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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“Hey, dude, let’s go to the graduation together.”

“Nah, I can’t sit in the sun for four hours with a hangover.”

“Come on, Jimmy, don’t be a pussy. The guy from Beavis and Butt-Head is going to be the commencement speaker. It’s going to be awesome.”

“The Beavis and Butt-Head guy?”

The Beavis and Butt-Head guy was, of course, Mike Judge, the man who created Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space, and the man who’d eventually create an HBO show called Silicon Valley.

I watched Beavis and Butt-Head when I first came to America. Even though I didn’t have a strong grasp on the English language yet, it made me laugh out loud with the way it was drawn and its weird sayings. I had no idea what Cornholio meant, but “I am Cornholio, I need teepee for my bunghole” was absolutely hilarious. Beavis and Butt-Head and The Simpsons were the only shows I watched that weren’t on BET.

I didn’t think anybody cool ever graduated from UCSD. So I dragged my ass to the graduation ceremony with a pounding headache. Our chancellor, Marye Anne Fox, kicked off the commencement ceremony with a quote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” It was the lamest quote from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I immediately started to regret coming to this ceremony.

She droned on for another five minutes with generic “inspirational” remarks, and it felt like two hours with my massive hangover. Finally, they introduced Mike Judge. Mike looked way different than I had imagined. He was an athletic middle-aged dude with a sleekly shaved head, dressed in a polished black suit. He looked more like Jason Statham in The Transporter than the guy who drew Beavis and Butt-Head. He came up to the microphone in front of a thousand graduating students. “Ahh-huhuhuhu.” He opened with the classic Butt-Head noise and continued in Beavis’s voice. “Graduating class of 2009, hee-hee-hee.” Then he switched gears to the familiar Hank Hill voice. “Boy, I tell you what, Class of 2009. It is indeed my pleasure to be with you this afternoon.” Then Boomhauer came to life. “The dang ol’ Chancellor Fox, man, the dang ol’ thank you very much.” The crowd lit up and I forgot I had a hangover.

Mike talked about how he graduated UCSD with a physics degree because that’s what everyone said he should do. “Our high school guidance counselor and adults in general had us all convinced that if we just got a degree in science, jobs would just come raining out of the sky.” He had always wanted to do comedy but didn’t think it was really possible. After graduating, he settled for a job in Silicon Valley, during the original tech boom in the eighties. He soon realized he couldn’t deal with the cultish, overachieving culture in that world, so he quit and became a touring musician. He was just as lost as I was. He then stumbled into an animation studio, and finally saw his dream of doing comedy materializing as a possibility. “For the first time, I was motivated. I was a man on a mission,” Mike said in his speech. Shortly after, Beavis and Butt-Head was born, and the rest was history. He left the job that everyone told him he should do to become one of the most successful comedic voices in America.

That speech spoke to my lost, hungover college self. I couldn’t imagine wasting my life away at a job based on an economics degree I never cared for, but I was too afraid to find my passion. I could hear my dad saying, “Doing what you love is how you become homeless.” Finding a passion seemed as unrealistic as the Yellow Panthers winning a Grammy. Mike’s commencement speech gave me the permission that my parents never gave me; it gave me the permission to quit what others thought I should do and find something I was truly passionate about. I wanted to find the thing that made me tick. And when I eventually stumbled into a comedy club, I felt that feeling of stumbling into the animation studio he described in his speech, and I knew I’d found that thing I was passionate about. And as fate would have it, Mike Judge would be the one who gave me my first big break in pursuing what I loved. Mike cast me on Silicon Valley five years after that commencement speech, not knowing I was sitting in the audience that day.

Pursue what you love, not what you should.

CHAPTER FIVE HOW TO

STAND UP

My dad had set me up with an internship at Smith Barney, a prestigious financial consulting firm his friend worked at. I interned at their ritzy Beverly Hills office under one of their top financial advisers; it was the internship every parent dreamed of for their kid. I felt like a baller; I reconciled tax documents for their millionaire clients, I did analysis on mutual funds and my boss handled Kevin Sorbo’s finances, a.k.a. Hercules. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Needless to say, I hadn’t met a lot of celebrities before then and I was easily impressed. I had a blast during the first few weeks of the internship, daydreaming about a successful future that my dad would be so proud of. But after a month at that office, the routine set in and an intense dread of being stuck behind a desk for the rest of my life came over me. Am I really going to be reconciling Kevin Sorbo’s taxes for the rest of my life? That became a recurring nightmare of mine; in the dream, I would be crunching numbers on an old Dell desktop and Hercules would come up behind me and crack me with his whip. “Faster, you mortal!” Then I’d cry to the image of his diversified mutual fund portfolio.

I started to hate everything about the internship, and I couldn’t wait until my three-month sentence was over. I hated mutual funds, I hated CNBC and I hated Hercules. But at the same time, I knew how proud my dad was of his son who was following in his footsteps to become a financial adviser. He’d ask me with a sweet sense of pride on his face: “How’s the internship going?” “It’s going great! Today we worked on a couple Vanguard funds.” I said it with a fake stapled grin on my stupid face. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated the internship and I thought Vanguard funds were fucking stupid.

During my last week of the internship, Dad delivered some breaking news: “Jimmy! My friend at Smith Barney said he wants to offer you a full-time job when you graduate! Congratulations!” I’d never seen him so excited. I’m sure this was one of the happiest moments of his life, but in contrast, this was one of the most dismal moments of my life. Tears of joy almost rolled down from his eyes, while tears of absolute sadness almost poured down from mine. “Oh… that’s great.” I uttered those words like a zombie. The thought of looking at mutual funds for one more day, let alone for the rest of my life, made me feel dead inside. I felt like I was stuck in a terrible relationship, and I didn’t know how to break up with my girlfriend who thought everything was going perfectly. Dad wanted to go out for dinner that night to celebrate.

“Where do you want to go? Anywhere you want.”

“Dad, listen…” There was no way to let him down easily; I just had to do it. “I don’t want to work for Smith Barney.”

The joy disappeared from his face. He was in shock. He was in denial. He was blindsided. He asked me a question that he prayed I’d say yes to: “Do you have another job?”

“No.” I couldn’t even make eye contact with him.

He walked away, mourning the loss of his son that night.

I went from a dream internship to becoming every parent’s worst nightmare. My dad thought I was delusional. He was too disappointed to ever confront me face to face, so he tried to passive aggressively get me back on track by sending me emails from CareerBuilder.com. “Jimmy, did you check your email today?” He’d say it in a deep, emotionless tone, making sure that I sensed his disappointment. “No, not yet.” “Check it, I sent you three links from CareerBuilder.com. Real people are hiring.” And this happened for years to come. I couldn’t imagine the torment I put my dad through during those years. It was probably like having a son hooked on heroin, and he sent me CareerBuilder.com job leads instead of rehab brochures. To his credit, he never gave up on me. One could argue that not taking a “legit” job in order to find my passion was one of the stupidest decisions in my life, or now in hindsight, you could say that I was brave for making such a risky decision; but for me it wasn’t even a decision. Taking a chance was the only way I could live with myself. I’d rather take a chance and fail miserably than to have never tried at all.

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