《初來乍到》原型黃頤銘 打破亞裔模範迷思

On a cold, dark street in Tijuana, Mexico, I asked Eddie Huang a question that many people were sure to ask him in the months to come. “What did you expect?”

在墨西哥提華納一條陰冷黑暗的街道上，我問了黃頤銘(Eddie Huang)一個幾個月來大家都會問的一個問題：“你的期望是什麼？”

For the past week in December, Huang had been venting about his tortured ambivalence toward “Fresh Off the Boat,” the ABC sitcom based on the memoir he wrote about growing up as a child of Taiwanese immigrants in Orlando, Fla. He deployed his gift for pithy, wounding invective against the show’s producers and writers — before professing gratitude and love for the same people he just vilified. He described what he took to be the show’s falseness and insensitivity to nuance — before praising its first episode as the best sitcom pilot he had ever seen. He lamented the choice he had made to sell his life rights to a major network — before insisting that the premiere of “Fresh Off the Boat” on Feb. 4 would be a milestone, not just in the history of television but in the history of the United States.

十二月的過去一週裏，黃一直在發泄他對《初來乍到》(Fresh Off the Boat)所持有的那種令人糾結的矛盾心態。這部美國廣播公司旗下的情景喜劇改編自黃的回憶錄，講述了他作爲臺灣移民的孩子在佛羅里達州奧蘭多的成長經歷。說起該劇的製作人和編劇們的時候，黃充分發揮了他那說簡潔有力的惡毒髒話的天分。可是壞話剛說完，他接着又表達了對這些人的感激和喜愛之情。他批評該劇虛僞，沒有傳達出原著的精妙之處，可是馬上又對第一集大加讚賞，說那是他看過的最好的情景喜劇試播集。他對於把自己人生故事的版權賣給一個大電視網的這一決定後悔不已，但接着又堅稱二月四日《初來乍到》的首播不但將是電視歷史上，也是整個美國曆史的一個里程碑。

He had a point. “Fresh Off the Boat” would be the first network sitcom to star an Asian-American family in 20 years and only the third attempt by any major network in the history of the medium. Huang chose to sign with ABC in deference to the residual power of network television to alter mass perceptions about race, and he had hoped to portray the Asian-immigrant experience without equivocation or compromise.

他有理由這麼說。《初來乍到》是二十年來在美國電視網播出以亞裔美國家庭爲主角的第一部情景喜劇。在美國電視史上，所有的主要電視網加在一起只有三次這樣的嘗試。黃選擇跟ABC合作，是覺得電視網還有一定的殘餘影響力，可以改變公衆對種族的看法。他希望能夠毫不含糊、毫無妥協地描繪亞洲移民的生活經歷。

“What did I expect?” Huang responded. “I expected I could change things.” He told me that he thought his story was powerful enough for ABC to allow him to tell it his way. “I thought that people in network television had their own conscience about things.”

“我期望什麼？”黃迴應了我的問題，“我期望能夠改變一些事。”他告訴我他本來相信他的故事足夠震撼，能夠說服ABC不做任何干涉，以他的方式講述。“我原本是相信電視網的人還是有一點良心的。”

Huang, 32, was dressed in an acid-wash denim jacket and a black fur hat with its earflaps folded up, which lent his large, round baby face a not-at-all-coincidental resemblance to a certain East Asian dictator. (Huang likes to give himself nicknames — Kim Jong Trill, the Rotten Banana, the Human Panda, the Chinkstronaut — all of which, like the name of his show, repurpose and reclaim slurs and stereotypes.) He was sitting on the back fender of a Vice Media van, in which a five-man crew was preparing its equipment to shoot. We were waiting for two young female marijuana dealers whom Huang would be interviewing for “Huang’s World,” the gonzo food and travel show he hosts for Vice.

黃今年32歲。他穿着一件做舊的牛仔夾克。黑色皮毛帽子護耳上翻，加上他那張又大又圓的娃娃臉，這形象似乎是在有意模仿某位東亞獨裁者 。（黃喜歡給自己起諸如“金正雀”、“爛香蕉”、“熊貓人”、“中國佬宇航員”這樣的外號。這些外號像他節目的名字一樣，重新利用種族侮辱和種族定型，賦予它們新意）黃坐在一輛Vice傳媒麪包車的後保險槓上。在車裏，五位工作人員正準備設備開拍。我們在等兩位女大麻販子。黃將要爲《黃的世界》(Huang’s World)採訪她們，這是他給Vice主持的一檔怪誕的美食旅行節目 。

He had, he admitted, been extremely naïve about the realities of network television. By way of explanation, Huang reviewed for me the string of previous triumphs that induced him to overrate his ability to set his own terms in the world. “You have to remember how unlikely all of this was. With Baohaus, for instance,” he said, referring to the basement hole-in-the-wall Taiwanese sandwich shop that took Huang to the forefront of a new generation of hip young New York chefs, “I had never worked in a New York City restaurant. I came out of nowhere. And I did it!” After a brief dalliance with the Cooking Channel, Huang started the Vice show, which at the time was called “Fresh Off the Boat.” “When had there been a television host with an identity like mine — a hip-hop Asian kid? I was the first! And the show was a huge success!” In 2013, he published a memoir, the story that Huang had always wanted to tell, and it became a national best seller. “And so I said, We can do this one more time! But network television wasn’t what I thought it was.”

