WATCH: Fresh Off the Boat
After watching the first two episodes of ABC’s “Fresh Off The Boat”, I’ll admit that I’m interested in giving the show a shot. It depicts some instances of my childhood and I can’t wait to see more. Particularly, Constance Wu's character Jessica shoots it out of the park! I’ll even pick up Eddie Huang’s book. Admittedly some of it is diificult to watch in that maybe because it was all true?!
Here's an excerpt from Eddie Huang in an interview that was posted in the New Yorker.
I didn’t understand how network television, the one-size fits-all antithesis to Fresh 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?
We are culturally destitute in America, and this is our ground zero. Network television never offered the epic tale highlighting Asian America’s coming of age; they offered to put orange chicken on TV for 22 minutes a week instead of Salisbury steak … and I’ll eat it; I’ll even thank them, because if you’re high enough, orange chicken ain’t so bad.
He's hilarious so just give it a shot. If you can believe it, it's the first Asian TV family in over 20 years!