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?”
在墨西哥提华纳一条阴冷黑暗的街道上，我问了黄颐铭(Eddie Huang)一个几个月来大家都会问的一个问题：“你的期望是什么？”
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.
十二月的过去一周里，黄一直在发泄他对《初来乍到》(Fresh Off the Boat)所持有的那种令人纠结的矛盾心态。这部美国广播公司旗下的情景喜剧改编自黄的回忆录，讲述了他作为台湾移民的孩子在佛罗里达州奥兰多的成长经历。说起该剧的制作人和编剧们的时候，黄充分发挥了他那说简洁有力的恶毒脏话的天分。可是坏话刚说完，他接着又表达了对这些人的感激和喜爱之情。他批评该剧虚伪，没有传达出原著的精妙之处，可是马上又对第一集大加赞赏，说那是他看过的最好的情景喜剧试播集。他对于把自己人生故事的版权卖给一个大电视网的这一决定后悔不已，但接着又坚称二月四日《初来乍到》的首播不但将是电视历史上，也是整个美国历史的一个里程碑。

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.
他有理由这么说。《初来乍到》是二十年来在美国电视网播出以亚裔美国家庭为主角的第一部情景喜剧。在美国电视史上，所有的主要电视网加在一起只有三次这样的尝试。黄选择跟ABC合作，是觉得电视网还有一定的残余影响力，可以改变公众对种族的看法。他希望能够毫不含糊、毫无妥协地描绘亚洲移民的生活经历。
“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.”
“我期望什么？”黄回应了我的问题，“我期望能够改变一些事。”他告诉我他本来相信他的故事足够震撼，能够说服ABC不做任何干涉，以他的方式讲述。“我原本是相信电视网的人还是有一点良心的。”
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.
黄今年32岁。他穿着一件做旧的牛仔夹克。黑色皮毛帽子护耳上翻，加上他那张又大又圆的娃娃脸，这形象似乎是在有意模仿某位东亚独裁者 。（黄喜欢给自己起诸如“金正雀”、“烂香蕉”、“熊猫人”、“中国佬宇航员”这样的外号。这些外号像他节目的名字一样，重新利用种族侮辱和种族定型，赋予它们新意）黄坐在一辆Vice传媒面包车的后保险杠上。在车里，五位工作人员正准备设备开拍。我们在等两位女大麻贩子。黄将要为《黄的世界》(Huang’s World)采访她们，这是他给Vice主持的一档怪诞的美食旅行节目 。
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.”
黄承认，他此前对电视网节目的现实情况的认识极度天真。作为解释，他向我列举了自己此前一系列的成功，这些经验使他高估了自己可以在与电视网合作过程中自作主张的能力。“我之前的成功真是不可思议。拿Baohaus来说”——这是他经营的一家开在地下室的台式刈包店，这个简陋小店使黄成了新一代纽约年轻新潮厨师的领军人物——“我没有在纽约市任何餐厅的工作经历。我没有任何背景，但我却成功了！”在跟美食频道的短暂合作后，黄开始在Vice主持他的节目。那时这个节目就叫做《初来乍到》。“之前没有任何一个电视主持人有我这样的身份——一个嘻哈亚裔小子？我是第一个！我的节目大获成功！”2013年，他出版了一本回忆录，讲述了他一直就想讲的故事，而这部回忆录也成了全国畅销书。“所以我会说：‘我们可以再来一次！’但是电视网节目并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.”
黄认为，为了迎合大众口味而减弱他童年故事的独特性，会使《初来乍到》变成“反向黄面孔”——利用中国人的面孔讲述美国白人的故事。虽然他很清楚亚裔美国人非常渴望得到任何文化承认，但是他不想为了打入主流而牺牲掉他个人经历的独特性。“我们在文化上还处于冰河世纪，”他说，“我们连火都不会生。连轮子也还没发明。如果《初来乍到》能成为第一个轮子，也许别人可以做出另外三个。”
Then, he added, “we can get an axle and build a rice rocket.”
接着，他又说道：“我们可以弄个轮轴，造一辆‘亚洲小跑车’。”
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.