黃承認，他此前對電視網節目的現實情況的認識極度天真。作爲解釋，他向我列舉了自己此前一系列的成功，這些經驗使他高估了自己可以在與電視網合作過程中自作主張的能力。“我之前的成功真是不可思議。拿Baohaus來說”——這是他經營的一家開在地下室的臺式刈包店，這個簡陋小店使黃成了新一代紐約年輕新潮廚師的領軍人物——“我沒有在紐約市任何餐廳的工作經歷。我沒有任何背景，但我卻成功了！”在跟美食頻道的短暫合作後，黃開始在Vice主持他的節目。那時這個節目就叫做《初來乍到》。“之前沒有任何一個電視主持人有我這樣的身份——一個嘻哈亞裔小子？我是第一個！我的節目大獲成功！”2013年，他出版了一本回憶錄，講述了他一直就想講的故事，而這部回憶錄也成了全國暢銷書。“所以我會說：‘我們可以再來一次！’但是電視網節目並不是我想象的那回事。”

Huang feels that by adulterating the specificity of his childhood in the pursuit of universal appeal, the show was performing a kind of “reverse yellow­face” — telling white American stories with Chinese faces. He doesn’t want to purchase mainstream accessibility at the expense of the distinctiveness of his lived experiences, though he is aware of how acutely Asian-­Americans hunger for any kind of cultural recognition. “Culturally, we are in an ice age,” he said. “We don’t even have fire. We don’t even have the wheel. If this can be the first wheel, maybe others can make three more.”

黃認爲，爲了迎合大衆口味而減弱他童年故事的獨特性，會使《初來乍到》變成“反向黃面孔”——利用中國人的面孔講述美國白人的故事。雖然他很清楚亞裔美國人非常渴望得到任何文化承認，但是他不想爲了打入主流而犧牲掉他個人經歷的獨特性。“我們在文化上還處於冰河世紀，”他說，“我們連火都不會生。連輪子也還沒發明。如果《初來乍到》能成爲第一個輪子，也許別人可以做出另外三個。”

Then, he added, “we can get an axle and build a rice rocket.”

接着，他又說道：“我們可以弄個輪軸，造一輛‘亞洲小跑車’。”

The story Huang tells in his memoir is one of survival and struggle in a hostile environment — a prosperous neighborhood in Orlando. Though the picaresque book is written in Huang’s jaunty mash-up of hip-hop lingo and conspicuously learned references to American history and literature, it is also an extraordinarily raw account of an abused and bullied child who grows to inflict violence on others. The racism Huang encounters in Florida is not underhanded, implicit or subtle, as it often is for the many Asians from the professional classes living in and around the coastal cities where the American educated elite reside. It is open, overt and violent.

黃在回憶錄中講述的是一個在奧蘭多某富裕社區中生存和鬥爭的故事。對他來說那是一個充滿敵意的環境。黃在這一充斥着流氓小混混的作品中生動地夾雜了嘻哈語言。與之形成強烈對比的是他對美國曆史和文學典故的旁徵博引。但他的作品遠不止於此。黃用異常樸實震撼的筆觸描寫了一個飽受虐待和欺辱的孩子學會如何以牙還牙的故事。和許多住在教育精英聚集的東西海岸地區的亞裔職業人士不一樣，黃在佛羅里達遭受到的種族歧視不是偷偷摸摸、暗示性的，或是含蓄的。在這裏，種族歧視是公開的，沒有任何掩飾的，甚至是暴力的。

“Up North and out West, you have a bit more focus on academics, and there are accelerated programs for high-achieving kids,” said Emery Huang, reflecting on the tumultuous upbringing he shared with his brother. “Down South, you’ve got football and drinking, and that’s it. If you weren’t fighting, you were a nerd and a victim.” In response to this bullying, the Huang brothers did not conform to the docile stereotypes of Asian-American youths, in large part because of the influence of their father, Louis. A hardened, street-smart man, Louis had been sent by his own father to the United States to get him away from the hoodlums he had been running with in Taipei. “We wouldn’t get in trouble with our dad if we got into a fight,” Emery said. “We would get in trouble if we didn’t win.”

“在北部或是西部，人們更重視學業。他們有很多給優等生的快進課程，”黃的弟弟埃莫瑞·黃(Emery Huang)回憶起他和哥哥的成長經歷時說道。“在我們南部，除了橄欖球和喝酒，沒有別的了。如果你不打架，那你就是個書呆子，就會被別人欺負。”在欺凌面前，黃家兄弟並沒有符合亞裔美國孩子的溫順典型，這在很大程度上是受了他們父親路易的影響。路易是一個堅毅精明的角色。爲了不讓他在臺北和小流氓們混，路易在年輕時被自己的父親送到了美國。“如果我們打架的話，父親並不會找我們麻煩，” 埃莫瑞說。“但是如果我們打架輸了，那就有麻煩了。”

Huang’s memoir records an unusual life trajectory: from tormented outsider, to angry adolescent who would twice be arrested on assault charges, to marijuana dealer, to high-end street-wear designer (under the “Hoodman” label, which eventually led to a lawsuit from Bergdorf Goodman), to corporate lawyer, to successful restaurateur. The book fixates on themes of pain and punishment. As a teenager, Huang was commanded by his father to kneel and bow to police officers after he was caught stealing from neighbors. Later, he would find himself surrounded by cops with guns drawn after he drove his car into a crowd of frat guys who were menacing him and several friends (after one of his own broke a window at their house).

黃的回憶錄記錄了他不同尋常的生活歷程：他從一個受欺負的外來者、一個因受到襲擊指控被逮捕兩次的憤怒少年、一個大麻販子，成長爲一位高端街頭時尚設計師（黃的品牌“Hoodman”最終遭到了波道夫·古德曼[Bergdorf Goodman]的侵權訴訟）、一位公司律師、一位成功的餐廳業主。苦難和懲罰是該回憶錄的兩大主題。在他十來歲的時候，黃因爲偷鄰居的東西被抓獲。他父親命令他向警員們下跪鞠躬。這之後，他因爲開車衝撞了威脅他和他朋友們的一羣兄弟會成員而被持槍的警察圍堵（事情的起因是黃的一位朋友砸碎了兄弟會房屋的窗戶）。

At times, Huang comes across in his memoir as a dutiful son who admires and reveres his parents and feels the enormous weight of obligation to them — “I wasn’t mad at my dad,” he writes after being forced to remain kneeling on his asphalt driveway for several hours, “I deserved it” — and at others as an enraged teenager, rebelling against constant assaults on his self-esteem to which he was subjected in the home — he recalls “constantly being told I was a fan tong (rice bucket), fat-ass or waste of space.” He finds in hip-hop a language for his alienation, citing Tupac Shakur’s “Me Against the World” as the cathartic soundtrack of his youth. (“Our parents, Confucius, the model-minority [expletive] and kung-fu-style discipline are what set us off,” he wrote. “But Pac held us down.”)

