An American Dream of Self-Understanding

In the Asian-American community, one of the biggest topic in the recent days is the premiere of "Fresh off the Boat," the first Asian-starred prime-time sitcom on American television in over two decades.  Narrated by DC-born Taiwanese celebrity chef Eddie Huang, the sitcom describes how a new Asian immigrant family come face to face with a Floridan community that has little experience dealing with Asian minorities, and how each family member came to cope with the often uncomfortable dissonance they come to have with their new home.

Prescribing the same autobiographical flashback format so successfully used in describing the African-American family in Chris Rock's "Everybody Hates Chris," Eddie Huang's venture into comedy is largely filled with outrageous racial stereotypes to draw laughs, mixed in with warm moments of mutual support the family members provided each other in order to counter hostile treatments that they (and indeed, a majority of Asian Americans) perceive as more or less inevitable on the long and rough road to achieve that increasingly skeptical goal of the "American Dream."  

A broadcasted summary of the struggles an Asian family goes through in achieving success is all the more relevant today as the American populace is increasingly told of an "Asian Century," with likes of rising China and India occupying the non-Asian imagination, often backed by increasing portrayal of Asia as a bustling land of opportunity in its own right, and relative decline of America as a place to pull in the hopeful.   Following the "American Dream" of an Asian family then, would in many ways increase America's continued pride as a center of the global economy in a changing world.

Yet, as each family members question the wisdom of what they are doing in Florida as reaction to their negative experiences with the non-Asian majority, the audience, both Asian and non-Asian, should be able to sympathize with such questioning.  The more "exotic" the Asian mannerisms are displayed in this sitcom, the more viewers ought to understand the massive gap between the immigrant family and the unprepared host society, a gap that must be overcome to ensure immigrants become well-assimilated and productive members of the mainstream American society.

In this way, it is not only the Asian immigrants who can find resonance with Eddie's Huang's family in the sitcom.  All immigrant families, whether Hispanic, African, or anywhere outside the Anglo-Saxon heritage cherished by white America, would find the sometimes hopeless, oftentimes confused sentiments of the Asian immigrant family to be something they have all experienced in their own processes of becoming American.  To understand the show, then, requires little knowledge of Asian habits or culture as prerequisites.

For the Asians themselves, the possibility of being truly understood by non-Asians in America has been short of proper channels.  With Asian representation in mainstream media scant (as non-Asian producers of both TV and the big screen tend to see Asians as not salable in any role not racially predefined), the non-Asian public's understanding of Asians, especially in regions where Asians are hardly present, are limited to vague showings in media reports of cultural quirkiness, economic dynamism, and political aggressiveness.

This has only encouraged the Asians to self-isolate.  Often assuming that Asians are not understood by non-Asians, they have become disillusioned on whether they will ever be in America.  Most, unlike the brave Huang family, have chosen to not venture outside designated clusters of Asian neighborhoods, complete with socioeconomic institutions exclusively catered to Asian needs.  Sure, their material well-being has become satisfied, but it came at the cost of living in a separate America where they gave up multicultural interaction outside of strict work environments.

It is the author's greatest hope that "Fresh off the Boat" can begin to dismantle such self-isolationist mentality among Asian-Americans.  By understanding that the Asian immigrant experience in America, in essence, is not at all different from those of any other ethnicity, Asians can finally become part of the American Dream story, not just an Asian-American one.  It is as the Huang family displayed so well, ultimately, the American Dream is incomplete and not achievable if the immigrants cannot find common language with and embrace American people of all different origins.