How to American Read online

  Most American kids would have probably rebelled and said, “Screw you, Dad! You’re not the boss of me!” But I couldn’t. Disrespecting your elders was the ultimate sin in Chinese culture. And most of all, I empathized with my dad. Mom was gone and my brother was in college; I was the only thread in our family that he could hang on to. I couldn’t bear the burden of leaving my dad alone for dinner. As much as I wanted to hang out at Jeremy’s house, I went home for dinner with my dad every night.

  BET RAP CITY

  Jeremy, Phil and Chris were big fans of rappers like 2Pac, Snoop Dogg and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. I had never heard of any of those names before, and I felt left out whenever they talked about this hip-hop music. My dad always complained that rap music was too noisy and it sounded like “Buddhist monks reciting a poem.” We grew up listening to Michael Jackson, Madonna and the Eagles. I knew nothing about hip-hop; I didn’t even know 2Pac was dead. But I wanted to fit in with my friends, so I started consuming any hip-hop I could find. That’s when I discovered BET.

  BET stands for Black Entertainment Television; it is an American television network for the urban community. I later learned that urban is just another word for black people. BET featured urban TV series, urban music and urban gospel on Sundays. Tuning into BET was like opening Pandora’s box to a whole new American world. I went from watching cartoons on Nickelodeon to studying Rap City on BET. I was mesmerized by the colorful hip-hop culture. Every day, rappers like 50 Cent would come on Rap City wearing XXXL basketball jerseys, with massive diamond chains on their necks, and count down the best urban music videos. Each music video was a portal into a whole new world that I’d never seen before. When I saw Jay-Z’s Big Pimpin’ music video for the first time, it changed my life. For those of you who don’t remember Big Pimpin’, or are too white to be aware of it, Big Pimpin’ was the greatest music video of all time. It featured hundreds of beautiful women in bikinis partying on a million-dollar yacht, as three rappers named Jay-Z, Bun B and Pimp C poured champagne on them for four minutes straight. And the girls were all loving it! My fifteen-year-old immigrant brain couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This is America? I’m fucking in! Big Pimpin’ was the epitome of the American dream and I needed to be part of it. I wanted to be like these larger-than-life American superheroes they called rappers. I wanted to be a pimp like Jay-Z and a gangster like 50 Cent. I made it my life’s goal to live the Big Pimpin’ lifestyle. Whenever I watched BET, I forgot I was a small foreign Chinese boy and I felt like a badass gangsta. I started imitating how the rappers walked and how they talked. I would go up to my classmates and say, “Yo what up, dog. Our geometry teacher is a bitch, homie.” I learned how to speak proper American English from watching BET. I consumed at least three hours of music videos a day. These music videos were snippets of different versions of the American dream. They shaped my adolescence and they inspired me way beyond my high school years. Aside from Big Pimpin’, here are some of my favorite music videos that taught me about America.

  TOP FIVE HIP-HOP MUSIC VIDEOS

  1. Sisqó—Thong Song. “Baby! That thong thong thong thong thong!” This was one of the first songs I heard on American radio. It was catchy as hell, but I had no idea what a thong was. Then when I saw the music video, everything made sense. There was so much booty in that video that I almost slapped the TV. I didn’t even know booty was a point of attraction on the opposite sex. Nobody had booties like that in Hong Kong. I learned what “thick” meant as a compliment, and I got a whole new appreciation for thick girls after watching this video.

  2. Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz—Get Low. “369 Damn She Fine!” This was America’s introduction to crunk music. It was high-energy southern hip-hop with a sense of humor. I sang that every day in school. “Till all skeet skeet skeet skeet!” It took me a year to realize what skeet actually meant. This song was a quintessential soundtrack of my high school years. We even gave one girl in school the nickname “369” because, well… Damn she fine!

  3. 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg—P.I.M.P. I didn’t know what a pimp truly meant until I saw this music video. I looked it up in a dictionary and pimping seemed to be an illegal activity. 50 Cent and Snoop Dogg gave pimping a new meaning. They were strutting with their pimp canes, riding in a Rolls-Royce and dancing with the most beautiful girls. A P.I.M.P is simply a man who is living the American dream. Pimp became the ultimate compliment. Everybody wanted to be a pimp.

