AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
New Year's Day was yesterday, but today's our holiday here at NPR. And we're in the mood to share a treat with you. So in that spirit, we have a fun interview we're going to air now, essentially re-gifted. It's my conversation with Eddie Huang. You might know him from "Fresh Off The Boat," the ABC sitcom based on his memoir about growing up with Chinese-Taiwanese immigrant parents. He's also a chef. Huang heads Baohaus, a popular bun shop in New York City.
When we spoke last May, he had just released his latest book, "Double Cup Love," which is about food, family, culture and identity. I asked him to talk about the restaurants his father had run when Huang was a kid.
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CORNISH: Some of the names were, like, Cattleman's Steakhouse...
EDDIE HUANG: (Laughter).
CORNISH: ...Fajita Grill, Corleone's Italian Food...
HUANG: Yeah.
CORNISH: ...And my favorite, Coco's Floribbean I think.
HUANG: Yeah, Coco's Floribbean Cuisine - I worked there after school.
CORNISH: Everything but Chinese food.
HUANG: Yeah.
CORNISH: So why didn't he make Chinese food, and why do you?
HUANG: My dad was the businessman's businessman. And the difference between us is, I've opened Baohaus, and I cook food because I'm telling a story about identity. My dad opened restaurants, and he cooked food because he wanted to make money. And I don't think either one is better than the other.
You know, he had to survive. He had three kids, and he did what he had to do. And he looked, and he said, Americans don't respect us. They don't respect our food. They still don't pay as much for, you know, a sizzling filet mignon at a Cantonese restaurant sliced with black bean sauce and onions as they do a filet mignon that they've done nothing to and just put in a Montague broiler.
CORNISH: So fast forward to today. You're living in a very different time. And at the start of this book, your restaurant Baohaus in New York City is doing really well, right?
HUANG: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's doing well.
CORNISH: And people here in the U.S. love your cooking. And then you essentially decide that you need to go back and cook and serve food in China. And so the first time you actually get to cook, you're at a hotel, right? What happened?
HUANG: Yeah, I was actually in a boutique pop-up hotel within a Super 8 motel...
CORNISH: (Laughter).
HUANG: ...That was owned by this Chengdu businesswoman, Hakka Heather (ph). And she had also a bar called Hakka Bar upstairs, and she let me cook there. So me and my brothers brought a bunch of, like, camping stoves. We made red cooked pork. We made some stewed cabbage. We made bitter melon, some seaweed knots.
And people lined up. We served them. There was Hunan people there. There was people from Szechuan there. There was people from Taiwan there. And it was a very special event 'cause I don't feel like all these people had come together before to eat food like this and ask the questions that we did. And we did it with - what's always with me these days is a Dipset soundtrack.
CORNISH: (Laughter) How nervous were you?
HUANG: I wasn't nervous. I was just curious. I know my food's good. If anything, I was nervous that the people eating there would say something that made me question them and write off China or write off my place here. But I wasn't worried.
CORNISH: That would be your take away? Like, you must be wrong (laughter).
HUANG: Yeah, like, sometimes you look at, like the...
CORNISH: Like, what?
HUANG: Sometimes you look at, like, the Amazon readers' reviews of, like, the books and stuff, and it's just, like, this wasn't for you. Like, you're never going to get it. You know, you're very simple. You're very basic, and you're only going to understand inputs into your computer that you have presets for.
So I was worried that the people eating were so programmed that they only wanted what they knew. But these people were very open-minded. They were even more liberal about their Chinese identity than I was, and I think it's because they were more confident in it.
CORNISH: And not only did they like your food. You seemed a little taken aback by the compliments, the way that they complimented it, saying that, well, it's not Chinese. It's not American. It's a mix. There was something about that that you couldn't accept.
HUANG: Yeah, well, it was something about it I couldn't even understand because in America, we have this idea of authenticity. Either you're authentically Chinese, or you're not Chinese. And for a lot of people I know, they're Jamaican, or they're Puerto Rican. They go back to their homeland as well. And you know, their aunts and uncles and cousins that didn't come over to America always got jokes about, oh, look at the way you peel breadfruit. Look at the way you eat oxtails. Like, you're not Jamaican, or you're not Puerto Rican.
And so that was always in the back of my head, and there's always that insecurity like I'm a fraud. But over time, I started to realize they were complimenting me and also that, like, children of the Diaspora - we have a job. We have a duty to take this culture, go to different places and see the different faces that it takes on if you let it go and you let it grow alongside your history and identity.
CORNISH: You write that people don't realize coming from abroad that Chinese food in China is constantly changing.
HUANG: Yeah, Chinese food - when you go back, every time you go on the street, there's something new. I remember 10 years ago, I went to Taiwan, and there was this dish called toa-tng pau sio-tng. And it's big intestine wrapped around small intestine. And they have sticky rice inside of an intestate, and then they have a sausage inside. They put tons of toppings in. It's almost like a Chinese intestine sticky rice hot dog.
CORNISH: That's a lot of information just there (laughter).
HUANG: Yeah. It was one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten in my life - like, easily top ten. And sometimes in America, we're afraid to play with our food within the same pantry. And what I mean is, I'm not into fusion. I'm not into a Subway teriyaki sub, right?
CORNISH: (Laughter).
HUANG: That's not my thing. I get the meatball sub at Subway. But I think that food is language. Just like any other language, it has a system. It has a structure. It has references it draws from, and it has values.
And so you can bring your experience to it, but sometimes people clunk them together like Legos. But I like when food comes from an experience. And when you go to China, you'll see that there are new experiences, and as that society changes, so does their food.
CORNISH: Whenever someone does a memoir, it is revealing, right (laughter)?
HUANG: Yeah.
CORNISH: And you're putting yourself out there. And you put out there your fears about having a non-Asian child, your fears of feeling like a fraud. Really, it was like you were rethinking your assimilation in a way that was surprising to me - right? - in a way that seemed different from the guy who brought me "Fresh Off The Boat" and was, like, really into black and hip-hop culture. Did you find yourself rethinking how you thought about these things over the years?
HUANG: Growing up in America, so many Chinese people call you American. In my case, they called me black. And I not only didn't fit in going back to Taiwan or going back to China, but I didn't even fit in in the Chinese-American schools I'd go to on Sundays. And it was very tough, and I was always made to feel like not only was I not American. I was also not Chinese. And this was me going home and really grappling with my own fears, my own insecurities about identity and asking people in the homeland what they thought.
But what I started to realize is, it doesn't matter what Americans thought of me or Chinese people thought of me. It just matters what you think. It's OK to not fit into any boxes or silos. And as much as I've fought against it, as much as I've railed against it, I realized I was the one that felt the most alien 'cause I didn't fit into them.
Part of me was always like, damn, I'm weird. I'm never going to fit in. But this trip, going to China, I really learned to accept and love myself and let somebody else love me. And it was a huge part of my life.
CORNISH: That was Eddie Huang talking to us last year about his memoir "Double Cup Love."
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