniest thing, the thing that really kept me going while writing this (and I'm not being funny) was Future's Dirty Sprite 2. I just listened to Dirty Sprite 2, as I was editing this. Because he'll mumble on songs, like, "Imma get'chu back; bitch left me; imma get'chu back." It was funny, because he'd be like braggadocious and saying, "Yeah, I'm on this, man; I'm doing this, I'm doing that, zanz, zanz, zanz," but then he'd just mumble, like, "Imma get her back."
MD: Do you mumble during your writing?
EH: I mumble all the time, man.
MD: I can't imagine you sitting at a computer or a laptop or pen-and-paper, and actually being quiet and writing. I can't imagine you doing that.
EH: It's a side of me that my really good friends have seen. But I can sit in a chair for literally twelve hours, and listen to the same song on loop.
MD: You listen to the same — headphones?
EH: No, playing. I have to have it out, auditory. If I know I have something to say, I cancel the day, I sit in a bathrobe, and I just start playing songs, and then one of them is like, "That's how I feel today."
MD: Do you write and then rewrite immediately, or do you just write it all out and get it all out there?
EH: I think Chris Jackson would prefer if I wrote and rewrote. But no, I don't. I just kind of write. I just write it, and then I deal with it later. I believe in just getting it all out; coming back a few days later, looking at it again; coming back a couple of weeks later and looking it at later. The things you write on paper have a life of their own, and you have to let them marinate, and you come back. It's a person you're talking to. Because the person that you think you are, the person that you look at in the mirror is different than the person on paper. I think the person on paper is the most difficult one to look at. It's the most honest one. Because it's very permanent, and it's starting you in the face. There's nothing that distracts you. There's no visual, there's no sound, there's no smell. It's just fucking words on paper that came out of your head.
MD: Knowing you, you want that to be genuinely you, and nothing other than genuinely you.
EH: Yeah. You can tell when you're fighting yourself. You come back a day later, you don't feel the same way, you don't believe it as much — you're like, "I'm lying." To me, writing is about honesty.
MD: Final two questions for me. One: What are the chances this becomes a sitcom on ABC?
EH: I think zero. I'm pretty sure zero — 0%. Twentieth still owns the rights to me as a character.
This one is a book. I don't know why I'm emotional for a second . . . But this one is a book.
MD: It's not going to be anything else.
EH: Yeah. I want to say the right thing. What happened with the first one is really tough. What happened with the first book was very tough. I will not let it happen to this book. This one is closer to home.
Fresh Off the Boat is a kid that had been silenced for a long time, and told he was a silly Chinaman and was not allowed to say shit for a long time, and I fought it and I fought it, and I kicked the door down and I wrote that book. I go back and I read that book, and I don't feel the same way. I'm not that angry, and I learned to accept myself. I learned that: You know what? The world isn't against me. Professor X, when he puts on Cerebro, there's a lot of mutants out there. There's a lot of mutants, there's a lot of weirdos, and that makes me feel good.
—June 22, 2016