  4. Big Tymers—Still Fly. Birdman and Mannie Fresh defined hood rich. This whole song was basically the dictionary description for hood rich. “Gator boots with my pimped out Gucci suits, ain’t got no job, but I stay sharp.” I might never understand that mentality to spend what you don’t have, but it was awesome to see two ballers on a budget.

  5. Nelly—Country Grammar. Nelly brought out the whole neighborhood in St. Louis in this video. There weren’t any Rolls-Royces or yachts. It was hundreds of people dancing at a block party with Cadillacs and St. Louis BBQ. They looked like they were having more fun with nothing fancy at all. This was the American neighborhood party I wanted to be at. It was the hip-hop party I could relate to.

  Another BET show that absolutely fascinated me was Comicview. It was an “urban” stand-up comedy showcase with “urban” stand-up comedians performing in front of an “urban” audience, talking about “urban” stereotypes. This was my first exposure to stand-up comedy. It was more than just funny to me; it was unrestrained, dynamic and culturally relevant. I couldn’t really understand what the comedians were saying and I was lost on the stereotypes they were referring to. It was like a whole new language to me. I had no concept of the credit system in America, let alone the stereotype of black people having bad credit; I didn’t understand why white people were always doing crazy things, like skydiving and hiking, that black people would never do; and I didn’t understand what it meant when a comedian said, “Mama trippin’.” Did his mom trip and fall over on the floor? Is she okay? Even though I couldn’t understand half of the bits, I was enthralled by the performances. Comicview was a slice of real American culture that I’d never known before. I thought to myself, If I can understand Comicview, I will understand everything about America. So I watched BET Comicview religiously for three years. And I learned about this country from the realest American educators: comedians. They weren’t just telling jokes, they were making insightful observations from a unique point of view. Rap City taught me American English; Comicview enlightened me about American culture. These shows had such a huge influence on my life. I soon found my first love in making hip-hop music before I eventually became a stand-up comedian.

  I couldn’t rap for shit, but I wanted so badly to be part of the glamorous rap game that I’d seen on Rap City. Chris downloaded a bootleg copy of Sony’s ACID Music Studio, a beat-making software, and he started cranking out some sick beats. Then Jeremy, Phil and I would go to Chris’s mom’s apartment and record our raps on his five-dollar computer microphone. Next thing you know, we’d formed a rap group just like N.W.A. Chris’s mom’s apartment and his Dell desktop became our recording studio. We felt like the real deal and we called ourselves Syndakit. The first time I recorded at Chris’s house, he played me a beat he had just made. It sounded like a real track I’d heard on Rap City. I pulled out my trigonometry notebook and I was ready to write my first rhymes, but I had no idea where to start.

  “So… what do I write?”

  “Just write anything you want.” Chris was the Dr. Dre to my Eazy-E.

  “How much do I write?”

  “I think you need sixteen bars.”

  I understood that “bars” were some kind of quantifier for lyrics and not Snickers, but is a bar one word? Is it a full sentence? Or can it be a fragment? Chris saw the confusion on my face, and he explained:

  “One bar is one line that is four beats.”

  “Oh, yeah, totally, I got that.”

  I had no idea what a beat was. This was like one of those stupid dictionary descriptions where
they explain a word with the same word you don’t understand. Pathological—of or relating to pathology. If I knew what pathology meant I wouldn’t have asked for the definition of pathology! But I went with it. I flipped past the trigonometry homework in my notebook, and started writing down my first sixteen bars.

  Don’t hate the player ’cause the player don’t play, haters talk shit but the bullet stays.

  And those were the first two bars I ever wrote. It was two uninspired, fraudulent lines copied from what I’d heard on BET. What bullet? I was an A student in Beverly Hills High School. I should have been rapping about the Pythagorean theorem. But I wanted to be a gangsta-ass rapper, so I rapped about sex, drugs and gangbanging. In reality, I was a virgin who had a seven o’clock curfew. I scribbled down another fourteen bars of garbage and I was ready to make my first gangsta rap song. Chris held up the five-dollar computer mic and I started spitting my sixteen bars. Two seconds in, Chris stopped me.

