Fresh Off the Boat (23 page)

“Yo, that article was powerful, man! We need that voice on the board.”

“Respect! I’m glad you fuck with it, but I’m not an institutional cat. I’ll complain about it, but I’ll never be part of it.”

“I don’t get it, dude, we’d be giving you a platform?!”

“Look, man, I’ll never be ‘Asian’ enough for the people in this club.”

“Son, you playin’ yourself, you mad Asian! You know everything about the food, you speak fluently, you been back to Taiwan, you more Chinese than all these cats.”

“Yeah, but it’s different than what these ABCs expect. My pops isn’t an engineer or doctor; he got an automatic he used to put on my head while I watched cartoons.”

“What’s that have to do with anything?”

“Everything! Dude, do you listen to the people in these meetings? They’re all dying to live under the bamboo ceiling and subscribe to the model-minority myth; I’m not OK with that shit. They don’t understand that in China, Taiwan, or the Philippines, we can be whoever we want. In America, we’re allowed to play ONE role, the eunuch who can count. You seen
Romeo Must Die
! Jet Li gets NO PUSSY!”

Whenever I tried to articulate what I really felt about being Chinese in America, my dad said I sounded like a slant-eyed Malcolm X. He’d always tell me not to talk like that in public because Americans would try to silence me. In Florida that made sense, so I played dumb, but college was supposed to be the place where you could have liberal ideas so I figured I’d drop the “dumb” act and speak my mind.

After a year, I decided to transfer home to any college in Orlando that would have me, but before I left Pittsburgh I got a lesson on Italian food that changed my life. It was .45-cal Cliff who taught me. The university was in the Oakland section of Pittsburgh, but Cliff was from the other side. One day after playing ball at Trees, he took me to the Italian diner that he grew up eating at. I scanned the menu looking for my standbys—chicken parm or sausage and peppers—but before I could figure out what I wanted, Cliff summoned the waiter over and ordered for both of us.

“Two orders cavatelli and red sauce.”

“Can I get some sausage in mine?”

“Fine, we’ll allow him the sausage in the cavatelli, but let’s also get two slices of cake.”

The cavatelli came out different than I’d ever seen before. It was chewy, with good texture, and lopsided. You could tell they were handmade, which was a rare treat. But the sauce seemed boring, just stewed tomatoes with a little basil and salt. No oregano, no rosemary, no ground meat, just a few pieces of Italian sausage sprinkled in. I didn’t get it.

“Yo, Cliff, why is the tomato sauce so bland? It’s just salt and tomatoes, kid.”

“Just eat it.”

I didn’t want to diss his food so I just kept eating it … and eating it … and eating it. It was endless. I’d never had to chew that much eating pasta, but it had its charm. Every bite gave perfect bouncy, textural mouthfeel that remained amazingly consistent from piece to piece. Just chewy enough without being dense or heavy. The sauce was inoffensive, it was there, but unobtrusive. By the time I finished the bowl, I wanted another. Cliff nodded. His bowl was empty, too.

“Another two bowls, same thing, please.”

In that little Italian diner tucked onto an anonymous street in western Pennsylvania, I learned that there were universal food truths. Every culture had dishes that prized the simple and traditional over showy flavors and elaborate presentations. The things that may not seem worthy on first look, but over time become an indispensable part of your life. If you grow up in an immigrant culture, there are going to be foods you eat that other people just don’t get. Not the universal crowd-pleasers—the fried chickens and soup dumplings—but the everyday stuff. We Southerners, for instance, love grits, boiled peanuts, and fried okra but nobody else understands. For Chinese people, it’s things like rice porridge, thousand-year-old eggs, or tomato and eggs. Simple things that don’t impress at first look, but instead offer nuance: strange textures and sublime flavors that reveal their charm over the years. The things people left off menus, only to find an audience during family meal.

Whether it’s food or women, the ones on front street are supermodels. Big hair, big tits, big trouble, but the one you come home to is probably something like cavatelli and red sauce. She’s not screaming for attention because she knows she’s good enough even if your dumb ass hasn’t figured it out yet.

The best dishes have depth without doing too much. It’s not about rounding up all the seasonal ingredients you can find, it’s about paying close attention to the ones you already have. You don’t need anything more than a few tomatoes, onions, and maybe a country rib, but simple tomato sauce requires patience: you sear the country rib, wait the twenty-five minutes it takes to caramelize onions, boil the tomatoes, peel the tomatoes, and then watch them stew the requisite hour and finish with just the lightest touch of fresh basil, salt, and olive oil. What more do you need? Patience, attention, and restraint are the keys to good cooking. That night, I learned everything I needed to know about food eating a bowl of cavatelli and red sauce with some Yinz pizza delivery boy rockin’ a do-rag. America, I fux with you.

