Jimmy Yang - How to American

“Nope.” I knew better after what happened at Jeff Greenberg’s office.

I wiped the sweat from my forehead and took a deep breath; I was so flustered, I forgot how to be nervous. Then I let out all my pent-up frustration from Central Casting, the apartment rental agency and Modern Family in those two lines on the sides. “Hey, come on! Hurry up! I’ll buy it for you!” Those would eventually become my first lines on TV.

When Jane called me next morning, “Congratulations! You booked it!” I felt like I had won the lottery. I called all my friends to brag about the news, and I’m sure I posted some cheesy humble brag post on Facebook. “Finally, after all the sweat and tears, I’ve booked a role on TV! If you believe in yourself, you can too! But for now, everybody look at me while I humble brag on social media!” I told my parents about the good news, but I didn’t expect much of a reaction from them. My dad asked, “So how much does it pay?” And my mom, to this day, still calls the show “2 Broken Girls.” To be honest, that doesn’t sound like a bad show; I can see it on HBO starring Kristen Stewart and Chlöe Moretz.

I made my television debut on 2 Broke Girls on CBS prime time. This qualified me to join the Screen Actors Guild without collecting the three vouchers from Central Casting. It’s a straight-to-union rule called Taft-Hartley that every new actor dreams about. I truly felt like I’d made it. It might not have paid as much as Will’s vodka commercial, but it gave me the money to keep going for another two months, and more importantly, it reinstated my confidence. When the episode finally aired, I called everyone I knew to tune in to CBS at 9:00 p.m. My dad said, “I don’t have CBS.” And that was the end of the phone call. Who the fuck doesn’t have CBS? You can stick a piece of tin foil in the back of the TV and get CBS. Dad was just a hater. He eventually called back and said he’d come and watch the episode with me. It might not have been a Nobel Prize, but I did see a smile from my dad when my name came up in the credits.

THREE DUDES, ONE ROOM

I finally moved out of Nathaniel’s apartment when Tarrell from the Comedy Palace decided to move up to LA. Tarrell and I rented a one-bedroom apartment in the Little Armenia neighborhood in East Los Angeles, where the only landmarks were an Armenian vacuum repair shop and a Scientology center. It definitely wasn’t the posh part of town. I’d sleep in the living room while Tarrell paid an extra hundred dollars for the bedroom. Then two weeks later, my bank account was hit with an overdraft fee for insufficient funds. I guess the 2 Broke Girls money didn’t last as long as I thought. Then I looked at my bank statements and saw there was a thirteen-hundred-dollar check that bounced. I didn’t remember writing such a check; I mean at that time thirteen hundred dollars was an astronomical figure and I wouldn’t forget writing that check. So I went to the bank and asked for a copy of this mystery check. It had a poorly forged signature of mine, and it was made out to none other than Nathaniel. That son of a bitch stole one of my blank checks before I left and had the balls to make it out to himself. How stupid and desperate do you have to be to literally write your own name on a very illegal stolen check? Luckily, I was so poor I didn’t have thirteen hundred dollars in my bank account, so the check bounced and my account was frozen. I went down to the Hollywood police station and reported it to an officer: “My old roommate committed check fraud. He stole my check and made it out to his name. Here’s the evidence.” I handed him the copy of the fraudulent check, hard evidence.

The officer asked:

“So he stole thirteen hundred dollars from you?”

“He tried to steal thirteen hundred dollars from me, but it didn’t work.”

“So he didn’t really steal from you.”

“He stole my check and forged my signature!”

“Well, if he didn’t technically steal anything from you, we can’t really charge him on anything substantial.”

I thought about taking matters into my own hands and going back to Nathaniel’s apartment to kick his ass. But I thought better of it; I didn’t want to be the one who ended up getting arrested. The bank eventually waived the thirty-five-dollar overdraft fee and unfroze my account, but I had completely lost faith in the LAPD.

I lived with Tarrell for a year in the Little Armenia apartment before Guam also moved in with us. We couldn’t afford a bigger place, and Guam couldn’t afford to pay anything because he still hadn’t won the lottery yet. So we struck a deal where Guam would buy groceries for us using his EBT, government-issued food stamps, instead of paying rent. Guam slept in a ten-foot-square closet in the living room next to my bed. It was like having a pet that was a two-hundred-pound forty-year-old Guamanian man. Guam had terrible sleep apnea and snored like two elephants mating. I’d kick the closet door at four in the morning. “Guam, stop snoring.” He’d startle awake for two seconds, then go right back to rumbling in the closet. I hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since he moved in. The EBT deal didn’t really work out in our favor either, because Guam ended up eating all the groceries he bought for the household. But even though we had three dudes crammed in a one-bedroom apartment, living with two of my best comedian friends was a major upgrade to living with Nathaniel the check thief. In our minds, we made it.

[JIN YANG] (20s) PLEASE SUBMIT TALENT WHO ARE NATIVE BORN ASIAN THAT SPEAK ENGLISH. TALENT MUST HAVE GREEN CARD OR BE US CITIZEN WITH PROPER PAPERS.A resident at Erlich’s incubator, Hacker House, Jin Yang is a tall, skinny ASIANTech geek who speaks in a THICK ACCENT with every other word being either s**t, f**ck, mother**ker or dude. Role slated to start shooting approx. 3/2–3/5. POSSIBLE RECURRING GUEST STAR

I got an audition email with this very interesting character description. It was for a new HBO pilot called Deep Tech, which somehow sounded too nerdy and too sexual at the same time. Jin Yang was a Chinese hacker who coded like the wind and cursed like a Cambodian pirate. The character was so foreign, they needed to make sure the actors auditioning for this character had proper paperwork. They were looking for an authentic Chinese immigrant actor who was just foreign enough to have a green card. I was born to play this role.

I threw on my gray pilly sweatpants and I slipped on a pair of ugly rubber sandals over my white socks. To complete the look, I put on an old faded T-shirt with chemical bonding diagrams that my mom had bought for me in Shanghai ten years ago. I looked like I crawled out of the back of a Chinese Internet cafe, and that was exactly how I wanted to look. I hopped into my Toyota Celica and drove to the legendary McCarthy/Abellera casting office in Santa Monica. Jeanne McCarthy and Nicole Abellera were responsible for casting classics like Con Air; I, Robot; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . I was anxious to meet them for the first time. I read the sides twice and Jeanne McCarthy politely said, “Thank you.” A week went by and I didn’t hear from my agent. No news always means bad news when it comes to auditions.

Acting is like a never-ending job interview. You have to constantly prove yourself through the grueling audition process just to get another day of work. There are so many elements that are out of the actor’s control. They could have chosen someone else for the job because I was too short, too young or too weird-looking. Acting is the only job where physical discrimination is allowed. I once auditioned for something with the character description “NO FAT PEOPLE!!!” in caps with three exclamation marks. Ironically, it was for a McDonald’s chicken nuggets commercial. I never try to look for the reason why I didn’t get a job; I just try to do better in the next audition. Dwelling on an audition is like dwelling on a girl who told you she’s emotionally unavailable. It’s best to move on or, as my agent Jane would say, “On to the next!”