  “What happened?” I was curious as to why he had stopped my incredible flow.

  “You’re not on beat.”

  “What do you mean I’m not on beat?”

  I wasn’t challenging him; I actually didn’t know what being on beat meant.

  “Jimmy, you have to rap to the rhythm of the music.”

  I had no idea that I was supposed to be matching the rhythm of the music. I was literally just talking over the music. When Chris played me the beat again, I mechanically bobbed my head to the kicks and snares, but I couldn’t follow the tempo. And that’s when I realized that this was exactly what the Comicview comedians meant when they said, “White people got no rhythm.” This Chinese boy got no rhythm.

  When the other kids were busy chasing girls and scoring booze, we went to Chris’s house to make music. The thought of maybe getting on BET Rap City one day gave us something to strive for, but more importantly, making music gave us an identity. We weren’t the random kids who hung out by the cafeteria anymore; we were now the kids who made hip-hop. We made a full-length rap album with that five-dollar microphone and we pushed those CDs to everyone we knew in class. We’d burn the CDs and each carry a Walkman in class, showing people the songs. “Hey, check out our tracks, get it before we blow up. We gonna go platinum, homie.” That was my sales pitch. I think we ended up selling three copies of the album for a total proceed of fifteen dollars, so technically we were only 499,997 records away from going platinum. We made just enough money to recoup for the five-dollar computer mic and a ten-dollar stack of CD-ROMs.

  The Syndakit gang. Jeremy (top right), Phil (bottom right), Chris (bottom left). Throwing up random gang signs that we’d seen on BET. Needless to say, I never got laid in high school.

  We even performed at the battle of the bands in our high school wearing ridiculous iron-on matching Syndakit T-shirts. Most people thought we were completely ridiculous, and rightfully so, but it was the first time anyone even noticed us. A skinny half-white guy, two Persian dudes and a Chinese immigrant rapping about gangster shit. We looked more like a sketch comedy group than a rap group.

  Chris decided to take music more seriously, so he recruited two other friends from our school to our rap group who could actually rap: Yuji, a half-black, half-Japanese dude who acted like two black dudes, and Julian, a quietly cool black dude who was a great rapper. Jeremy, Phil and I would eventually get fazed out of Chris’s songs, and rightfully so; we sucked. So I took matters into my own hands and downloaded a bootleg beat-making program called Fruity Loops and started to make my own beats. I came up with a producer name, Doc West. An uninspired attempt to combine my two favorite hip-hop producers’ names, Dr. Dre and Kanye West. I sat in front of my computer for four hours a day in an attempt to come up with something decent. Then in an ultimate coup d’état, I recruited Julian and Yuji to join my own rap group. The three of us would be a perfect balance of 1.5 Asian guys and 1.5 black guys. I named our rap group the

  YELLOW PANTHERS

  In hindsight, I’m very surprised nobody beat me up for coming up with that name. I guess I have always been more of a comedian than a musician. Yellow Panthers forever!

  I was the worst rapper alive; I didn’t even have the concept of a bar or a beat. That’s like a car mechanic who has never heard of an engine or a transmission. I wanted to live the rapper lifestyle, but I didn’t know the first thing about rap. I wasn’t an artist; I was a fraud. But in the process of struggling to stay on beat, I discovered my first creative outlet. It didn’t matter if our songs were going to make it on the Billboard Hot 100 Chart; we felt like we were making something of ourselves. With bootleg software, a five-dollar microphone, and some shitty lyrics, we made something out of nothing. Best of all, we didn’t need permission to make this. There were no rules. It felt like the opposite of everything I had to follow in school and in my family. I smelled the independent spirit of hip-hop: it smelled like America, which I guess happened to smell like the fumes coming out of an old Dell computer. For the first time, I felt like I was freely frolicking in the streets without parental supervision like an American kid.

