In an effort to catch up with the onslaught of episodes ABC has been airing of their sitcom adaptation of Eddie Huang's memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, we offer these impressions of the first four episodes by Seattle writer (and Stranger Genius shortlister) Shin Yu Pai, beginning with last night's broadcast, and continuing with the initial three episodes below.

EPISODES THREE & FOUR (Mon Feb 9)
“The Shunning” and “Success Perms”
When I was in the seventh grade, a kid named Ross Perez called me a Communist. I went home and told my father, who was so incensed that he drove down to my school and immediately had a meeting with the assistant principal, in which he gave the poor administrator an earful on the differences between the Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese identities. Ross’ punishment was to write a 10-page research paper on the topic. My father had never set foot on my campus before that moment – whether for disciplinary issues, parent-teacher meetings, or school performances. In last night’s installments of Fresh Off The Boat, Jessica’s new friends’ circle involves her in more social gatherings. It’s clear that they see their new member as a foreigner, from their initial expectations that she’d have a more exotic name to the ringleader Deirdre’s comment that Jessica’s reasons for cutting up a cake in equally sized portions are because of Communism in her home country. Jessica stays silent and chooses not to correct Deirdre’s false perception.

Jessica’s finds affinity with Honey, her neighbor Marvin’s young trophy wife, only to be admonished by her Louis that the friendship threatens to compromise business at Cattleman’s Ranch. The neighborhood women ostracize Honey and brand her with a big scarlet A for breaking up Marvin’s first marriage to one of their own. Jessica and Honey bond over their mutual interest in Stephen King novels and make a genuine connection, until Jessica caves to social pressure and publicly shuns her new friend. Ultimately, Jessica is confronted with choosing between her own needs and group harmony. She turns around and embraces her friendship with Jessica, while singing a painful karaoke rendition of Whitney Houston’s “I will always love you” to her while performing on stage at a NASCAR block party.

In the second back-to-back episode, Jessica’s sister Connie and her husband Steve visit the Huangs in Orlando. They bring with them their son Justin and Jessica and Connie’s mother, who once considered Jessica her favorite child. When she uprooted to Florida, her mother transferred her affections to her oldest daughter. Extreme sibling rivalry and a ridiculous level of competition play out as the Jessica and Louis go to extreme lengths to create the image that the restaurant is prospering. The youngest Huangs, Even and Emery, give up their bedroom for their visiting grandmother. Louis enlists his staff in filling up the restaurant and even puts in a fax line at the house to show off to Steve his new status as a successful business owner. Their efforts to create a sense of success quickly come undone and Jessica and Louis must face the shame of struggling in their new home.

Eddie is excited to reconnect with his cousin, who first turned him on to hip-hop. But Justin shows up in a flannel button-down and a Nirvana shirt. “I’m thinking of moving to Seattle,” he says. Disappointed by the distance between him and Justin, Eddie stops treating his siblings like babies, and starts to accept them as potential friends. His brothers are eager to hang out and Eddie can take the role of mentor, introducing the boys to his music.

Though Fresh Off The Boat is a show that supposedly centers on Eddie, four episodes in, I’m far more interested in his parents as characters. Eddie’s pre-teen identity is developing and constantly shifting as he pursues whatever he thinks will bring his status and help him to fit in – Lunchables, a hot girlfriend, hip-hop culture, sports. But perhaps since Louis and Jessica have more developed identities as adults, their struggles as immigrants to fit in feel closer to my own family experiences.

A few years ago I visited my 1st Uncle and his son in Nantou. I asked them to take me to a museum that documented the history of the earthquake that rocked Taiwan in 1999. The natural disaster leveled houses and people lived in tent cities for months. We toured the ruins of destroyed school buildings. My dad and me got in line to try out the earthquake simulation. My cousin refused to join us, offering to wait for us at the end of the experience. When I asked him why he replied, “I already know what that feels like. I lived it.”
This is how I feel, watching Eddie trying to fit in at school and observing his fantasy life which positions black culture and white bodies at the center of social acceptance. When his parents cross boundaries to enter and disrupt his dream life, I see a young person that hasn’t yet learned to claim his identity independently from his family.

Most interesting moment in last night’s episode: several passive aggressive exchanges that take place in English between Jessica and Connie are subtitled to illustrate deeply engrained cultural codes around what is said and left unsaid.

PILOT (Wed Feb 4)
The pivotal moment in Wednesday’s premiere of new Asian American sitcom Fresh Off The Boat arrives when 11-year-old Eddie Huang finds himself rejected in the school lunchroom by both black and white classmates alike. Branded as the new “Chinese kid,” Eddie takes a seat at a table with the sole African American kid, Walter, a reluctant and hostile outsider. Eddie code switches instantly when a group of seemingly friendly white boys engage him in a conversation about Notorious BIG and invite him to join their table. “An Asian dude and a white dude bonding over a black dude,” Walter quips. But just as Eddie seemingly relaxes into his skin, his schoolmates ridicule him for his homemade Chinese lunch – fat rice noodles resembling worms in brown sauce.