黄在回忆录中讲述的是一个在奥兰多某富裕社区中生存和斗争的故事。对他来说那是一个充满敌意的环境。黄在这一充斥着流氓小混混的作品中生动地夹杂了嘻哈语言。与之形成强烈对比的是他对美国历史和文学典故的旁征博引。但他的作品远不止于此。黄用异常朴实震撼的笔触描写了一个饱受虐待和欺辱的孩子学会如何以牙还牙的故事。和许多住在教育精英聚集的东西海岸地区的亚裔职业人士不一样，黄在佛罗里达遭受到的种族歧视不是偷偷摸摸、暗示性的，或是含蓄的。在这里，种族歧视是公开的，没有任何掩饰的，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，人们更重视学业。他们有很多给优等生的快进课程，”黄的弟弟埃莫瑞·黄(Emery Huang)回忆起他和哥哥的成长经历时说道。“在我们南部，除了橄榄球和喝酒，没有别的了。如果你不打架，那你就是个书呆子，就会被别人欺负。”在欺凌面前，黄家兄弟并没有符合亚裔美国孩子的温顺典型，这在很大程度上是受了他们父亲路易的影响。路易是一个坚毅精明的角色。为了不让他在台北和小流氓们混，路易在年轻时被自己的父亲送到了美国。“如果我们打架的话，父亲并不会找我们麻烦，” 埃莫瑞说。“但是如果我们打架输了，那就有麻烦了。”
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).
黄的回忆录记录了他不同寻常的生活历程：他从一个受欺负的外来者、一个因受到袭击指控被逮捕两次的愤怒少年、一个大麻贩子，成长为一位高端街头时尚设计师（黄的品牌“Hoodman”最终遭到了波道夫·古德曼[Bergdorf Goodman]的侵权诉讼）、一位公司律师、一位成功的餐厅业主。苦难和惩罚是该回忆录的两大主题。在他十来岁的时候，黄因为偷邻居的东西被抓获。他父亲命令他向警员们下跪鞠躬。这之后，他因为开车冲撞了威胁他和他朋友们的一群兄弟会成员而被持枪的警察围堵（事情的起因是黄的一位朋友砸碎了兄弟会房屋的窗户）。
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.”)
在回忆录中，黄有时把自已描绘成一个敬重父母、知道自己责任重大的孝顺儿子。有一次，父亲让他在沥青车道上跪了好几个小时。黄这样写道：“我没有生父亲的气， 我是活该。”但在另一些段落里，他却显得是一个愤怒少年，反抗在家中不断受到的对自尊心的打击。他回忆说：“我不断地被叫做饭桶、肥仔或是废物。”黄在嘻哈乐中找到了表达自己疏离感的语言。图派克·夏库尔(Tupac Shakur)的《反抗世界》(Me Against the World)是他青年时代的宣泄之声。（“我们的父母、儒家哲学、少数群体典范和功夫般的严明纪律让我们吃不消，”他说，“是派克给了我们支持。”）
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.
我再后来见到黄是在12月的洛杉矶。我们开着他那辆鲜黄色的保时捷驶向黄在马里布的公寓。我问他，他的父母对于他在回忆录中描写的他们对他的虐待有什么看法。
“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.”
“我父母从来不承认这是虐待，因为在他们的文化和国家里这不是，”黄说。他认为他受到的心理和生理的伤害在很大程度上跟周围环境有关。“我看到别的孩子并没有受到跟我一样的遭遇，所以我对我受到的虐待赋予了更多的含义。”他解释说有一段时间，在每个周五下午，会有社工把他从教室里领出来查看他身上有没有伤口或淤青。“这让我觉得我是个与众不同的怪胎，或是我做错了什么，或是我们亚裔本身就有什么不对头的地方。”
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《华尔街日报》登出蔡美儿(Amy Chua)的《虎妈战歌》(Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother)节选后不久，黄就找到出版商，提出了想写《初来乍到》这样一本书。这一巧合大大提升了他的作品的商业前景。蔡的书间接地回应了美国中上产阶层最关心的一个问题——如何把他们的孩子们送到一流大学，从而激起了更大范围内的美国大众对亚裔美国人群体少见的兴趣。蔡让亚裔美国人成为话题中心，而黄正好搭上了东风，可以标榜为《虎妈战歌》的反调作品来营销。
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.”
