Jimmy Yang: How to American

Copyright

Copyright © 2018 by Jimmy O. Yang

Photos courtesy of the author. Page 206 photo courtesy of Jason Fredrickson.

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First Edition: April 2018

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-306-90349-6 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-0-306-90350-2 (e-book)

E3-20180202-JV-PC

When we first cast Jimmy O. Yang in Silicon Valley , I didn’t know anything about him. I just had a good feeling about him based on his audition. I had no idea that the accent he was doing was not the way he normally spoke and that his persona was very different from that of the character he was playing in our show, Jian Yang. I also didn’t know that he had graduated with a degree in economics from UCSD, the same school I graduated from many years earlier, or that he graduated in 2009, the year that I gave the commencement speech, and that he had attended it and apparently had been somewhat inspired to go into comedy by what I said. I found all this out after we had been working on set for a couple days.

Jimmy and I hit it off right away and became fast friends. As you’ll notice when you read this book, he’s a funny guy with an interesting and unique perspective on things in this country. You don’t often hear the stories about Chinese immigrants. At least it seems that way to me. I think maybe it’s because we Americans just don’t ask. Jimmy and I hung out quite a bit and I became interested in his story. It’s an interesting one. He’s had quite a journey. From being a child Ping-Pong star in Hong Kong, to coming to America and becoming a stand-up comedian, achieving his dream of being a strip club DJ only to discover how sad and depressing that is, to becoming a successful TV and movie actor, Jimmy has really experienced America like few have.

When we were shooting the first season of Silicon Valley, we had no idea if the show would become a hit and go on for more seasons, or if it would flop and be quickly forgotten. We were all just working away trying our best to make it good and hoping it would work. Jimmy always had a great optimism about him, and when we’d talk about the show it would make my cynical ass believe that maybe it could be a hit.

And then it was. And as we went on to do additional seasons, Jimmy’s character quickly became a cornerstone of the show. He also became my favorite character to write for around season three. There’s something great and stoic about Jian Yang that Jimmy embodies perfectly. I know that sometimes language-barrier jokes can be considered easy by comedy snobs, but Jimmy makes it all work in a really great way.

I was already getting a sense that Jian Yang was becoming a favorite character on the show, but it really hit me when we were doing a panel at Comic-Con San Diego in 2016. We were in one of the big rooms with a couple thousand people (I’m bad with crowd numbers but it was at least that, maybe three or four thousand), and someone asked if there was going to be more Jian Yang next season. This was followed by thunderous applause, which was followed by even more thunderous applause when I said yes. Jimmy was officially famous.

Part of my inspiration for the show Silicon Valley came from back when I was working as an engineer. And at my first engineering job, I had an Iranian friend who worked there too, who said something that always stuck with me. He said that this really is the land of opportunity, but most Americans just don’t see it because they’re simply too used to it. They don’t appreciate it and they don’t take advantage of it as much as people who move here from other countries do. When you come to America from a place like Iran, you get here and you just marvel at all the opportunities and the freedom. Reading this book, you get the sense that Jimmy had that same experience, and he did not waste the opportunity at all. He worked his ass off for everything he has.

Jimmy’s experience is uniquely American. You just don’t hear these kinds of stories from other countries. Okay, somebody slap me. I’m getting too patriotic.

Here’s something I’ll never forget about Jimmy. Before the first season of Silicon Valley had aired, Jimmy and I were sitting at the bar at a restaurant in Santa Monica. (Now when I’m out with him, we are often interrupted by fans who recognize him and want to take selfies.) I was asking him about China. He was saying that if you’re an ordinary American and you go to China, it’s like being a movie star. Everyone stares at you and wants to be around you. He said it’s the same if an American goes to Cuba. Then he paused for a second, looked down at his drink and said, “There’s nowhere I can go.” Well, Jimmy, now there’s nowhere you can’t go without being recognized like a star. Welcome to America, Jimmy O. Yang.

Mike Judge

“I eat the fish.”

I said this to my roommate, in my thick Chinese accent.

“I know you eat the fish, but when you clean the fish, you can’t just leave the fish head and guts and shit in the sink, because the whole house smells like a bait station. So you got to put it in the trash, then take the trash out. Do you understand?” my big, curly-haired American roommate explained to me, pointing at the leftover fish parts in the sink.

I stared at him, confused. And I replied, “Yes, I eat the fish.”

“Motherfuck!” he howled in complete frustration.

The whole crew burst out in laughter. That was my second day on the set of Silicon Valley, an HBO show created by one of my comedy heroes, Mike Judge. It was my big break in Hollywood. My character, Jian Yang, is a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant whose struggle with the English language often leads to comical misunderstandings with his buffoonish roommate, Erlich Bachman, played by the impeccable T. J. Miller. It felt natural for me to play this character. I was once a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant myself. I was Jian Yang.

When my family immigrated to America from Hong Kong, I was a thirteen-year-old boy who looked like an eight-year-old girl. I didn’t even speak enough English to understand the simplest American slang. On my first day of school in America, a girl came up to me and said:

“What’s up?”

I stared at her, confused. I had never heard this term before.

She repeated, “What’s up?”