  TOO COOL FOR PROM, BUT NOT REALLY

  I never got a record deal, but I experienced creative freedom for the first time. I still was nowhere close to being popular. I never went to any fancy Beverly Hills High School house parties, I never smoked weed in front of the swim gym and I never went to prom. Not that I didn’t want to do those things; I never got invited to them. I spent the rest of my high school career holding on to the music; it was the only thing that kept me from being a complete loser.

  I wanted to go to prom with a high school sweetheart. I mean who wouldn’t? But I had no date in sight, so I just said fuck it and pretended to be a cool antisocial kid who didn’t care about prom. A part of me felt like I was missing out in life, but the other part convinced myself, Who cares? You were never trying to fit in anyways. Own the coolness of being a rebel badass who don’t give a shit about prom. I remember the night everyone else went to prom. I was just sitting at home watching MADtv with my dad. We loved that show and we’ve always preferred it over SNL. My dad always got very excited when the hilarious Bobby Lee came on-screen; any Asian person who made it on American television was a big deal. At that time, it was just Bobby Lee and Yao Ming. That night, my dad never asked me, “Hey, why aren’t you going to prom?” He didn’t even know what prom was. If he did know about it, he’d probably call it stupid American bullshit, especially if he found out how much money he’d have to fork out for my tux rental.

  The only person that ever pressured me to go to prom was Phil’s mom, a nice Persian woman named Fariba. During my senior year, every time I went over to Phil’s house, Fariba would say to me:

  “Jimmy, you have to go to prom, it’s a once in a lifetime experience!”

  “Fariba, it’s okay, I don’t want to spend the money.” I didn’t want to tell her the actual reason was I didn’t have a date in sight.

  “Jimmy Joon [Joon is an endearing term you put after someone’s name in Farsi], I’ll pay the money, you have to go, or you will regret it your whole life.”An all-expenses-paid prom still doesn’t sound that great if you don’t have a date.

  “Fariba Joon,” I jokingly responded, “nemi khom,” which is Farsi for “I don’t want.” I fended Fariba off for the rest of the year with the Farsi phrases I picked up from hanging out with my Persian friends, which was the official second language of Beverly Hills High School.

  Maybe I’m still in denial, but I never regretted not going to prom. One thing I really did want to do in high school was to join the football team. I wanted to live the all-American dream of scoring a touchdown under the Friday night lights and spiking the ball in the end zone. I was pretty fast and had some actual ball skills; my dream was to play kick return like my hero Dante Hall. He was a five-foot-six kick return specialist who played for the Kansas City Chiefs. He weaved and juked defensive players twice his size and scored hundred-yard touchdowns without ever getting touched. I was also fi
ve-foot-six and I thought I could be like Dante. So I went to my dad and asked him to sign the waiver for me to play football. He never even considered it for a moment; he just laughed right in my face.

  “You? Football? Come on.”

  “But, Dad, I’m fast and—”

  “I’m not signing a paper that’ll make you die.”

  And he was probably right. I was a hundred pounds soaking wet. I would have gotten concussed just sitting on the bench. My body was never destined to play anything more than a serious game of Ping-Pong.

  I eventually graduated high school as a bona fide virgin with a 3.9 GPA. People might have remembered me as the ridiculous rapper kid who watched too much BET, but I was no longer the weird foreign kid. I never got to slow-dance with my lover at prom or play football at homecoming, but I had an authentic American high school experience. I found a group of friends who came from every part of the world and we bonded over Jay-Z. To me, that is more American than scoring a touchdown at homecoming.

  THE PINNACLE OF MY MUSIC CAREER

  Years later, when I was in college, I hit the pinnacle of my music career. I received a phone call from an unknown number. I picked up the phone and a man with a gravelly voice asked:

  “Are you Doc West?”

  “Yes, that’s me.” I was ecstatic that it was a call for hip-hop producer Doc West, not Jimmy.

  “That’s great. I heard your beats online, I love them.”

  Is this a dream? “Thank you, sir.”

  Then he introduced himself. “My name is Laronn James.”

  “Excuse me? YOU are Lebron James!?” I almost shitted myself.