在回憶錄中，黃有時把自已描繪成一個敬重父母、知道自己責任重大的孝順兒子。有一次，父親讓他在瀝青車道上跪了好幾個小時。黃這樣寫道：“我沒有生父親的氣， 我是活該。”但在另一些段落裏，他卻顯得是一個憤怒少年，反抗在家中不斷受到的對自尊心的打擊。他回憶說：“我不斷地被叫做飯桶、肥仔或是廢物。”黃在嘻哈樂中找到了表達自己疏離感的語言。圖派克·夏庫爾(Tupac Shakur)的《反抗世界》(Me Against the World)是他青年時代的宣泄之聲。（“我們的父母、儒家哲學、少數羣體典範和功夫般的嚴明紀律讓我們吃不消，”他說，“是派克給了我們支持。”）

In Los Angeles later in December, while driving with Huang in his canary yellow Porsche Boxster to his Malibu apartment, I asked him what his parents thought of his portrayal of the abuse they inflicted on him.

我再後來見到黃是在12月的洛杉磯。我們開着他那輛鮮黃色的保時捷駛向黃在馬里布的公寓。我問他，他的父母對於他在回憶錄中描寫的他們對他的虐待有什麼看法。

“My parents have never acknowledged that it was abuse — because in their culture and their country it wasn’t,” he said. Huang believes that the psychological and physical harm that was done to him was largely a matter of context. “I think the abuse had extra meaning that I gave to it, because I saw that it wasn’t happening to other kids.” For a time, every Friday afternoon, Huang said, social workers would take him out of class to inspect him for cuts and bruises. “And I knew that I was weird and different and was made to feel like I had done something wrong, like there was something wrong with us.”

“我父母從來不承認這是虐待，因爲在他們的文化和國家裏這不是，”黃說。他認爲他受到的心理和生理的傷害在很大程度上跟周圍環境有關。“我看到別的孩子並沒有受到跟我一樣的遭遇，所以我對我受到的虐待賦予了更多的含義。”他解釋說有一段時間，在每個週五下午，會有社工把他從教室裏領出來查看他身上有沒有傷口或淤青。“這讓我覺得我是個與衆不同的怪胎，或是我做錯了什麼，或是我們亞裔本身就有什麼不對頭的地方。”

The book proposal for “Fresh Off the Boat” was sent to publishers not long after an excerpt from Amy Chua’s memoir, “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” appeared in The Wall Street Journal. The commercial prospects of Huang’s proposal were almost certainly enhanced by this coincidence: Chua’s book indirectly addressed the chief preoccupation of the American upper-middle class — getting their children into top-tier colleges — and therefore generated one of the infrequent moments in which Asian-­Americans aroused the fascination of the wider American public. Chua made Asian-Americans matter just long enough for Huang’s proposal to sell as a counternarrative to hers.

在《華爾街日報》登出蔡美兒(Amy Chua)的《虎媽戰歌》(Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)節選後不久，黃就找到出版商，提出了想寫《初來乍到》這樣一本書。這一巧合大大提升了他的作品的商業前景。蔡的書間接地迴應了美國中上產階層最關心的一個問題——如何把他們的孩子們送到一流大學，從而激起了更大範圍內的美國大衆對亞裔美國人羣體少見的興趣。蔡讓亞裔美國人成爲話題中心，而黃正好搭上了東風，可以標榜爲《虎媽戰歌》的反調作品來營銷。

The Journal excerpt, titled “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” gave what Chua would later claim was a misleading impression of the overall arc of her book, which chronicled the crisis that ensued when her younger daughter revolted against “Chinese” parenting methods that might seem “unimaginable — even legally actionable” to Western parents. But the marketing campaign, of which the excerpt was a part, appealed to an underlying (and not entirely unjustified) concern among white American parents that they had grown too indulgent toward their children. Huang found the book repellent. “She Kumon-ized our existence,” he told me, referring to the popular Japanese after-school learning program. “This is something that 50- and 60-year-old Asians are still dealing with.”

蔡後來聲稱，《華爾街日報》的節選《爲什麼華裔母親更勝一籌》 誤導讀者以偏概全，她的書其實是描寫了小女兒對中國式的教子方法產生逆反心理後發生的危機。這些方法在西方父母看來“不可想像，甚至會有法律問題”。但是《虎媽戰歌》的營銷活動——節選也是營銷活動的一部分——迎合了白種美國父母對於自己是不是太溺愛孩子的擔憂（這擔憂不是沒有一定道理）。黃對《虎媽戰歌》深惡痛絕，“她把我們都給公文式化了，”他告訴我說。公文式是一個流行的日本課後學習教程。“五六十歲的亞裔都有這個問題，”他說。

When I spoke to Huang’s parents, they didn’t deny his claims, but they emphasized that there was a cultural and generational gap. They were young at the time, they said, and they had reverted to parenting practices they saw in Taiwan. “I wanted to make them tough,” his father said, “and I think that I did.” Emery, however, claims that his brother’s harsh depiction of their childhood in the book seemed “sugarcoated.”

當我採訪黃的父母時，他們並沒有駁斥黃在書中的描寫。但是他們強調和兒子之間有文化和年齡的鴻溝。他們說，自己當時還年輕，教育兒子的時候就沿襲了他們在臺灣看到的那套。“我想讓他們堅強。”黃的父親說，“我想我做到了。”但是埃莫瑞卻說，哥哥的書對他們的嚴酷童年仍舊有些輕描淡寫。

Still, Huang is quick to say that he never thinks of his parents as bad people. “I do think about getting hit, though,” he said. “And I definitely am the way I am because of it. I am quick to react. I am quick to protect myself. I am very comfortable with people yelling at me. And I am very comfortable telling people exactly what I think. I am very comfortable getting personal.”