蔡后来声称，《华尔街日报》的节选《为什么华裔母亲更胜一筹》 误导读者以偏概全，她的书其实是描写了小女儿对中国式的教子方法产生逆反心理后发生的危机。这些方法在西方父母看来“不可想像，甚至会有法律问题”。但是《虎妈战歌》的营销活动——节选也是营销活动的一部分——迎合了白种美国父母对于自己是不是太溺爱孩子的担忧（这担忧不是没有一定道理）。黄对《虎妈战歌》深恶痛绝，“她把我们都给公文式化了，”他告诉我说。公文式是一个流行的日本课后学习教程。“五六十岁的亚裔都有这个问题，”他说。
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.”
当我采访黄的父母时，他们并没有驳斥黄在书中的描写。但是他们强调和儿子之间有文化和年龄的鸿沟。他们说，自己当时还年轻，教育儿子的时候就沿袭了他们在台湾看到的那套。“我想让他们坚强。”黄的父亲说，“我想我做到了。”但是埃莫瑞却说，哥哥的书对他们的严酷童年仍旧有些轻描淡写。
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.”
尽管如此，黄还是马上指出他从来没有认为父母是坏人。“但是我仍旧会想起挨打的事，”他说。“这肯定对我的性格有影响。我反应快。会很快地采取行动保护自己。当别人骂我的时候我一点儿也不在乎。我很乐于告诉别人我的想法。我也不在乎互相进行人身攻击。”
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.
所有种族的移民都有这种对父母爱恨交加的情感。但是这种情感在亚裔美国人身上体现更为强烈，这其中一部分原因来自提倡牺牲自我以顾全家庭的儒家传统。而在1965年的《移民与国籍法》放宽了国籍配额后，亚裔移民在六十年代文化动荡对美式习俗和道德观念造成巨大冲击的同时大批地来到美国。在这一背景下，亚裔子女更容易对父辈生出矛盾心理。如今，许多亚裔美国人用以取得优异学业的方法（死记硬背和应试学习）与他们期望融入的社会自由派精英的理念和做法格格不入。这种文化上的不协调使亚裔美国人成了一个让人缄口的话题：亚裔美国人不想把他们的父母描述成落后于时代，而白种自由派人士又不想显得看不起别的种族和文化——尽管他们认为后者的教育方式过于原始。黄讨厌在这一话题上的沉默。
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.
黄的坦诚态度跟他泼辣的母亲如出一撤。我们到了他在马里布的公寓以后，黄很随意地提起，他母亲好几次把车突然转向马路对面的车流以吓唬孩子们就范。但是黄后来又说他有今天的成就都要归功于母亲。“每天早上，不论是工作日还是周末，她都会叫我起床，然后问我：‘你今天要做什么？有什么计划？什么行程？’”黄说母亲的唠叨给了他不屈不饶追求成功的冲劲。
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.
实际上，母亲喋喋不休的指教不经意间启动了黄的写作生涯。在2010年，他的第二家餐馆“宵夜”被《纽约时报》评了零分。餐馆的菜单罗列了各种滑稽的、带有种族歧视意味的菜名，包括“非狗肉大杂烩”和“普林斯顿评论豆酱面”。在《纽约时报》的食评文章里，作者山姆·西弗敦(Sam Sifton)惋惜地写道：“黄先生的时间都用在写作搞笑博客，发幽默推文，上传嘻哈音乐，和他的网上朋友、竞争对手、批评者和顾客互动了。如果他能拿出三分之一的时间来做菜，‘宵夜’没准还能成为纽约市过去几个月新开张的比较有趣的餐馆之一。”在这一评论发表后，黄在他的博客上登出了母亲给他的电子邮件，引来众多人的点击。
“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???????????????????”
