I am a cultural appropriator. I think I’m a white person from Colorado. I talk like one in the peculiarly flat, uninflected accent of the westernmost mid-west. I make white cultural references to things like Steve Gutenberg and Fiona Apple, and I developed a friend group comprised almost exclusively of white, middle-class people of similar educational backgrounds. I was born in Golden, CO, in the early seventies, and because the examples of my own race presented to me in the ruling culture were to a one humiliating and ridiculous, I hated that others saw me as Chinese. I appropriated white culture in order to survive— I took the easy path. I made jokes at my culture’s expense. I distinguished myself as not “one of those” Asians. I assimilated. But because I am of a different race, there’s only so much I could ever “pass.” I spent most of my life hiding from my race. I’m done with that now. I do white person better than you do, I know more about and can express myself more clearly than you can in your only language — and I’m also Chinese, meaning that I am actually more than just white. Imagine if all Asian-Americans embraced that all of a sudden. It might look like this rise in activism, art, and concurrent rise in hate crimes against us as the terrified ruling majority suddenly finds themselves under attack from an unexpected flank. The other edge to the double-edged sword of increased representation is violence against us. If this allies Asian-Americans more closely to African-Americans and Mexican-Americans in this White Supremacist monoculture, I guess I’m taking the beatings and eradicating the “model minority” myth as a point of pride. We are in good company. I’m sorry we’re late to the fight.
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Eddie Huang has been accused of appropriating Black culture, though, like me, I think he’s just finding a way to assimilate into a less humiliatingly-perceived culture. Between the two of us, I would say that I wish I had appropriated Black culture instead of white as a survival tactic. White culture is diseased. Huang wrote a memoir, “Fresh off the Boat,” that spawned a series that I watched half of the first season of: the half that wasn’t about making the mother — the best part of the show — wrong and in need of humbling for her being defiantly Chinese. Huang himself distanced himself from the program after the pilot episode. I should have done the same. Huang opened some restaurants, said things indelicately, got accused of pretending to be something that he wasn’t, but the better question is why Asian-Americans feel as though they need a different cultural identity in a place that casually dismisses Asian men as impotent sidekicks, sage old mentors, or martial artists. Better to be white, where you can have string lights on your patio pergolas, or Black, where the damaging stereotypes are hypermasculine rather than flaccid and silly. In any case, Huang isn’t being something he isn’t. Huang is being Huang. I am being me. Take it or leave it; I don’t care much what you think of me anymore.
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The best moments of Huang’s hyphenate debut “Boogie” sparkle with the same kind of defiant individualism. Boogie (Taylor Takahashi) is a high school basketball star who hopes to win a scholarship to a division one program. His fractured family life, however, and the chip on his shoulder threaten that aspiration. He falls in love with Eleanor (Taylor Paige), to whom he loses his virginity, and sets his sights on making a big splash at “The Big Game” — at its heart, “Boogie” is structured like “Hoosiers” with everything leading to a big sports metaphor for working together, humility, marrying disparate elements into a pleasing whole. Because it’s Huang, “Boogie” is a cooking metaphor, too. Boogie has appropriated Black culture in the way he dresses and speaks; he has appropriated white culture in the way he tries to impress white recruiters; he has appropriated basketball culture in his referencing of Jeremy Lin and the steps it will take to make it to the NBA. He’s also the product of Chinese culture in its rituals of humility and ancestor worship which manifest in ways that are lovely (as the youngest in some situations, he is responsible always for pouring tea for his elders); and not so lovely as in the ways he listens to his angry, abusive dad in all matters relating to his future. I thought a lot about how Takahashi is a fourth-generation Japanese guy who doesn’t speak Mandarin very well, and how Huang cast him in this role as a Chinese-American, knowing the troubled history between the two cultures. I then thought about how I actually have more in common with Huang and Takahashi than I do with my parents and grandparents and the withering, genocidal slaughter of the Sino-Japanese war. We’re all Asian-Americans now— and when you accuse us of “appropriating” other cultures in order to survive here, I guess I think you should probably check yourself.
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I like that Eleanor works at a clothing shop where she sells “Wu-Tan Clan” apparel because if you want to talk about cultural appropriation, I want to talk about that tattoo you got that you think means “eternal strength” or something, but doesn’t. “Boogie” is about Boogie torn between the things he’s expected to be for his father, for his mother who has to do the books, for his uncle who wants to walk the middle line, for his girl, for his rival, for his coach, his English teacher trying to present Holden Caufield as a universal everyman rather than a Jay Gatsby, his culture, your culture, their culture. Boogie is an American in every conflicted, violent, sexualized, arrogant, insecure facet of being something that is young in the world and in the process still of building a tradition for itself of which it can be, finally, proud. In a lot of ways, I liked “Boogie” for how messy it is. Huang likes speeches instead of actions, and when he relies on an image, as he does with his extreme close-ups of eyes, he leans on them hard. There’s something to be said for swinging for the fences on every pitch— there’s something to be said, too, for picking your spots. If Huang gets another shot at this, I think, like a great chef, he’ll learn about balance. But as a debut for not just Huang but Takahashi, there’s a vibe to this— a vibrant, unpracticed, honest immediacy that reminds me a lot of something like “Boyz n’ the Hood” that first sought to capture for a mainstream audience the pain of assimilation into a culture that’s already made up its mind where you belong. It’s worth a look. And as another voice added to a growing chorus of Asian-Americans who were taught to be quiet, I guess I’m glad it’s not polished, that it’s coarse and impolite. Because we’re coming for you and you might as well know. [C+]