儘管如此，黃還是馬上指出他從來沒有認爲父母是壞人。“但是我仍舊會想起捱打的事，”他說。“這肯定對我的性格有影響。我反應快。會很快地採取行動保護自己。當別人罵我的時候我一點兒也不在乎。我很樂於告訴別人我的想法。我也不在乎互相進行人身攻擊。”

This mixture of love and loathing toward parents will be familiar to generations of immigrants of every color, but Asian-Americans feel this tension with an unusual acuteness, in part because Confucian tradition is so explicitly directed toward the breaking of individual autonomy in favor of the demands of the family. This tension is compounded by the fact that, as a result of the federal Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which eased national-­origin quotas, Asians began arriving in the United States in large numbers just as the cultural upheaval of the 1960s was drastically loosening American manners and mores. Today the means that many Asian-Americans apply to achieve academic success (a narrow emphasis on rote memorization and test preparation) could not be more out of step with the attitudes and practices of the socially liberal elite that Asians aspire to join. The ensuing cultural dissonance generates an awkward silence around the topic of Asian-Americans — Asian-­Americans don’t want to portray their parents as backward, and white liberals don’t want to be seen as looking down on people of other races and cultures whose parenting practices seem primitive. Huang hates this silence.

所有種族的移民都有這種對父母愛恨交加的情感。但是這種情感在亞裔美國人身上體現更爲強烈，這其中一部分原因來自提倡犧牲自我以顧全家庭的儒家傳統。而在1965年的《移民與國籍法》放寬了國籍配額後，亞裔移民在六十年代文化動盪對美式習俗和道德觀念造成巨大沖擊的同時大批地來到美國。在這一背景下，亞裔子女更容易對父輩生出矛盾心理。如今，許多亞裔美國人用以取得優異學業的方法（死記硬背和應試學習）與他們期望融入的社會自由派精英的理念和做法格格不入。這種文化上的不協調使亞裔美國人成了一個讓人緘口的話題：亞裔美國人不想把他們的父母描述成落後於時代，而白種自由派人士又不想顯得看不起別的種族和文化——儘管他們認爲後者的教育方式過於原始。黃討厭在這一話題上的沉默。

It is no paradox that Huang’s brazen attitude resembles nothing so much as that of his brash immigrant mother. As we arrived at his apartment in Malibu, Huang casually mentioned that his mother had on more than one occasion turned the wheel of her car sharply into oncoming traffic to terrorize her children into compliance. But Huang would later insist that he owes everything he has become to her. “Every morning, whether it was weekdays or weekends, she would get me up and start demanding: ‘What are you going to do with yourself today? What is the plan? What is the itinerary?’ ” Huang credits this with instilling in him the drive that made him relentless in his pursuit of success.

黃的坦誠態度跟他潑辣的母親如出一撤。我們到了他在馬里布的公寓以後，黃很隨意地提起，他母親好幾次把車突然轉向馬路對面的車流以嚇唬孩子們就範。但是黃後來又說他有今天的成就都要歸功於母親。“每天早上，不論是工作日還是週末，她都會叫我起牀，然後問我：‘你今天要做什麼？有什麼計劃？什麼行程？’”黃說母親的嘮叨給了他不屈不饒追求成功的衝勁。

In fact, his mother’s haranguing inadvertently helped jump-start his writing career. In 2010, his attempt at a second restaurant, Xiao Ye, received a zero-star review in The New York Times. The restaurant’s menu included facetiously racist items, including an “Everything but the Dog Meat Plate” and “Princeton Review Bean Paste Noodles.” In the write-up, Sam Sifton lamented that “if Mr. Huang spent even a third of the time cooking that he does writing funny blog posts and wry Twitter updates, posting hip-hop videos and responding to Internet friends, rivals, critics and customers, Xiao Ye might be one of the more interesting restaurants to open in New York City in the last few months.” Huang’s blog went viral when he published an email his mother sent him after the review came out.

實際上，母親喋喋不休的指教不經意間啓動了黃的寫作生涯。在2010年，他的第二家餐館“宵夜”被《紐約時報》評了零分。餐館的菜單羅列了各種滑稽的、帶有種族歧視意味的菜名，包括“非狗肉大雜燴”和“普林斯頓評論豆醬面”。在《紐約時報》的食評文章裏，作者山姆·西弗敦(Sam Sifton)惋惜地寫道：“黃先生的時間都用在寫作搞笑博客，發幽默推文，上傳嘻哈音樂，和他的網上朋友、競爭對手、批評者和顧客互動了。如果他能拿出三分之一的時間來做菜，‘宵夜’沒準還能成爲紐約市過去幾個月新開張的比較有趣的餐館之一。”在這一評論發表後，黃在他的博客上登出了母親給他的電子郵件，引來衆多人的點擊。

“Trust me, you much keep your bar license active just in case you need it,” his mother wrote. “You do not even understand your own strength or the whole scope of this business, and you are not even willing to listen. YOU MUST GET BURNT BEFORE YOU WILL HEAR YOUR MOM. Please calm down, analyze yourself, and be honest. You have a lot of potential, but you must make good choice and stick to it with the best choice. With all the staff, and your korean friend, no one was able to point out or warn you the mistakes, or problems you have???????????????????”

