Jimmy Yang - How to American

PS: Sadly, Fudgestick.com is no longer operating. I checked, for research purposes. Maybe I’ll show the world my Fudgestick.com music video trailer on The Tonight Show someday.

For Asian kids, going to college is like going to elementary school. It’s mandatory. Asian parents are never proud of you for going to college; they are just not disappointed.

“Dad, I got into college!”

“So? Your cousin has three PhDs, from Harvard.”

Both my first and second college choices were in Los Angeles: UCLA and USC. And they both unequivocally rejected me. I had good grades but I didn’t have enough extracurricular activities because apparently, the Yellow Panthers wasn’t a legitimate activity to these highbrowed admission officers; maybe I should have included Fudgestick.com on my college application. I was accepted by UC San Diego, the San Diego sister school of UCLA. I thought that was basically UCLA by the beach, so I went in blind without even visiting the campus. People used to always tell me, “College is the best four years of your life, enjoy it!” That’s way too much pressure. And that’s saying after you graduate college, everything is downhill from there. What a morbid thought. Not only was it not the best four years of my life, it turned out to be the worst five years of my life.

I hated the school part of college and I despised the social part of UCSD. There was zero school spirit in UCSD. Our mascot was called the Triton; it’s a naked old man holding up a fork. Our sports teams all sucked; there were no Division I teams other than water polo, fencing and men’s volleyball. UCSD focused on academics and sports that nobody cared about. While my brother was partying at the UCLA versus USC rivalry football games at the Rose Bowl with a hundred thousand people, I was watching the Triton’s men’s volleyball team. The only cool thing in UCSD was its proximity to the beach and the surfing culture in San Diego, but I could barely swim. When my dad took me to the beach in Hong Kong when I was three, I cried and begged him not to put me near the water. I was born to be a land dweller. I ended up spending the better part of my college career smoking weed to mentally escape from UCSD.

UCSD’s student body was made up of a majority of Asian students. I was one of them, but I didn’t want to be lumped in with everyone else. I was used to being different. So I tried my hardest to be the opposite of a stereotypical Asian student: I grew my hair out down to my shoulders, I started smoking weed and I never went to class: the holy trinity of an underachieving party kid from Arizona State. The only difference is, I wasn’t getting laid. I wasn’t trying to be a bad boy; it was a cry for help to stand out in a school with twenty thousand students. I felt like my identity was being judged based on the other Asians around me instead of my own personality, my inside voice screamed, I listen to Jay-Z, motherfuckers! In high school, I didn’t want to be perceived as the weird foreign kid; in college, I didn’t want to be perceived as the same as everyone else. I had a new identity crisis. One way to not be another Asian is to smoke so much weed that you transcend into being a stoner. If someone asked, “Hey, do you know that kid Jimmy from dorm 706?” I wanted people to say, “Yeah, the kid who’s high all the time?” instead of “Oh yeah, that Asian kid.”

I went into UC San Diego as a mechanical engineering major but I was smoking way too much weed to keep up with the engineering curriculum. At the highness that I was, it would have taken me seventeen years to graduate with an engineering degree. I had no idea what I wanted to do. So I switched my major to economics, the easiest major that Asian parents would still approve of. I didn’t give a shit about the economy. How was I supposed to care about fiscal policies when I only had student loan debts and no assets? As long as weed was twenty bucks a gram, the Federal Reserve was doing their job. I ended up graduating UCSD after five long years with a pathetic 2.7 GPA. I Daniel Day-Lewis’d myself into being a stoner who didn’t care about grades, and at some point I actually started to believe I was this stoner character. There’s a Chinese saying that describes when someone goes too deep into something and they lose themselves in it, , which literally translates to “the fire leaves and the devil enters.” In my case it was “the brain leaves and the THC enters.”