邮件是这样写的：“相信我，你一定要保住你的酒吧执照，说不定以后还会有用。你不知道自己的强项，也不了解这一行业的深浅，而且你从来也听不进去别人的意见。你一定要吃了亏才知道要听你妈的话。现在你应该平静下来，诚实地评估自己。你有潜质，但是你必须做出正确的决定并且以正确的方式坚持下去。你的雇员们，还有你那个韩国朋友，难道他们没有一个人向你指出你的错误或问题吗？？？？？？？？？？？？？”
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大狂欢”可能是惹恼了纽约州酒类管理局。Four Loko是一种含咖啡因的酒精饮料，每周四在“宵夜”以超低价出售（黄原来还打算定价不定量出售）。在酒类管理局的多次巡查后，“宵夜”彻底关张。但是西弗敦在他的文章里提到了关键的一点：对于黄大厨来说，更新博客和推特比食物更重要。比起美食，黄真正的野心一直在于表达自己。他告诉我开餐厅是因为“没有人愿意听我倾诉”。
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.”
黄在社交媒体上桀骜不驯的形象给他惹了不少麻烦，但是这反而使他的名气看涨。他说话口无遮拦，并且有一种贴近大众坦诚交流的天赋，这些特点使他能和社交媒体完美契合。当美食频道签下他主持“廉价美食”(Cheap Bites)后，他却在推特上抨击频道所属电视网的大明星们。黄不得不和美食频道解约——而大多数兢兢业业的厨师会对这种机会倍加珍惜。黄对此一点也不后悔（“那个节目一团糟”），后来他又被任命为TED研究员，这个机会本来可能让他步入高薪职业演讲者的殿堂，但是不久他就被炒了鱿鱼。原因是他为了和涂鸦艺术家大卫·崔(David Choe)和日裔美国色情女星阿萨·阿基拉(Asa Akira)出现在一档播客节目中，而好几次爽约TED活动。崔说那次节目是“全宇宙最烂亚裔”大聚会。而黄之后指责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.
黄完全没有自我保护的意识，但这却不可思议地一直使他免受伤害。他所抨击的那些根基稳固的机构企业既要平衡各种既得利益，又要保守行业秘密。 在它们目前，黄是唯一说实话的人，拒绝和专横腐败的当权机构妥协——这是一个总是让人同情的角色设定 。这使得黄和Vice传媒一拍即合。Vice的美食频道Munchies的目标观众是那些对小资“美食主义”并不感冒，但却希望有美食好品味的年轻潮人。黄的电视形象——大墨镜、高帮运动鞋、花哨的街头时装——经常让他看上去像一个亚裔版的阿里·G(Ali G) 。这一形象要不是黄有意的自我嘲弄，倒真会招致讥讽。黄的这档节目带给人最大的乐趣就是看着这个小丑一样的人物灵机一动，说出一些展露他敏捷渊博思维的精辟妙语，然后又看着他逐渐回到那个好像吸了大麻、昏头昏脑的傻瓜形象。
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.
当我在洛杉矶见到黄的时候，《初来乍到》的制作正处于一个非常紧张的时刻。几个星期前，黄在推特上突然发难，指责ABC阉割了他的书。而这时离拍摄结束只有一周时间了。该剧的执行制作人们很小心地强调电视剧并不是黄和他的家人的传记。他们说剧本是受到了“启发”，而不是“基于”黄的著作，改编并不完全忠于原著。电视剧只不过借用了书中的场景和人物，整个情节差不多都是出自该剧主创人娜娜查卡·汗(Nahnatchka Khan)领导的一个职业编剧团队的手笔。虽然电视剧讲述的是黄的生活经历，但是为ABC制作该剧的二十一世纪福克斯电视公司却掌握着该剧的创意权。
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.”
梅尔文·马(Melvin Mar)是福克斯的一位制作人，正是他购买了黄的著作改编权。马告诉我，黄和电视公司的合作是不同寻常的。通常，一家制作公司在买了一位作者的作品后， 并不会寻求或是提议和作者进一步的合作。但是作为购买条件，黄坚持要成为电视剧的制作人。所以，马告诉我说：“我们决定一起做这件事，就像一家人那样。”
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.”
黄和马之间的复杂情感像极了黄的和他家庭的关系。黄对父母的那种矛盾心理往往在他与权威人物打交道时显现出来，而马正是这样一个角色。黄有时说马是他的导师，教导他该何时寻求对抗，何时承认合作的必要。但是这些出自肺腑的尊敬之词很快变成了对整个娱乐业妥协风气的藐视。“这个体制就像亚裔受到的教育，”黄告诉我。他说马为了自己的职业而放弃了太多的自主权。现在“电视网成了他的第二父母”。
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.”