郵件是這樣寫的：“相信我，你一定要保住你的酒吧執照，說不定以後還會有用。你不知道自己的強項，也不瞭解這一行業的深淺，而且你從來也聽不進去別人的意見。你一定要吃了虧才知道要聽你媽的話。現在你應該平靜下來，誠實地評估自己。你有潛質，但是你必須做出正確的決定並且以正確的方式堅持下去。你的僱員們，還有你那個韓國朋友，難道他們沒有一個人向你指出你的錯誤或問題嗎？？？？？？？？？？？？？”

Huang closed the restaurant after repeat visits from the State Liquor Authority, which might have been peeved by his “Four Loko Thursday” deal, when the high-alcohol, caffeinated beverage was sold at a steep discount. (Huang had also floated the idea of an all-you-can-drink deal.) But Sifton grasped something important in his observation that the blog posts and Twitter updates mattered more to the chef than the food did. Huang’s true ambitions always had more to do with writing than with feeding people. He told me he opened the restaurant “because no one wanted to listen to me.”

“宵夜”的“星期四Four Loko大狂歡”可能是惹惱了紐約州酒類管理局。Four Loko是一種含咖啡因的酒精飲料，每週四在“宵夜”以超低價出售（黃原來還打算定價不定量出售）。在酒類管理局的多次巡查後，“宵夜”徹底關張。但是西弗敦在他的文章裏提到了關鍵的一點：對於黃大廚來說，更新博客和推特比食物更重要。比起美食，黃真正的野心一直在於表達自己。他告訴我開餐廳是因爲“沒有人願意聽我傾訴”。

Huang’s cocky social-media personality kept getting him in trouble, but it only seemed to swell his fame. His inability to censor himself, combined with his talent for speaking frankly and intimately to a mass public, aligned him perfectly with the mood of social media. When the Cooking Channel signed Huang to host a show called “Cheap Bites” — the kind of opportunity that most dedicated chefs would hold on to for dear life — the deal fell apart after Huang lashed out at the network’s biggest stars on Twitter. Huang has no regrets about the dust-up. (“The show looked like trash.”) He was later named a TED fellow, a potential gateway into the world of highly compensated corporate speaking, but quickly got himself booted from the program when he skipped some of the events to appear on a podcast with the graffiti artist David Choe and the porn star Asa Akira. Choe declared it to be a meeting of the “worst Asians in the universe.” Huang would later denounce TED as a “cult.”

黃在社交媒體上桀驁不馴的形象給他惹了不少麻煩，但是這反而使他的名氣看漲。他說話口無遮攔，並且有一種貼近大衆坦誠交流的天賦，這些特點使他能和社交媒體完美契合。當美食頻道簽下他主持“廉價美食”(Cheap Bites)後，他卻在推特上抨擊頻道所屬電視網的大明星們。黃不得不和美食頻道解約——而大多數兢兢業業的廚師會對這種機會倍加珍惜。黃對此一點也不後悔（“那個節目一團糟”），後來他又被任命爲TED研究員，這個機會本來可能讓他步入高薪職業演講者的殿堂，但是不久他就被炒了魷魚。原因是他爲了和塗鴉藝術家大衛·崔(David Choe)和日裔美國色情女星阿薩·阿基拉(Asa Akira)出現在一檔播客節目中，而好幾次爽約TED活動。崔說那次節目是“全宇宙最爛亞裔”大聚會。而黃之後指責TED是“邪教”。

Huang’s utter lack of instinct for self-preservation has had the curious effect of preserving himself against any harm. While the established institutions he railed against had myriad vested interests to balance and secrets to hide, Huang has always taken the inherently sympathetic role of the only honest man, refusing to compromise with arbitrary or corrupt authority. This has made Huang a particularly good fit with Vice Media, whose food channel, Munchies, seeks to appeal to young hipsters turned off by bourgeois “foodie-ism” but interested in educating their palates. Tricked out in big sunglasses, high-top sneakers and flashy street wear, Huang's on-screen persona often resembles an Asian Ali G — easy to mock, were it not a deliberate self-­caricature. Much of the pleasure of Huang’s Vice show comes from watching him slyly emerge from his buffoonish character to make incisive comments revealing an agile, literary mind — and then lapse back into the role of the pot-addled numbskull.

黃完全沒有自我保護的意識，但這卻不可思議地一直使他免受傷害。他所抨擊的那些根基穩固的機構企業既要平衡各種既得利益，又要保守行業祕密。 在它們目前，黃是唯一說實話的人，拒絕和專橫腐敗的當權機構妥協——這是一個總是讓人同情的角色設定 。這使得黃和Vice傳媒一拍即合。Vice的美食頻道Munchies的目標觀衆是那些對小資“美食主義”並不感冒，但卻希望有美食好品味的年輕潮人。黃的電視形象——大墨鏡、高幫運動鞋、花哨的街頭時裝——經常讓他看上去像一個亞裔版的阿里·G(Ali G) 。這一形象要不是黃有意的自我嘲弄，倒真會招致譏諷。黃的這檔節目帶給人最大的樂趣就是看着這個小丑一樣的人物靈機一動，說出一些展露他敏捷淵博思維的精闢妙語，然後又看着他逐漸回到那個好像吸了大麻、昏頭昏腦的傻瓜形象。

I met Huang in Los Angeles during a time of high tension surrounding his show, a few weeks after he exploded in a Twitter tirade, accusing the network of neutering his book, and a week before shooting would wrap. The executive producers were, at this point, careful to emphasize that the show was not a biography of Eddie Huang and his family. It was a loose adaptation “inspired” by, rather than “based” on, Huang’s book. The series borrows the setting and the characters but applies them to a plot that was invented almost entirely by a professional writing staff, led by the showrunner Nahnatchka Khan. Though Huang lived the life depicted in the show, 20th Century Fox Television (which produces the show for ABC) retains creative control over it.

