Jimmy Yang - How to American

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How to American: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Standup comic, actor and fan favorite from the popular HBO series
shares his memoir of growing up as a Chinese immigrant in California and making it in Hollywood.
Jimmy O. Yang is about to have his moment. You've likely seen the standup comic and actor starring as a series regular, the fan favorite character Jian Yang in Mike Judge's Emmy-nominated HBO comedy
. Or you may have caught his first dramatic turn in director Peter Berg's acclaimed film
. Next up is a major role opposite Melissa McCarthy in the comedy
. Beyond his burgeoning career in Hollywood, Yang's star status is only a small piece of his story. His family emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles when he was 13. Can you think of a worse time for a young adolescent who didn't speak English to be thrown into the Los Angeles School District with its notorious income gap, mean girls, and children of Hollywood elite?
In his…

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“Oh man, this is strong.”

“You never smoked chewy before, huh?”

“No, I don’t think so. What is it?”

“It’s weed with cocaine sprinkled on it.”

My eyes went wide. I’m sure it was a combination of shock and the cocaine coursing down my bloodstream. He made cocaine sound like an ice cream topping. I had never done coke before, and I’d just smoked it in a joint with a random dude on a bicycle in a park across from my dad’s retiree apartment. I panicked. “I got to go.” I got up and speed-walked home in an effort to sober up. I couldn’t throw up something I’d smoked, and I couldn’t water it down either, so I just lay in my bed with my heart pounding faster than Floyd Mayweather hitting a speed bag.

I didn’t know what a panic attack was at the time; I thought I was having a full-blown heart attack. My dad was watching TV in his bedroom, no idea his son just smoked a cocaine-laced joint. I had a decision to make. Should I wait it out and hope my heart doesn’t blow out of my chest? Or should I tell my dad I did some cocaine so he can take me to the hospital? The first choice could mean death; the second choice would come with a lifetime of shame. As a proper Asian, I chose death over shame. I hopped into the shower to try to calm myself down. I took a forty-five-minute shower, twice, and my heart was still jumping out of my throat. I lay down on the couch and turned on SportsCenter on ESPN. The familiar voices of Stan Verrett and Neil Everett eased my panic and I started to dose off. I gave myself a fifty-fifty chance of waking up, scared to my core that I’d sleep forever. When I did manage to wake up the next morning, I wasn’t sure if I was still living or I had gone to hell where the TV is permanently stuck on ESPN. Actually, I could argue that’d be heaven for me.

I started praying to Jesus after this near-death experience. “Lord, thank you for saving me from smoking chewy — that’s a joint laced with cocaine, in case you’ve never heard of that.” I felt my life going down an even steeper spiral. When I went back to school, I spent most of my sophomore year locked inside of my room, trying to not die again. I needed to do something drastic to snap out of this slump.

FOREIGN FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT

In my junior year at UCSD, I moved into an apartment in San Diego with my high school friends, Phil from the lunch table, who also went to UCSD, and our mutual friend Bobby, who also went to Beverly Hills High School. Bobby’s specialty was peer pressure. Whenever I didn’t want to go out with him, he’d put on a full-court press. “Come on, Jimmy, don’t be a pussy. Jimmy, come on, man, why are you being like that?” And he wouldn’t stop until I went with him. It was annoying at times, but I desperately needed someone like Bobby to pull me out of my funk. One day, Bobby threw out a grandiose idea:

“Jimmy, let’s go study abroad in Italy.”

“What? No way. Studying abroad is for rich white girls, I can’t afford to go to Italy.” Really, I didn’t want to go because I was scared of yet another change. Since I moved to America, my whole life had been a study-abroad trip.

“Come on, Jimmy, why are you being like that? We are going to go to Italy and drink wine, eat pasta and hang out with hot Italian girls. Jimmy, come on, don’t be a pussy.”

A month later, I was sitting on a plane next to Bobby on the way to Italy. I took out an extra twenty thousand dollars in student loans and we spent the next semester in Florence.

It was yet another new start for me. The great thing about studying abroad was that I wasn’t the only foreign kid; everyone was the foreign kid. While everyone tried to get used to the new country, I’d already had a master class in assimilation. Bobby and I shared an apartment with a group of fellow study-abroad students from all over the States. Tim was a fashionable gay man from Florida; Nick was a straightforward New Yorker; Josh was a streetwise chef from Wisconsin; and Alex was a half-Korean, half-white hippie from San Francisco. It was like a season of The Real World minus the hot tub. We were all from different parts of America, but we all felt like foreigners in Italy. While everyone felt like a fish out of water, I felt right in my element.

The Italians were not as politically correct as people in America. I passed by the Florentine flea market when I walked back to our apartment every day. The merchants peddled everything from overpriced truffle oil to miniature souvenir statues of David. It was a tourist trap and I looked like an easy target. Every time I walked by the market, the Italian merchants would greet me with three different greetings from three different Asian languages. “Konichiwa!” “Ni hao!” “Annyeong!” But they’d never just say, “Hi, how are you?” in English. Then I’d turn to the merchants and say, “Yeah, good day to you too, sir.” One merchant continued the charade with a bow and said, “Xie xie.” I wanted to respond, “ Xie xie to your madre , bitch.” But I restrained myself. Even though I was an American student who spoke better English than them, they still insisted I was a Chinese tourist.

Aside from a few konichiwas from ignorant merchants, studying abroad was an absolutely amazing life-changing experience. I took classes that were barely classes. I had a wine-tasting class where we got drunk on high-end wine every week; a food critique class where our homework was to eat at amazing restaurants and write about it; an architecture class where we browsed the historical Florentine sites like tourists; and a class called History of the Mafia. Yes, that was the real name of a real class, where we literally watched The Godfather: Part II with our ex-mafioso teacher. It was more like a summer camp than school. None of these credits transferred back to my economics degree in UCSD, but who cares? I was having the time of my life. I forgot about my near-death chewy experience and my near-deportation episode in Tijuana. Every weekend we’d visit a different city or a different country: Rome, Milan, Amsterdam, Dublin or Barcelona. We partied at the coolest Italian nightclubs and smoked hash in front of the Santa Croce church; being sacrilegious never felt so good. It was exactly what I needed to break out of my funk. I felt the world had finally opened up and I was no longer trapped under my Chinese family rules, my boring college curriculum and the confines of a dreadful retirement home. It was the first time I felt the freedom of being an American, and I had to go to Italy to find it.

When I came home to the States, I felt like I was coming to America for the first time again. I’d forgotten how wide the streets were in California, and I’d forgotten how to dress like a Californian. Everyone was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway wearing T-shirts and sandals, and I was trying to walk three miles to the grocery store rocking an Italian blazer. The study-abroad trip was such an amazing experience; it raised the bar for my standard of living. It made me not ever want to go back to my inadequate life back home. I felt a purposeful depression. I wasn’t sad; I was unsatisfied. I wanted more out of life. I needed to step my life up.

THE BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD GUY

The college graduation ceremony felt more like a deadline than a celebration. It marked the day when I’d go from being a student to officially becoming an unemployed adult. After my trip to Florence, I didn’t want to settle for any mundane job like I settled for a mundane college experience. But what should I do with my life? How am I supposed to find a job if I don’t even know what I want to do? I didn’t want to go to my graduation ceremony. And I was also very hung over from the night before when I tried to drink my problems away. I planned to pop Advils and watch SportsCenter in my bed all day, and then of course, Bobby gave me no choice.

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