My food education continued that summer, when I went to my friend TJ’s crib in Lewiston, New York, right outside of Buffalo. TJ’s mom made the best sausage and peppers I’d ever had from an oven. I had never seen sausage and peppers roasted before because usually people did them on griddles or sauté pans. Her food was the other end of the spectrum, but every bit as delicious. I watched how she roasted garlic to the perfect consistency. It’s harder than you’d think: not enough time and the garlic is too sharp; if you over-roast, the garlic is mushy and too sweet, but done right it’s rich, meaty, and laced with a sweet caramel tone that lingers. Fold that into your sauce, hit it with some dry white wine, fresh herbs, peppers roasted until tender but not soft, and you have the perfect sauce. Her food jumped off the plate. The flavors were big, deep, kid-dynamite-Mike-Tyson-knock-you-out-the-box shit. But, again, she didn’t add any crazy herbs or vegetables. It was classic sausage, peppers, onions, and unassuming fresh herbs done right. Every single aspect was considered. I loved seeing food at that level in someone’s home. You pick through the dish to
see how the flavors were created and you realize at every layer of the dish, it was all about patience and awareness. If any element was ignored or dismissed, it wouldn’t be the same. Those sausage and peppers were like Wu-Tang, nine crazy motherfuckers all on the same page firing at the same time. Perfection.

TJ’s people later took me to their favorite spot for pasta and I revisited the revelation I had with Cliff: boring red sauce, lumpy handmade gnocchi, and flake salt on the table. No server coming around with cracked pepper or parmesan, just eat the shit as is. It reminded me of my mother’s minced pork on rice, the de facto national dish of Taiwan when you inexplicably don’t want to eat tofu cured with rotten cabbage (stinky tofu). The gnocchi was “q q”
^‡
just like a well-made bowl of short-grain and sweet rice that provided the perfect canvas for minced pork. I remember how Moms mixed the pork belly with ground shoulder as if she were Voletta Wallace on that Jamaican rum and whiskey. Minced pork stew employed things like five-spice, fried shallots, rice wine, and rock candy, but at the finish line, it all came together as one simple, unassuming gravy that revealed its character bowl after bowl just like red sauce. Cliff and TJ taught me a lot about Italian food and it became one of my favorites.

I remember riding out of Pittsburgh in Allen’s Civic the last day of school. I said peace to Graham and Cliff thinking I’d see them again, but it wasn’t so. When Allen and I crossed the bridge over Three Rivers I looked down and saw all of Pittsburgh. I always loved coming into Pittsburgh, coming down the bridge, and around the bend descending into Oakland, but it was a relief to get out that day. College just wasn’t live enough for me. It felt like some fantasy world incubating the future gentrifiers of America while the rest of the world did its thing. The whole idea of a campus felt unnatural to me. A lot of kids liked being insulated, but I hated living in a reverse retirement home with a bunch of kids who constantly asked me how to fade hair and cop ecstasy. I wanted to go home. I
missed my family, I missed the Gunshine State, and I missed my homies. I couldn’t wait to get home and hotbox Mike’s Toyota Celica with a fat philly blunt, eating Triscuit sandwiches and frozen bagel pizzas and playing NBA 2K with Pastor Troy screamin’ “We ready!” through the speakers. What I didn’t realize was that there was nothing left for me in Orlando.

W
hen I got back to Orlando, it was like nothing had changed. Warren was gone, but Justin, Romaen, Austin, Lil’ Cra, Muschewske, Ben, and Jared were all still around, just chillin’. I burned all evidence of Aeropostale
^*
and got back on that flip-flops and socks with shants game. When I told them I was going to Rollins College, they all started laughing. We never went down near Winter Park ’cause Rollins was the “country club,” a pipeline school for kids from New England boarding schools who couldn’t get into the Ivy Leagues. If you had paper and bad grades, you could go to Rollins. It was mentioned in
American Psycho
and the most apt quote I ever heard was “Rollins is where you send your daughter so nothing happens to her and if something does happen to her, it’s from the right guy.” I didn’t care. I figured I’d just take class, mind my own business, and hang with my old friends. College wasn’t for me.