當我在洛杉磯見到黃的時候，《初來乍到》的製作正處於一個非常緊張的時刻。幾個星期前，黃在推特上突然發難，指責ABC閹割了他的書。而這時離拍攝結束只有一週時間了。該劇的執行製作人們很小心地強調電視劇並不是黃和他的家人的傳記。他們說劇本是受到了“啓發”，而不是“基於”黃的著作，改編並不完全忠於原著。電視劇只不過借用了書中的場景和人物，整個情節差不多都是出自該劇主創人娜娜查卡·汗(Nahnatchka Khan)領導的一個職業編劇團隊的手筆。雖然電視劇講述的是黃的生活經歷，但是爲ABC製作該劇的二十一世紀福克斯電視公司卻掌握着該劇的創意權。

Melvin Mar, the producer at Fox who bought the rights to the book, told me that Huang’s arrangement with the studio is atypical. Usually, a production company will pay an author for a book it options and neither seek nor offer further participation. But Huang insisted on being brought on as a producer as a condition of the sale. So, Mar told me, “we decided we would all do this together, like a family.”

梅爾文·馬(Melvin Mar)是福克斯的一位製作人，正是他購買了黃的著作改編權。馬告訴我，黃和電視公司的合作是不同尋常的。通常，一家制作公司在買了一位作者的作品後， 並不會尋求或是提議和作者進一步的合作。但是作爲購買條件，黃堅持要成爲電視劇的製作人。所以，馬告訴我說：“我們決定一起做這件事，就像一家人那樣。”

More than anything, the fraught dynamic that emerged between Mar and Huang resembles that of Huang’s actual family. The ambivalence Huang feels toward his parents tends to manifest itself in all his dealings with authority, Mar most emphatically not excepted. Huang sometimes describes Mar as a mentor, someone who has taught him about when to pursue confrontation and when to acknowledge the necessity for accommodation. But these sincere expressions of respect often segue quickly to contempt for the compromises endemic to the entertainment industry. “It’s a system that is kind of similar to the Asian upbringing,” Huang told me. By giving up so much autonomy for his career’s sake, Huang said, Mar “got a second set of parents in network television.”

黃和馬之間的複雜情感像極了黃的和他家庭的關係。黃對父母的那種矛盾心理往往在他與權威人物打交道時顯現出來，而馬正是這樣一個角色。黃有時說馬是他的導師，教導他該何時尋求對抗，何時承認合作的必要。但是這些出自肺腑的尊敬之詞很快變成了對整個娛樂業妥協風氣的藐視。“這個體制就像亞裔受到的教育，”黃告訴我。他說馬爲了自己的職業而放棄了太多的自主權。現在“電視網成了他的第二父母”。

Mar and Khan met at a symposium for Asian-Americans interested in the popular arts, where they dealt with a familiar crowd of activists demanding to know why Hollywood seemed so uninterested in casting people who looked like themselves. (Mar’s family is from China; Khan’s is from Iran.) “You go to these conferences, and there’s always people saying, ‘You should do more for Asian people,’ ” Mar said. “And my response is, ‘Yes, I agree with you.’ But it’s easier said than done. I have to bring actual projects that are viable and convince the executives that there’s a real business case for making it.”

馬和汗是在一次主題爲流行文化藝術的研討會上認識的。與會的積極分子他們並不陌生。這些人都想弄明白，爲什麼好萊塢對亞裔這麼不感興趣。（馬是華裔，汗是伊朗裔）“每次去這樣的會議，都會有人告訴我：‘你們應該多給亞裔做些東西，’馬說，“我的迴應是：‘對，我同意。’但是說起來容易做起來難。我得有具體可行的項目來說服領導們製作這個東西確實具有商業價值。”

The business case for making an Asian-American show is simple: Asian-Americans are the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country, they earn and spend more than the average American and they are overrepresented in the advertiser-coveted 18-to-34-year-old demographic. But if the case were really so strong, surely two decades would not have passed without some network making a bid for this audience. Perhaps the reason is that the so-called Asian-American demographic (some 18 million viewers) is actually made up of many different nationalities with no common culture or language.

製作一部關於亞裔美國人電視劇的商業價值顯而易見：亞裔美國人是美國發展最快的族羣，他們的收入和花銷都在平均美國人之上。在廣告商最看中的18到34歲這個年齡段，他們的人數也超過其他族裔的比例。但是，如果情況真的這麼有說服力的話，在過去這二十年裏肯定早有電視公司打起這一觀衆羣體的算盤了。但事實是卻並非如此。原因可能是所謂的亞裔美國人這一人口羣體（也就是1,800萬觀衆）實際上是由很多不同的民族組成，他們之間並沒有共同的文化和語言。

Moreover, comedies about nonwhite people generally must navigate a trap-laden path between offending the group represented and neutering the comedy to avoid doing so. And they suffer from having to be approved and produced by people who are overwhelmingly white, and thus unfamiliar with the nuances of the stories they are telling, and also intensely wary of giving offense — but all this does is increase the likelihood that these shows will be dull, though still capable of offending their audience. This is exactly what happened to “All-American Girl,” the sitcom starring the comedian Margaret Cho and the last significant attempt to make an Asian-American TV show. The series was disowned by the Korean-American community that it tried to portray and was eventually rejected by the wider audience for being unfunny. It was canceled after just one season, two decades ago.

此外，關於非白種人的喜劇作品總是得避免各式各樣的陷阱，既不能得罪所描述的種族，又得小心不能犧牲喜劇效果。批准和製作這些作品的大多數還是白人。他們不熟悉故事的微妙之處，又非常小心不要冒犯到任何人。這樣的結果就是他們製作出來的東西有很大可能既沉悶無趣，還又冒犯了觀衆。由瑪格麗特·曹(Margaret Cho)主演的情景喜劇《全美女孩》(All-American Girl)正是如此。這是《初來乍到》之前關於亞裔美國人的電視節目的一次重要嘗試。《全美女孩》試圖描繪韓裔美國人羣體，卻沒有得到他們的認可。更多的觀衆覺得該劇並不好笑。播放了一季後該劇被叫停。這是二十年前的事了。

“Fresh Off the Boat” was meant to be different. Not only is the production staff diverse, but the source material helps indemnify the show against criticism of many of its outlandish elements, which are rooted in Huang’s actual life. For example, the ferociously uninhibited and heavily accented mother portrayed in the series might appear to be an offensive caricature if it were a generic “Tiger mom” conjured out of thin air.

|《初來乍到》不想重蹈覆轍。不但它的製作團隊來自不同種族背景，而且素材來源也令劇中很多出格內容免遭批評，畢竟，這些內容源自黃的真實生活。例如，劇中那位潑辣不羈、口音極重的母親，如果只是憑空虛構出來的一位“虎媽”角色的話，就可能如同一個鬧劇形象，冒犯很多人。

In fact, Constance Wu, the actress who plays Jessica Huang on the show, told me that she underplays her character in relation to the actual woman. “I don’t actually think they would believe she was real,” Wu said. “That’s what reality television is for — to show you people who no one would actually believe were real.” To preserve the appearance of reality, the show has had to depart from it — while also claiming that same reality as its license to go as far as it does in presenting a raw slice of immigrant life.

