Jimmy Yang - How to American

Some of the crazy beautiful supporting cast of Crazy Rich Asians. LEFT TO RIGHT: Jing Lusi, Chris Pang, Gemma Chan, me, Harry Shum Jr., Fiona Xie, Sonoya Mizuno, Nico Santos, Carmen Soo, Remy Hii, Victoria Loke, Constance Lau, Ronny Chieng. Who wouldn’t want to be Asian?

I was still a big-city Hong Kong boy at heart. I never really lost my Asian-ness; I just covered it up with an American façade. In Hong Kong, I didn’t have to answer the question “Am I Chinese or am I American?” anymore. I was just another person. I was just me. The weight of being an immigrant and the weight of being defined as an Asian American were gone. Things that seemed like stereotypes in America were just normal in Hong Kong. Instead of an Asian guy eating weird chicken feet at the stereotypical dim sum, I was just a guy having lunch. I had forgotten that there was a place in this world where I wasn’t judged for my ethnicity, and I was the norm. I felt at peace.

I visited longtime family friends at the Shanghai Club, where they served some of the most authentic Shanghainese cuisine. I visited my grand-uncle Frank, who has always been a baller wearing Italian suits. He took me to an exclusive membership-only restaurant called the American Club. I know it was ironic to fly seven thousand miles to Hong Kong just to go to the American Club, but that was the best rib-eye I’ve ever had on any side of the world. It was dry-aged USDA prime beef mixed with the culinary skills of the top chefs in Hong Kong.

I walked down the street I grew up on, Tin Hau Miu Road. The twenty-five-story yellowish apartment building still looked exactly the same. The giant tree on the block looked just as big as on my first day of elementary school. Maybe it grew proportionately to my size. I walked down the steps to the Tin Hau temple. I used to be so scared of the statues of Chinese mythological characters in front of the temple when I was a kid; now they just looked like ugly cartoon characters. I sat down in front of the temple and was immediately bitten by a mosquito, a familiar pest in the humidity of Hong Kong. The itch reminded me of my childhood summers. I went over to the Chinese pharmacy for some herbal mosquito cream. The pharmacy had everything from Tylenol to Chinese herbs to a glass container filled with dried scallops, a signature Hong Kong delicacy. The place smelled like fish jerky wrapped in a Band-Aid. I strolled past the sneaker store where my dad bought me my first pair of Jordans. It was a pair of Jordan XIIs that came out in the 1996–97 NBA season when Michael Jordan defeated the Utah Jazz in the NBA finals. Those fresh J’s made me easily the coolest kid in my school that year. On the same street, I found one of our favorite hole-in-the-wall restaurants that specialized in beef brisket soup. They have been perfecting the brisket for forty years, and it’s the only thing they make in that restaurant. A bite of that tender brisket brought me right back to my first soccer practice in nearby Victoria Park, where my mom rewarded me with that brisket soup.

Everything was just as good as I remembered.

Just a few months before the trip, I reconnected with a couple of my grade school friends from Hong Kong through Facebook. My old classmate Ku Chun came across my stand-up set from The Arsenio Hall Show on YouTube. In the set I talked about being from Hong Kong, so he looked me up on Wikipedia and found my Chinese name. I was indeed the same kid he sat next to in third grade. So Ku friended me on Facebook, and through him I also reconnected with Darren Tse, one of my best friends from Hong Kong. I couldn’t believe they managed to find me after all those years. I tried to stay in touch with them when I first moved to America, but it was the year 2000. It was before Facebook, FaceTime calls and even MySpace. I had to use my mom’s international phone card to chat with my friends back in Hong Kong. I was only thirteen years old; I didn’t know how to properly stay in touch with my long-distance friends. So we slowly all faded away from each other’s lives. After seventeen years, we were about to hang out in Hong Kong, thanks to Arsenio Hall.

I met up with Ku and Darren at a hotel bar on top of central Hong Kong. When I walked in to find them, I had no idea who to look for. I had no idea what they looked like after all those years. I have seen puberty turn an ugly duckling into a swan, and I’ve also seen it turn a cute kid into a Ninja Turtle. I almost went up to two random dudes and gave them a hug. Then I heard “Jimmy!” I turned around and saw the same kids I played tag with in third grade. They were still the same guys. Ku was still the bad boy with a cool haircut; Darren was still the nice kid with a gracious smile. Chatting with them in Cantonese brought back all the memories we had in grade school. We chatted about our jobs, girlfriends we’d had and our other old friends from school. I thought I’d walk into the bar as the cool dude who made it in Hollywood, but I was pretty sure they were both making way more money than I was. Ku now runs a successful arcade business in Hong Kong, and he has a healthy collection of Ferraris and Lamborghinis; and Darren works at one of the top investment banking firms, and he just bought a multimillion-dollar condo in Hong Kong. They were the real Crazy Rich Asians; I was just an actor pretending to be them. But all that didn’t matter; we were just happy to see each other after all these years.

When I came home to LA from Hong Kong, I felt like I had left my real home to come back to the place I called home. Before I was ever an immigrant, before I was an Asian American, I was just a kid who didn’t know what either of those things meant. I’ve spent my entire adult life figuring out how to American. Fitting in became the only consistent part of my life. And no matter how American I tried to be, I’d always felt like an outsider. And no matter how long ago I left Hong Kong, it would always feel like home. My trip to Hong Kong gave me a chance to define myself as more than just the Asian guy in America, to see past my own ethnicity and evaluate what I’m really about. I am not the thirteen-year-old Hong Kong Jimmy anymore, and I’ll never be the all-American guy; I am an amalgamation of both. I am a Chinese American Hong Kong — born immigrant who learned English from BET. If it wasn’t for my family, I would not have emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, and if it wasn’t for the American mindset of pursuing what I love, I would not have been a stand-up comedian. I don’t have to be solely defined by where I came from, and I am more than just where I end up. I am as Chinese as I am American.

Can I see myself living in Hong Kong again? The people are great, the food is amazing and it’s one of the most vibrant cities in the world. But there is one very important thing that America has to offer. The same thing that made my family and so many others before us immigrate to America: boundless opportunities. That is what makes the American dream uniquely American. When I quit finance to become a stand-up comedian, my parents thought I was a crazy person. And they were right; I would be considered insane anywhere else in the world, except in America. Americans are encouraged to dream big and do anything we set our minds to. The United States is the only country where the pursuit of happiness is the right of its citizens. Jay-Z went from the Marcy Projects to drinking champagne on a yacht and marrying Beyoncé. I went from struggling with the English language to doing stand-up comedy and becoming a Hollywood actor. There might always be ignorant people who wish I’d go back to where I came from, but I embrace America the same way it has embraced me as its citizen. My American dream is as real as it comes.