Abstract
This chapter first draws upon selected cases to briefly map out crucial issues relevant to teaching Asian American studies in East Asia. It then uses author’s own teaching experience to illustrate how graphic narratives can help non-native students cultivate needed cultural and historical literacy in order for them to review and challenge the dominant ideologies that have informed their imagined vision of the United States. The chapter then argues that the graphic form can make visible the systematic operations of racial, class, and gender inequality inside and outside the United States, an understanding that is essential to the practice of transnational American studies.
My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America. How something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness. It was race. It was race. It was race. Apologies to Frank Sinatra, but I’ve been called a “ch!gg@r,” a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a pawn, and a chink; that’s life. I am obsessed with what it means to be Chinese, think the idea of America is cool, but at the end of the day wish the world had no lines.
Fresh Off the Boat
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Notes
- 1.
As Eddie proudly proclaims, “I was a loud-mouthed, brash, broken Asian who had no respect for authority in any form, whether it was a parent, teacher, or country. Not only was I not white, to many people I wasn’t Asian either” (148).
- 2.
Stein neglects to mention that in the memoir the only full quote from a literary work comes from Michael Odaatje’s The English Patient, in which the narrator expresses a hope for “a world without map” (Fresh Off the Boat, 249).
- 3.
Eddie, in fact, constantly voices his refusal to be entrapped by the model-minority myth in the memoir. As he puts it, “We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it’s positive, but it’s a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we’re lactose intolerant anyway! We can’t even eat the cheese” (156).
- 4.
The British Chinese cookbook author Fuchsia Dunlop, in her food memoir Shark’s Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Four Memoir of Eating in China, explains the origin of the noddle dish: “Dan dan noodles are the archetypal Chengdu street snack. Their name comes from the bamboo shoulderpole that street vendors traditionally use to transport their wares; the verb ‘dan’ means to carry on a shoulderpole. Elderly residents of the city still remember the days when the cries of the noodle sellers—‘Dan dan mian! Dan dan mian!’—ran out in all the old lanes. The vendors would lay down their shoulderpoles wherever they found customers, and unpack their stoves, cooking pots, serving bowls, chopsticks and jars of seasonings” (36).
- 5.
Eddie wrote about how he lost the job offer after the white editor saw him in person and commented on his (Asian) face (207–8).
- 6.
According to Alice I. McLean, “Because the vast majority of Chinese arrived in the American West without their families, these early immigrants soon began to establish public eating houses called ‘chows chows,’ which served Cantonese-styled meals to suit the Chinese palate” (3).
- 7.
In his history on Chinese American food, Haiming Liu writes that in the 1970s Chinese American restaurant business took a significant turn with the influx of immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and later China (4).
- 8.
Eddie clearly is taking cooking as a way to express his individuality: “Cooking was something that I loved to do on my own. I didn’t agree with people on their interpretations, their favorites, or their preferences and didn’t care because my tastes were mine. That’s the thing I really loved about food” (Fresh Off the Boat, 246).
- 9.
However, we should not overlook the fact that the 1882 Exclusion Act actually encouraged the growth of Chinese American food industry. Chinese immigrants in the early twentieth century pooled their resources to open restaurants and were able to gain entrance into the United States with merchant status. See Heather R. Lee’s report on “The Untold Story of Chinese American Restaurants in America.”
- 10.
Eddie’s experiences in Pittsburgh and New York also contribute to his Bildung in the culinary profession. At an Italian diner in Pittsburgh, among the “universal food truths” he learns that simplicity is the essence of good cooking and that the everyday foods at home will “over time become an indispensable part of your life” (Fresh Off the Boat, 159). In New York, he also learns about the primary importance of food for immigrant families (242).
- 11.
Eddie entitles Chapter 16, in which he appears on the Ultimate Recipe Showdown show, as “They Don’t Love Me, They Just Love My Tiger Style.”
- 12.
After getting laid off by his law firm, Eddie makes a list of six things that he wanted to do in his life. Every item on the list originates in “some sort of physical or creative expression” within himself; number six is to own a restaurant (233).
- 13.
Its 2015 TV adaptation, ABC’s Fresh Off the Boat, is pitched as a family sitcom and completely fails to capture the hidden pathos embedded in the book.
- 14.
Jessica’s comment may not be simply a personal observation. Robert Ji-Song Ku comments on what he terms the “stepchild” status of Asian food in American cuisine: “Asian Americans have always been and continue to be emblematic of the unassimilated American, not only in body politic but in gastronomic culture as well. Asian food is America’s culinary stepchild, technically part of the family but never quite entirely” (13). In his monograph on Chinese American food, Yong Chen also points out the lack of appreciation for Chinese cuisine in mainstream American society: “As for America’s Chinese food, its arrival and spread reflected the division of labor in modern global political economy, where China has been largely a provider of cheap labor. America has enjoyed Chinese food as a convenient and affordable service but has yet to fully embrace it as a cuisine” (152).
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Feng, Pc. (2022). Dan Dan Mian, Hip-Hop, and Baohaus: Transpacific and Interracial World-Making in Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat. In: Chou, S.S., Kim, S., Wilson, R.S. (eds) Geo-Spatiality in Asian and Oceanic Literature and Culture. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04047-4_3
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