Jimmy Yang - How to American

I didn’t sleep a wink that weekend and got on set with massive dark circles under my eyes. My eye bags felt like grocery bags and my face looked like a panda. I’m pretty sure I aged five years in two days. I pretended to be the perfect boyfriend while my body was about to shut down from methamphetamine. I somehow managed to power through the scenes without collapsing. Luckily, the scene was an eighties-themed party scene, so everyone looked ridiculous anyway. Maybe this was method acting for this party boy, or more precisely, meth acting. I survived that day and practically went into a coma and slept for twenty hours. Nobody ever found out this perfect boyfriend was doing meth on the weekend, until now. Little did they know Jimmy was far from a perfect boyfriend; he was a dipshit who let random girls stick drugs in his mouth.

FRESH TO DEF

I got a call from my manager one afternoon. “Hey, you want to go to the All Def Movie Awards?” The All Def Movie Awards was like the urban Oscars. It was an award show created by Russell Simmons to champion diversity in film. So of course I went. The next thing I knew, I was in the same building as Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, LL Cool J. I looked at the name tags at my table — Tommy Davidson, Mark Curry, Too Short — two of the best comedians and one of the most legendary rappers that I grew up watching on BET. There was an award that night called “Best Performance by an Asian Not Asked to Use an Accent.” I’m not making this up. I was invited to attend the show because I was nominated for that award for my role in Patriots Day, in which I did have an accent. The other nominees were Randall Park and also, Donnie Yen from Star Wars who naturally had a Chinese accent. The award was supposed to be ironic, really; it should have been called “Best Asian Homie Award.” And as if it was a dream come true, I won. It was the pinnacle of being an Asian actor who grew up watching BET. This was the very first award I’d ever won for my acting and it couldn’t have been more fitting to receive it in front of everyone who taught me English. This was my Oscar.

I jumped onstage to receive my golden All Def statue; it looked like an Oscar except the dude on the statue was the dude from Super Fly. I gave a speech in front of all of my heroes:

“Wow, an Asian winning an award on the All Def show, this is a dream come true.”

I looked over to Russell Simmons:

“Thank you, Russ. You have no idea who I am but that’s okay… This is big, man, I guess I’m doing it on behalf of Jackie Chan, Yao Ming, Lucy Liu.” The crowd laughed. “This is about diversity. I was an immigrant, I was the dude with an accent and I learned to speak English by watching BET Rap City with Snoop, Cube, LL Cool J and Def Comedy Jam , so all my heroes are here. Thank you, guys, very much.” I pointed to my heroes in the audience, and I saw Snoop Dogg clapping through a cloud of weed smoke surrounding him. Then I pointed to Snoop Dogg’s mentor in the audience, the infamous pimp who is always dressed in green and gold, and I signed off with one of his signature pimp catchphrases. “Thank you, Don ‘Magic’ Juan, you’re my hero. Green for the money, gold for the honey.”

When I got off the stage, I walked through a thick cloud of weed smoke and saw Snoop Dogg. Snoop gave me the coolest handshake and said, “Good job, homie.” This was the crowning moment of my career.

Become a series regular on a TV show

Stop driving Uber

Get my own apartment

Win an Oscar

Meet Snoop Dogg

I was invited to do a podcast at Too Short’s studio the next week and I got to hang out with the legend himself. Too Short is a West Coast rapper whose career spans from the eighties with hit singles such as “Gettin’ It,” “I’m a Player” and “The World Is Filled…” from Biggie’s Life After Death album, to more recently, the Bay Area hit song “Blow the Whistle,” where he famously says, “What’s my favorite word? Bitch!” He is known as the man who made the word bitch famous in rap songs. His studio is a giant warehouse converted into three recording studios, a live sound stage, a room filled with arcade games and full living quarters. It was every artist’s dream to be in that place.

On the podcast, we talked about BET, strip clubs and weed. For a kid that grew up in Hong Kong, I had a lot of common interests with a rapper who grew up in Oakland. I took a hit off of Too Short’s blunt and I coughed for the next five minutes. He laughed and said, “You can’t handle that Too Short weed.” And he was right: one hit and I was high for the next eight hours. I confessed to Short during the podcast: “I actually used to make beats before I got into comedy,” and I showed him some of my beats. He started bobbing his head. “This is good.” That was the ultimate stamp of approval in hip-hop. All the days spent making beats for the Yellow Panthers had finally paid off.

In the Boombox studio with DJ Bobby Loco, Too Short and my golden All Def movie award. I was so high that I have no recollection of taking this picture.

I thought selling beats to Fudgestick.com was the pinnacle of my music career; now I found a new frontier collaborating with Too Short. Short rapped on one of my songs and I was featured in one of his music videos. It was one of my lifelong dreams come true. Stand-up and acting are my bread and butter, but there is always a special place in my heart for hip-hop music. When we shot the music video for the song called “You Came to Party,” I knew exactly how to make it rain in that party bus from the hours of research I did on BET Rap City. The song also happened to be one of the end credit songs on Silicon Valley in season four. Jian Yang and Too Short made for a new dynamic duo.

This time, instead of asking myself, Now what? I had learned to enjoy the Now. Looking back to see how far I’d come from making music at Chris’s apartment to making music in Too Short’s studio gave me a brand new perspective. It’s exciting to chase after a new goal, but it’s meaningless if you can’t sit down and enjoy the moment.

LIFE IS LIKE BUYING A FLAT-SCREEN TV

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. You call all your buddies over and you watch Planet Earth for eight hours. It’s magnificent. That flat screen marks a milestone for your success. You’ve made it. Then two months later, you get used to the 55-inch TV; it’s just another TV to you. You watch the Price Is Right on it and scream, “One dollar! Bid one dollar, you fucking idiot!” just like you did when you had your Zenith tube TV. And sadly, you can’t go back to your Zenith tube TV. You have tricked your brain into a new standard and there’s nowhere to go but up. So you set a new goal to buy the newest 75-inch 4K TV. You save an extra hundred dollars every paycheck, and it feels exciting. You visualize the awesomeness of 4K in your dreams every day. You finally go to Best Buy and pick up your new baby. It’s the happiest day of your life, and the picture is better than your eyeballs can handle. You invite all your buddies over and you watch Monday Night Football in majestic 4K. You can even see a piece of Tom Brady’s perfect brown hair flow in the wind as he delivers the perfect spiral. It’s so awesome you get hard a little bit. Then another two months later, you’re sitting there alone screaming at Brady because you are coming up short in your Fantasy Football League. “Throw another touchdown, you fucking asshole!” And now the 75-inch TV becomes the new normal, yet again. Your amazing TV becomes just another TV. You can’t even go watch the games at Buffalo Wild Wings with your boys anymore because their 65-inch TV now looks like a Zenith tube TV to you. You go back to watching the Price Is Right , verbally abusing the contestants. Everything is still the same as when you had the Zenith tube TV. Then they roll out a new OLED super-high-def 85-inch TV. You’re motivated again, striving to get the new standard. But now you understand the cycle. You look back and see how far you’ve come from the crappy Zenith, and it gives you a whole new appreciation for the 75-inch TV you have in front of you. You learn to enjoy Monday Night Football again while you remain excited for the OLED 85-inch TV in your future.