How to American: An Immigrant’s Guide to
Disappointing Your Parents. By Jimmy O. Yang. Da Capo. $27.
The title’s implication, and the author
cover photo showing Jimmy O. Yang waving a small American flag with one hand
while holding a beer in the other, sitting in a chair with a football on the
floor on one side and snack foods spilling onto the floor on the other,
certainly combine to imply that How to
American will be a romp of some sort. But this turns out, rather quickly,
to be misleading. Yes, Yang is a comedian, and yes, his chosen profession
initially got little parental support – the book’s back cover even includes a
quote from “Jimmy’s Dad” to the effect that “Jimmy is not funny.” But this is
not a comedy book per se, and
certainly not the sort of written-out version of an existing comedy act that
sometimes passes for a book by an entertainer whose job is to generate
laughter. Instead, How to American is
a memoir, and at times a surprisingly affecting one.
Yang was born in Hong Kong and moved to
the United States just before starting high school. Amusingly, he learned
English by watching Black Entertainment Television and seeing rap videos – and
he got into standup comedy after college with stories like the one about his
white friends asking him to order Chinese food in Mandarin, even at Panda
Express from a server named Consuela. When it comes to trying to break into
comedy, Yang’s experience is not really all that unusual, although his way of
commenting when things go well is a bit offbeat: “The crowd ate it up like it
was orange chicken with a side of chow mein.” The financial reality, on the
other hand, is pretty straightforward: “I didn’t get paid a single penny that
night, but I did score a six-pack of Bud Light.” Other “nonmonetary payments
for a stand-up set,” Yang explains, include “weed,” “high-fives,” “unsolicited
career advice,” and “one food item from the left side of the menu.”
Professionally, Yang’s career took off
after he landed a role on the HBO series Silicon
Valley. But How to American is
not simply a success story filled with self-praise – it is more interesting and
amusing than that. Each chapter is a how-to of some sort: “How to Get High,”
“How to Strip Club DJ,” “How to Hollywood,” etc. Within many chapters are
subsections with titles such as “Too Cool for Prom, but Not Really,” “I Got Arsenio Canceled,” and “Lap Dance
Salesman.” The material within the chapters and subchapters is not particularly
revelatory, so what makes the book worth reading is the way Yang describes what
has happened to him. For instance, discussing “ten extra minutes on stage” at
one point, he explains, “It’s like being on a first date and completely running
out of things to say, so you sit there twiddling your thumbs wanting to kill
yourself, except instead of one girl judging you, it’s a hundred drunk people
judging you on a brightly lit stage.”
It is the self-deprecating sense of humor,
more than Yang’s eventual success at landing the role of Jian Yang on Silicon Valley, that is really of
interest here, although the book may have particular appeal for fans of the
show who want the inside story, such as it is, of one of the program’s stars. It
is, to be sure, sometimes a bit hard to know just how seriously to take what
Yang says, since some of the occurrences he describes are so clichéd: “I was so
flustered, I forgot how to be nervous.” “I was suddenly thrown into a fantasy
world.” What is not difficult, though, is to empathize with Yang, his attempt
to fit in after a move to a new and strange country, his friendly writing style
that makes it difficult to do anything but like him, his eventual success, his
willingness to say things such as, “The day you buy your 55-inch flat screen
and throw away your old Zenith tube TV is one of the best days of your life.”
There is nothing profound in How to
American, nothing revelatory about life in general or Hollywood in
particular; but there is a great deal about what it feels like in the 21st
century to be a recent immigrant to the United States (a legal immigrant; no big sociopolitical stances here), and to have
the pluck and luck to succeed in a new country. For today’s immigrants, unlike
so many of those who passed through Ellis Island more than a century ago, there
remains a strong tie to “where I came from” rather than a desire to escape
fully from “the old country” – or at least this is so for Yang. He encapsulates
the feeling in one of his most-sensitive sentences, after a visit to the place
where he was born: “When I came home to LA from Hong Kong, I felt like I had
left my real home to come back to the place I called home.” Yang is not a deep thinker,
but that is a deeper thought than many memoirs ever produce.
No comments:
Post a Comment