马和汗是在一次主题为流行文化艺术的研讨会上认识的。与会的积极分子他们并不陌生。这些人都想弄明白，为什么好莱坞对亚裔这么不感兴趣。（马是华裔，汗是伊朗裔）“每次去这样的会议，都会有人告诉我：‘你们应该多给亚裔做些东西，’马说，“我的回应是：‘对，我同意。’但是说起来容易做起来难。我得有具体可行的项目来说服领导们制作这个东西确实具有商业价值。”
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.
制作一部关于亚裔美国人电视剧的商业价值显而易见：亚裔美国人是美国发展最快的族群，他们的收入和花销都在平均美国人之上。在广告商最看中的18到34岁这个年龄段，他们的人数也超过其他族裔的比例。但是，如果情况真的这么有说服力的话，在过去这二十年里肯定早有电视公司打起这一观众群体的算盘了。但事实是却并非如此。原因可能是所谓的亚裔美国人这一人口群体（也就是1,800万观众）实际上是由很多不同的民族组成，他们之间并没有共同的文化和语言。
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，关于非白种人的喜剧作品总是得避免各式各样的陷阱，既不能得罪所描述的种族，又得小心不能牺牲喜剧效果。批准和制作这些作品的大多数还是白人。他们不熟悉故事的微妙之处，又非常小心不要冒犯到任何人。这样的结果就是他们制作出来的东西有很大可能既沉闷无趣，还又冒犯了观众。由玛格丽特·曹(Margaret Cho)主演的情景喜剧《全美女孩》(All-American Girl)正是如此。这是《初来乍到》之前关于亚裔美国人的电视节目的一次重要尝试。《全美女孩》试图描绘韩裔美国人群体，却没有得到他们的认可。更多的观众觉得该剧并不好笑。播放了一季后该剧被叫停。这是二十年前的事了。
“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.
|《初来乍到》不想重蹈覆辙。不但它的制作团队来自不同种族背景，而且素材来源也令剧中很多出格内容免遭批评，毕竟，这些内容源自黄的真实生活。例如，剧中那位泼辣不羁、口音极重的母亲，如果只是凭空虚构出来的一位“虎妈”角色的话，就可能如同一个闹剧形象，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.
实际上，剧中扮演黄母洁西卡的演员康斯丹丝·吴(Constance Wu)对我说，与原型相比，她在表演中有意弱化了这一角色。“我觉得观众会觉得这个形象太不真实，”她说。“那是真人秀节目做的事——展示那些令人难以置信的形象。”为了保证外表的真实性，剧集不得不脱离现实——同时又要以现实来为该剧对移民生活的种种震撼描写提供合理性。
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.
马请娜娜查卡·汗描述一下她希望此剧达成的效果，她的描述后来成了本剧开篇的一幕：对一个身着嘻哈服饰的男子的近距离特写，然后镜头拉开，观众发现…他不过是个矮墩墩胖乎乎的亚裔男孩。这种略显夸张的反差既是讨好黄金时段电视观众的笑话，也为观众打了预防针：本剧讲的可不是“模范少数族裔”的亚裔。但是，这也正是让黄最为不满的一处情节。
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.”
嘻哈音乐是黄与自己的家庭疏离，并在学校遭受暴力的标志。它为黄叛离自己的文化强加给他的“努力融入美国主流社会”的形象提供了表达的语言。正如黄在书中写的，嘻哈成了他生存的手段，而不是浅薄的、过客般的兴趣，或是扮酷的噱头。黄与学校里的黑人孩子称兄论弟，是因为他们也在自己家中挨打，而白人孩子则没有这种遭遇。“亚洲人在美国处于一种有趣的地位。”黄在书中写道：“大家都认为你会跨越阶层。你的社群指望着你他妈出人头地，进入法律、会计或银行业工作。但我那时意识到，我不会背离我的阶层。（尽管他的确曾经做过公司律师）我跟那群不成器的‘烂香蕉’们混在一起，他们根本不在乎出人头地。”
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.)