Food is significant in defining Eddie, who grows up to become a famous New York restauranteur, that makes his name by returning to the familiar Taiwanese flavors of his culture. Fresh Off the Boat adapts Huang’s autobiography of the same name and narrates the story of Eddie’s family which relocates from Washington DC to suburban Orlando, when Louis, the family patriarch, uproots his family to help him run his fledgling business venture. Cattleman’s Ranch is a kitschy caricature of a Texan-themed steakhouse decorated with taxidermied animals, game heads, and cactuses planted in metal spittoons, though the waitstaff wear black Reeboks. When the family tours the dining room, one of Eddie’s brothers asks, “Were there bears in the Old West?” Like exotic animals in the Old West, the Huangs make no sense in their new environment.

The episode is full of complex and uncomfortable moments that highlight racial and ethnic difference. In DC, white tourists ask Eddie and his brother for directions to the White House, enunciating their speech and speaking slowly in their presumption that the boys are FOB. Eddie tells his new neighbor Deirdre that he was born in DC to which she responds, “Your English is very good.” But even as the show seeks to unpack the Asian American experience and expose biases against and assumptions towards Asians, what may be more interesting and awkward, are the moments when White privilege and constructions of Whiteness are laid bare.
Louis hires a white host in an attempt to lure customers to his restaurant. Believing visitors will feel safer amongst their own kind, Louis explains to his wife Jessica the power of a welcoming and familiar face: “Hello white friend, I am comfortable. Yes, to the white face. Nice happy white face like Bill Pullman.” When customers don’t immediately double, Louis tells his new host Mitch, “I need your Caucasian features to work harder.” Louis casts Mitch as a redneck, in a self-produced commercial for Cattleman’s Ranch.

At home, Jessica struggles with her sons’ relationships to food. Her son Evan develops lactose intolerance when exposed to string cheese by a classmate. She takes pride in the way Evan’s body “rejects White culture,” even as she tries to accommodate Eddie’s request for “White people’s lunch” – the food that will get him a seat at the table with the cool kids. Mother and son venture to the big box grocery store in search of Lunchables, processed food that bears little resemblance to the Japanese eggplant or bitter melon that Jessica is accustomed to fighting over in the Asian market. Even as Jessica nearly succeeds in making an insightful comment about how ethnic behaviors may be defined in calling out Eddie’s desire to “fit inside a box” which she considers to be “so American” – she undermines her own moral credibility in dumping an entire bowl full of free tortilla chips into her shopping basket.

Fresh Off The Boat seeks to unpack the American experience as perceived and lived by characters that stand outside of the mainstream experience. It seems significant that Louis resists his host Mitch’s desire to minimize his dream of Cattleman’s Ranch into any common steakhouse-themed chain restaurant. Mitch sees a taxidermied bear that could be present in any Golden Saddle, perhaps a variation of the popular saying, “All Asians look alike.” But Fresh Off The Boat seeks to question and undo beliefs about Asian Americans, their experiences, and the formation of their identities.

EPISODE 2 (Wed Feb 4)
“Home Sweet Home School”

In the second episode of Fresh Off The Boat, Eddie’s mom, Jessica, struggles to find a new identity in Orlando. She throws herself into supporting Louis’ restaurant, Cattleman’s Ranch. But when her controlling nature intimidates the staff and threatens any sense of hospitality, Louis throws his sons under the bus and diverts his wife’s attention to improving the education of their three kids. With the same intensity that she approached managing the family business, Jessica creates an after-school cram school program for her boys, playing into the predictable image of the Chinese tiger mother that Amy Chua seeded in the public imagination, with her 2011 memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Jessica is driven, hyperdisciplined, and unforgiving. Her youngest sons Emery and Evan easily take to their new program of study, but Eddie pushes back, feeling a palpable sense of missing out on his childhood. Jessica’s life revolves around managing projects related to the male figures in her life, who do not fully understand or appreciate her efforts or intentions. It’s hard to not wonder about the life and identities that she may have given up when leaving DC. Viewers get a glimpse of this in the show’s pilot – she left behind family members, a Chinese community – but in suburban Florida, her best chance at making friends may lie with her white rollerblading MILF neighbors. She is vulnerable when she confesses to her oldest son that she’s trying hard to fit in, in an experience that parallels her son’s own displacement and lack of power. I’m hoping that as the series progresses, Jessica’s struggle to reclaim her identity reaches beyond her duties to her family to give a fuller sense of her power as woman. Likewise, I’d like to see Eddie’s Chinese-speaking grandmother, who has little screen time, integrate better within the multigenerational family structure to serve a greater role than functioning as a prop for Eddie’s monologues.