實際上，劇中扮演黃母潔西卡的演員康斯丹絲·吳(Constance Wu)對我說，與原型相比，她在表演中有意弱化了這一角色。“我覺得觀衆會覺得這個形象太不真實，”她說。“那是真人秀節目做的事——展示那些令人難以置信的形象。”爲了保證外表的真實性，劇集不得不脫離現實——同時又要以現實來爲該劇對移民生活的種種震撼描寫提供合理性。

When Mar asked Khan to sketch out her vision for the show, she described what would become the opening scene of the series: a tight focus on someone in hip-hop garb that pulls out to reveal . . . a short, chubby Asian boy. The apparent incongruity (more apparent than real) is at once a joke for the prime-time network audience and a wedge that protects the series from recapitulating “model minority” representations of Asian-Americans. It is also the sore point that offends Huang more than any other aspect of the show.

馬請娜娜查卡·汗描述一下她希望此劇達成的效果，她的描述後來成了本劇開篇的一幕：對一個身着嘻哈服飾的男子的近距離特寫，然後鏡頭拉開，觀衆發現…他不過是個矮墩墩胖乎乎的亞裔男孩。這種略顯誇張的反差既是討好黃金時段電視觀衆的笑話，也爲觀衆打了預防針：本劇講的可不是“模範少數族裔”的亞裔。但是，這也正是讓黃最爲不滿的一處情節。

Hip-hop had been the emblem of Huang’s alienation from his own household and the violence he encountered at school. It provided a language through which to reject the role of the eager assimilator that his own culture seemed to urge onto him. It was, as Huang described it in his book, a means of survival — not some glib, touristic fascination, or even a way of being cool. Huang identified with the black kids at school because they, too, were enduring beatings in their households in a way that white kids weren’t. “It’s a funny position being an Asian in America,” Huang wrote. “You’re the dude who can cross the union line. Your community actually wants you to sell the [expletive] out and work in law, accounting or banking. But I realized then that I wasn’t going to cross the picket line.” (Though he was briefly a corporate lawyer.) “I was down with the rotten bananas who want nothing to do with that.”

嘻哈音樂是黃與自己的家庭疏離，並在學校遭受暴力的標誌。它爲黃叛離自己的文化強加給他的“努力融入美國主流社會”的形象提供了表達的語言。正如黃在書中寫的，嘻哈成了他生存的手段，而不是淺薄的、過客般的興趣，或是扮酷的噱頭。黃與學校裏的黑人孩子稱兄論弟，是因爲他們也在自己家中捱打，而白人孩子則沒有這種遭遇。“亞洲人在美國處於一種有趣的地位。”黃在書中寫道：“大家都認爲你會跨越階層。你的社羣指望着你他媽出人頭地，進入法律、會計或銀行業工作。但我那時意識到，我不會背離我的階層。（儘管他的確曾經做過公司律師）我跟那羣不成器的‘爛香蕉’們混在一起，他們根本不在乎出人頭地。”

Huang’s appropriation of the language of racialized resistance might seem intrinsically noncredible to many white, black and even Asian interlocutors, who — implicitly or explicitly — regard Asian-Americans as the minority group that gets ahead by working hard and eschewing the politics of racial grievance. Not Huang, who likes to analogize his relationship with Mar to that of the “field Chinaman” to the “house Chinaman.” (Mar called this comparison “heightened,” which was his diplomatic way of saying “fantastically overwrought.” If there is a class distinction between the two men, it’s this: Mar’s family worked in the bean-sprout business in Los Angeles’s Chinatown, while Huang’s father become a millionaire many times over in Orlando.)

黃使用的這種種族化抗爭的語言，對於很多關注這個話題的白人、黑人或亞裔人士來說，可能從本質上顯得虛假，因爲這些人有意無意地仍舊把亞裔美國人當做那個通過努力工作、迴避種族政治而獲得成功的羣體。但黃可不是這樣的人。他喜歡把自己跟馬之間的關係比作“田地裏的中國佬”和“房子裏的中國佬”。（馬稱這種比喻有些“誇張了”，這就是他對“胡言亂語不知所云”的委婉說法。但假如兩人之間真的有階層區別的話，實際是這樣的：馬的家族在洛杉磯唐人街經營豆芽生意，而黃的父親則成了奧蘭多的千萬富翁）

Huang especially took issue with the second episode in the series, in which a youthful Eddie develops a protosexual fascination with a blond, large-breasted trophy wife who has just moved into the neighborhood. It includes a scene in which Eddie fantasizes himself into a rap video. He “makes it rain” and squirts Capri Sun onto models. Though test audiences found the scene to be innocuously funny, Huang considered the thrust of the episode outright offensive. In his estimation, it denigrates hip-hop culture by portraying it as a vector for adopting sexist attitudes — a perversion of what, for him, had been a vital emotional outlet. His analysis is credible but, as the writers and producers told him, way too abstruse for anyone in the audience to think about.