Sadly, the same shit I tried to escape was alive and well even at a small liberal arts school. Every single party was thrown by frats. It didn’t bother
me though ’cause I’d just roll with my homies and crash the parties. That first night at Rollins we realized something; we could get money here.

“Yo, Denny, these kids are marks.”

“You tellin’ me? I came with the footballs,
^†
they eatin’ ’em up.”

“I’m sayin’, let’s get this paper.”

Denny was my boy since eighth grade; we played on the same YMCA basketball team but in high school he dropped out and just hustled with all the Lake Cane kids. Denny introduced me to Danny Diaz and this Chino named Allen who didn’t even go to school. That cat was a futuristic Chinaman with gold fronts and a pit bull named Jade. It was one of the first times I saw an Asian kid that was rotten-banana’d out like me and we recognized each other from jump.

Allen had a crib out in the woods off Sand Lake Road that you couldn’t see from the street. It was just him, his girl, and Jade. Allen wore that deep yellow Asian 24k gold that everyone wanted. Twenty-four-k is pure gold, it’s easy to break ’cause it’s soft, but if you ball that’s what you need. Everyone knew you had to go to Chinatown if you wanted that cheez-whiz Cuban link. Russians stay on that 18 to 20k, broke mofuckers cop 14, but Asians wanted that 24k pure soft yellow. I remember when Ghostface came to UCF and the first thing his manager, Vel, said to my brother Evan was, “Where you get that gold g? Shit is deep!” Allen and his 24k were always on point and consistent so I never needed another connect.

I didn’t have a car when I came home so I got a dorm room at Rollins and used it as home base for my hustle. Most kids at that school weren’t local and got their work from this Indian kid Samir, who lived off-campus. He was pitchin’ borax to the entire campus, but wasn’t really serious, a Winter Park kid selling turkey bag
^‡
bullshit and stepped-on yack. Through Allen and Denny, I set up like Duane Reade on campus: I had Xanax, Vics, e, and sour diesel. Cokeheads were extra and I wasn’t trying to come up that hard so I stayed out of the coke game. If they wanted the white girl, I sent ’em to my boy PC, who posted up at the gas station.

A month in, I found this kid Troy Perkins. He was on full athletic
scholarship to Rollins but for some reason he rolled with this Tibetan kid, Yani, who was loud and reckless. I remember the first time Yani ran up on me at a party talkin’ about wanting work and having customers ready to go. I told him he needed to calm down, look, and listen. After a few weeks of getting to know them, I started keeping the work at Troy’s house off-campus. No one knew where he lived, the school never messed with him, and his complex was quiet. For about fifteen months, I kept the work at Troy’s and we never had problems. All he wanted was a cut.

Yani, Troy, and this kid Joe Randall all wanted to hustle but they were new in town and had no contacts so I was the only source they knew. If I was really going to make bread, I needed a crew. That’s where this Irish kid Krazy Kris came in. Kris was wild. He was a lot like Graham: he was from Philly, DJ’d, had turntables and stacks of records, and made his own tapes. On top of that, he was in a frat, which gave us a direct line to the biggest marks.

The first few weeks were the hardest. I ended up giving dimes away like Bourbon Chicken at the mall so people could get a taste. Most people are already copping from someone else. The only reason they’d check me out was to try something new—and if I didn’t have that, they already had someone else to call. I’d smoke whatever went dry. Everything I served was sticky, fluffy, no sticks, no stems, no seeds. When business was slow, my trick was to throw a piece of lettuce in every ounce. Never failed, it’d add weight, keep the weed fluffy, and no one could tell the water came from lettuce.

Every game is the same. Baos, birds, or bud, you do everything you can up front to get them in a habit, then just don’t do anything to disturb it. Set a pattern, get them into an expectation about how you gonna move, and everybody settles in. The key is not to run with people who can’t be consistent. Joe Randall was the weak link and I had to keep him focused because he didn’t actually need the money. When it comes to those dudes, you gotta keep an eye on ’em, don’t give them more than they can handle, and try to contain it. If he sold short bags, was late, or just didn’t show for some people, I’d send them to Krazy Kris the next time. Once Randall saw he lost people, he got his shit together. Same strategy in restaurants: if you fuck around and don’t close down or work the line properly, you lose
shifts. Never fails, the dude’s next shift is always perfect. I pay people the respect of talking to them the first time, but if they don’t get it, I stunt their money. Who knew selling weed to frat boy marks was this serious? My crew was on some Little Giants shit. If you think it’s hard to find good delivery boys at Chinese restaurants, try teaching New England boarding school toy dogs to move like pit bulls. Worst in show.