HOW TO GET DEPORTED

Tijuana is a Mexican border town just south of San Diego where all the underage college kids in San Diego go to party. It’s a dirty cesspool of sins, which translates to a Disneyland for college students. There are dance clubs, strip clubs, clubs with donkeys, cocaine, sex and everything a college student could dream of. In my freshman year at UCSD, my dorm mate, John, and I went on our first trip to Tijuana with our friend Ian. Ian grew up in San Diego and had been going to Tijuana since high school, and he knew all the party spots. He was like our gringo Gandalf of Tijuana.

We got off the San Diego city trolley around 10 p.m., ready for some shenanigans. We walked over the border and took a Mexican taxi to Revolution Boulevard, where all the debaucheries go down. It was a street filled with dance clubs and strip clubs with neon lights, accented by the smell of tacos and used condoms. Right as we got off the cab, a shady Mexican man wearing a cheap suit and sunglasses approached us. “Titties?” He motioned his hands like two titties bouncing on his chest. Of course we stopped and listened. He repeated, “Titties? Titty bar?” As intriguing as that sounded, our plan was to go to the nightclub first. So we politely declined and kept walking. He followed us down the street and kept on pushing. “Titties? Sucky sucky? Fucky fucky?” He was getting shadier by each word. “Titties? Titties? Cocaine? Heroin?” It escalated quickly. As he finally gave up, he just yelled out, “Maricon!” Within the first thirty seconds of arriving in Tijuana, we were offered titties, blow jobs and cocaine; us three Maricons knew we were in for a wild night.

Ian led us to a dance club on Revolution Boulevard. It was twenty dollars for an all-you-can-drink dance club party. We treated that bar like starving refugees at HomeTown Buffet. Next thing I knew, we were hammered, fist-pumping in the middle of a sweaty Mexican dance club, and John was nowhere to be found. “Shit, he probably went to the titty bar by himself,” I said to Ian. Then we heard the crowd cheering on the other side of the club, and we saw John in the middle of the commotion; he was dancing like Beyoncé as water was pouring onto his head from the upstairs balcony. John was having the time of his life. Ian and I looked up and we realized it wasn’t water being poured on John; it was actually a dude pissing onto John’s head from upstairs. John was way too drunk to realize he had been christened in a Mexican golden shower.

“No way.” I looked at Ian in disbelief. “We have to get him out of there.” “John!” Ian screamed out. “Come on, let’s go!” John was more excited than I’d ever seen him. “Guys, this is amazing!” Ian and I looked at each other, not sure what to say. John yelled from across the club, “They are pouring water on me and the whole crowd is going crazy! This is awesome!” We just nodded and let him have it; it would be better if he never found out, and I hope he never reads this book.

When we finally got out of the club; all the hustlers, drug dealers and prostitutes flocked to us like a pack of vultures. We ducked into this hole-in-the-wall taco shop to calm down from the overstimulation. We sat down on the high stools with a couple Dos Equises in front of the hot iron skillet filled with taco meat. The chubby Mexican lady with a red apron started heating up the little corn tortillas. She masterfully scooped a spoonful of meat, sprinkled a garnish of onion and cilantro and flipped the tacos onto a plate right in front of our drooling mouths. I was skeptical about the corn tortillas at first, from what my grandpa taught me in El Pollo Loco: it’s flour or nothing. So I asked the lady, “Do you have flour tortillas?” She didn’t even bother to look at me. Ian, a Tijuana taco shop veteran, said, “Dude, nobody does flour tortillas here; you sound like an idiot gringo. Eat the corn ones, they’re delicious.” I reluctantly bit into the corn-wrapped carne asada taco, and I realized I had been living a lie. This corn tortilla tasted like Salma Hayek’s lips. The sweet corn taste and the grainy texture layered with the meat, onion and cilantro transported me to a Mexican nirvana. I wanted to cry and hug the chubby Mexican lady who made this perfect taco. But I was a little bit too drunk to stand up straight. We decided we’d had enough excitement for one night and it’d probably be a good idea to head back to San Diego before another golden shower hit us. So we called a cab back to the border, but this wasn’t where this story ended; it was where it began.