黃對劇集中的第二集尤其不滿；其中，少年時代的黃頤銘對鄰家剛剛搬來的金髮大胸已婚花瓶女萌生“性趣”。劇中有這樣一個場景：少年黃頤銘幻想自己拍攝了一部嘻哈MTV，他在其中唱到自己“愛如雨下”，並且用濃縮橙汁噴灑到模特們的身上。儘管在公映前測試劇情時，觀衆感覺劇情滑稽而不低俗，但黃認爲第二集的主要情節非常令人不快。他認爲，劇情把嘻哈文化描寫爲性別主義的載體，從而貶低了他視之爲抒發情感關鍵渠道的嘻哈文化。他的分析不無道理，但是編劇和製片人們對他說，這種想法對於觀衆們來說太過高深，無法體會。

“It’s so interesting, what he’s going through,” Khan told me. “Most people never get the opportunity to experience what he’s experiencing. So now he’s rebelling and manifesting the angst, and that’s what makes him him, and that’s why he wrote the memoir in the first place. Part of me just wants to say, ‘Sit back and enjoy this.’ ”

“他所經歷的情感變化非常有趣，” 娜娜查卡·汗對我說。“多數人根本沒有機會體會他現在的處境。他現在處在反叛階段，在表達他內心的焦慮，這正是他的獨特之處，這也是他當初寫自傳的原因。我有時想說：‘放鬆點，試着享受這一刻吧。’”

When I told Huang that Khan wanted him to sit back and enjoy the ride, he had an immediate response: “That’s what pedophiles tell children.”

當我告訴黃，汗認爲他應該放鬆點，嘗試享受這個過程時，他脫口而出：“這是戀童癖們對孩子說的話。”

Even if Huang’s attraction to black culture is played for cheap laughs, to him it is an essential element of his person. It provides the missing half of the fully human entity that the Asian-American who consents to the model-minority myth has to relinquish. A model minority is a tractable, one-­dimensional simulacrum of a person, stripped of complexity, nuance, danger and sexuality — a person devoid of dramatic interest. Huang is something else: a person at war with all the constraints that would fetter him to anything less than an identity capacious enough to contain all his contradictions and ambivalence.

儘管黃對黑人文化的嚮往在劇中不過是廉價的搞笑噱頭，對他來說，這可是他個人身份的重要部分。作爲排斥了“模範少數族裔”神話的亞裔美國人，他所拋棄的這一半則由黑人文化填補，讓他重新成爲一個完整的人。所謂“模範少數族裔”是個缺乏自主的、單維度的人像，被剝奪了複雜性、微妙性、危險和性別，是缺乏戲劇色彩的人。而黃則截然不同：他與所有那些束縛羈絆他的因素鬥爭，他的身份一定要足夠廣闊善變，能夠容納下他所有的矛盾和模棱兩可的性格。

At the hotel on our last day in Tijuana, Huang spent the morning managing his Manhattan restaurant, Baohaus, by Skype. Besides traveling 24 weeks of the year for Vice, writing a second memoir and working on the ABC series, Huang continues to manage his restaurant. He often finds himself in fights with one cook in particular, an older Cantonese-speaking veteran of Chinatown restaurants. Huang is as exacting a boss as he is an insubordinate employee, but he is often forced to suffer the rebelliousness of his staff. He and the cook argued about how to properly cut chicken. The cook wanted to slice the chicken, which he believed white people prefer. Huang wanted it done the proper way, diced. “He never really accepts what I tell him,” he said. “And as soon as I turn my back, he starts doing it his own way.”

我們在蒂華納酒店的最後一天，黃用了一上午通過Skype電話打理他在曼哈頓的餐館Baohaus的生意。他在Vice的工作讓他每年要有24周到處旅行，而他還在寫第二本自傳，同時參與ABC劇集的製作；即便如此，他仍舊要管理自己的餐館。他跟自己的一位廚師尤其合不來；那是一位講粵語的老廚師，在唐人街的中餐館行業工作多年。作爲老闆，黃的苛刻程度與他作爲僱員的刺頭程度相比有過之而無不及，但他也經常要忍受自己手下的叛逆。這次，他與廚師吵架的緣由是如何正確地切雞肉：廚師想切片，認爲白人顧客喜歡這樣；而黃則要正確的切法：斬塊。“他從來不真正聽我的，”黃說，“我一轉身，他就開始按照自己的辦法來。”

“I’ve wanted to fire him so many times,” he said. “The problem is, you can’t teach American kids the speed this guy has or his ability to problem-­solve on the fly.”

“多少次我都想炒掉他，”他說，“問題是，這傢伙幹活的速度，還有他現場解決問題的能力，美國孩子是學不會的。”

As he thought about it, Huang hit on a comparison between Hollywood executives and the typical Chinatown restaurant. Each, he said, think they know what people want and strive to give them exactly that. But it never occurs to either of them to sell people the authentic thing itself — Chinese food the way Chinese people make it for themselves or, in the case of Hollywood, stories that don’t rely on formulaic contrivance to be funny.

說着說着，他又想到了好萊塢經理人們與任何一家唐人街餐館的類比：他說，兩者都認爲他們瞭解別人需要什麼，並且不遺餘力地提供這些東西。但兩者都沒有意識到，應該賣給顧客真實正宗的東西：對於中餐館來說，就是中國人吃的菜；而對於好萊塢來說，就是無需爲了好笑而陷入巢臼的故事。

“I really feel that people don’t always know what’s good for them,” he said. “When you have a strong conviction, you have a duty not to tell people what they want. At least represent yourself and say: ‘Yo, this is what I’m into, and this is what I’m seeing in the world. Let me take your hand and guide you through it, so you can see through my eyes.’ ”

“我真的覺得，人們並不總是知道什麼纔是真正適合他們的。”他說。“當你有強烈的信念時，你有責任不告訴人們他們需要什麼。至少應該表達你自己，然後說，‘嘿，這是我喜歡的東西，這是我眼中的世界。讓我牽着你的手，領你走過這一切，你就可以體會到我的視角了。’”