黄使用的这种种族化抗争的语言，对于很多关注这个话题的白人、黑人或亚裔人士来说，可能从本质上显得虚假，因为这些人有意无意地仍旧把亚裔美国人当做那个通过努力工作、回避种族政治而获得成功的群体。但黄可不是这样的人。他喜欢把自己跟马之间的关系比作“田地里的中国佬”和“房子里的中国佬”。（马称这种比喻有些“夸张了”，这就是他对“胡言乱语不知所云”的委婉说法。但假如两人之间真的有阶层区别的话，实际是这样的：马的家族在洛杉矶唐人街经营豆芽生意，而黄的父亲则成了奥兰多的千万富翁）
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.
黄对剧集中的第二集尤其不满；其中，少年时代的黄颐铭对邻家刚刚搬来的金发大胸已婚花瓶女萌生“性趣”。剧中有这样一个场景：少年黄颐铭幻想自己拍摄了一部嘻哈MTV，他在其中唱到自己“爱如雨下”，并且用浓缩橙汁喷洒到模特们的身上。尽管在公映前测试剧情时，观众感觉剧情滑稽而不低俗，但黄认为第二集的主要情节非常令人不快。他认为，剧情把嘻哈文化描写为性别主义的载体，从而贬低了他视之为抒发情感关键渠道的嘻哈文化。他的分析不无道理，但是编剧和制片人们对他说，这种想法对于观众们来说太过高深，无法体会。
“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.’ ”
“他所经历的情感变化非常有趣，” 娜娜查卡·汗对我说。“多数人根本没有机会体会他现在的处境。他现在处在反叛阶段，在表达他内心的焦虑，这正是他的独特之处，这也是他当初写自传的原因。我有时想说：‘放松点，试着享受这一刻吧。’”
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.”
当我告诉黄，汗认为他应该放松点，尝试享受这个过程时，他脱口而出：“这是恋童癖们对孩子说的话。”
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.
尽管黄对黑人文化的向往在剧中不过是廉价的搞笑噱头，对他来说，这可是他个人身份的重要部分。作为排斥了“模范少数族裔”神话的亚裔美国人，他所抛弃的这一半则由黑人文化填补，让他重新成为一个完整的人。所谓“模范少数族裔”是个缺乏自主的、单维度的人像，被剥夺了复杂性、微妙性、危险和性别，是缺乏戏剧色彩的人。而黄则截然不同：他与所有那些束缚羁绊他的因素斗争，他的身份一定要足够广阔善变，能够容纳下他所有的矛盾和模棱两可的性格。
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.”
我们在蒂华纳酒店的最后一天，黄用了一上午通过Skype电话打理他在曼哈顿的餐馆Baohaus的生意。他在Vice的工作让他每年要有24周到处旅行，而他还在写第二本自传，同时参与ABC剧集的制作；即便如此，他仍旧要管理自己的餐馆。他跟自己的一位厨师尤其合不来；那是一位讲粤语的老厨师，在唐人街的中餐馆行业工作多年。作为老板，黄的苛刻程度与他作为雇员的刺头程度相比有过之而无不及，但他也经常要忍受自己手下的叛逆。这次，他与厨师吵架的缘由是如何正确地切鸡肉：厨师想切片，认为白人顾客喜欢这样；而黄则要正确的切法：斩块。“他从来不真正听我的，”黄说，“我一转身，他就开始按照自己的办法来。”
“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，”他说，“问题是，这家伙干活的速度，还有他现场解决问题的能力，美国孩子是学不会的。”
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.
说着说着，他又想到了好莱坞经理人们与任何一家唐人街餐馆的类比：他说，两者都认为他们了解别人需要什么，并且不遗余力地提供这些东西。但两者都没有意识到，应该卖给顾客真实正宗的东西：对于中餐馆来说，就是中国人吃的菜；而对于好莱坞来说，就是无需为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.’ ”
“我真的觉得，人们并不总是知道什么才是真正适合他们的。”他说。“当你有强烈的信念时，你有责任不告诉人们他们需要什么。至少应该表达你自己，然后说，‘嘿，这是我喜欢的东西，这是我眼中的世界。让我牵着你的手，领你走过这一切，你就可以体会到我的视角了。’”