Fresh Off The Boat

Title: Fresh Off The Boat

Author: Eddie Huang

Genre: Memoir

Time: 8.1 hours

Rating: 8 out of 10

Surprise, surprise… another memoir made into a TV series.  This was not intentional.  I was actually reading Bunny Tales by Izabella St. James but for some reason it didn’t click and this one happened to be the next on the list.

I was pretty excited to read this as my hubby, kiddo and I love the tv series Fresh Off the Boat.  We somehow related to the Huang family and I was looking forward to finding more tidbits about them not (yet) mentioned on the show.  Welp, I was in for a surprise.  I’m not totally surprised but I can now say, I understand.  Let me back up a bit.  During the first season of Fresh Off the Boat, we were totally into that show and I tried to google stuff about it and found out that it was based on a memoir and the writer, Eddie Huang, was not happy about how the show turned out.  In fact, he didn’t want anything to do with it.  At that time, I wondered why.  Now I think I understand.

You see, the book isn’t like the TV series where it’s lighthearted and funny.  The period covered by the show is just in the first 3^rd of the book.  And there quite a lot of differences between the two.  Like for instance, the grandma in the wheelchair was his maternal grandma, not paternal.  The dad Louis was this scary, street thug back in Taiwan and he is still very scary & intimidating in the book.  Nowhere near the naïve person who wants everyone to like him which is shown on the series (although Cattleman’s Ranch is real but they had another restaurant which I forgot the name).  Mom Jessica was unhappy (which I’m guessing is because of her “shotgun marriage” to Louis when she got pregnant after a few months of dating) and was constantly looking for fights with the dad.  She was a stay-at-home mom and there was no mention of her being a real estate agent in the book.  What I did get was that she was an over-achiever as she graduated salutatorian of her high school class when she barely spoke a word of English as they only been in America for a year.  I guess maybe that's where her frustration comes from, knowing she's super smart and can do whatever she wanted to be but instead, she's stuck at home raising kids.  And in the book, it seemed that he and Emery were close when they were kids unlike on the series it’s Emery and Evan who are inseparable.  Their parents were crazy strict.  He describes discipline that borders on child abuse that it got to a point that they got reported to the social services(?) and for a time the school nurse had to inspect Emery (or was it Evan?) daily to see if there are any signs of abuse.

In the book, Eddie got into a lot of fights.  He seemed like an angry kid.  It feels like he’s always rebelling about something.. what? I don’t know.  He’s stuck in a place where he’s too Asian to be American and too American to be Asian.  He doesn’t want to assimilate and be “American,” he hates the stereo-typical Asian-American and I’m guessing he doesn’t also want to go to Taiwan and be Asian.

He sold drugs, tried law school, sold shoes and shirts, joined a reality cooking show, got arrested and he’s actually really smart, like gifted smart.  His brothers are smart, too.  hmmmm..  what else?  Oh yeah, in the book, he speaks in this (I’m guessing) hip-hop lingo(?) that most of the time I don’t get but I just try to understand by context clues.  And he tends to ramble on and on when he’s describing food, basketball or music.  I tend to just skip those parts.

It ends with him starting a successful restaurant in New York with the help of his friends and Evan.