How to American Read online

  “Oh man, this is strong.”

  “You never smoked chewy before, huh?”

  “No, I don’t think so. What is it?”

  “It’s weed with cocaine sprinkled on it.”

  My eyes went wide. I’m sure it was a combination of shock and the cocaine coursing down my bloodstream. He made cocaine sound like an ice cream topping. I had never done coke before, and I’d just smoked it in a joint with a random dude on a bicycle in a park across from my dad’s retiree apartment. I panicked. “I got to go.” I got up and speed-walked home in an effort to sober up. I couldn’t throw up something I’d smoked, and I couldn’t water it down either, so I just lay in my bed with my heart pounding faster than Floyd Mayweather hitting a speed bag.

  I didn’t know what a panic attack was at the time; I thought I was having a full-blown heart attack. My dad was watching TV in his bedroom, no idea his son just smoked a cocaine-laced joint. I had a decision to make. Should I wait it out and hope my heart doesn’t blow out of my chest? Or should I tell my dad I did some cocaine so he can take me to the hospital? The first choice could mean death; the second choice would come with a lifetime of shame. As a proper Asian, I chose death over shame. I hopped into the shower to try to calm myself down. I took a forty-five-minute shower, twice, and my heart was still jumping out of my throat. I lay down on the couch and turned on SportsCenter on ESPN. The familiar voices of Stan Verrett and Neil Everett eased my panic and I started to dose off. I gave myself a fifty-fifty chance of waking up, scared to my core that I’d sleep forever. When I did manage to wake up the next morning, I wasn’t sure if I was still living or I had gone to hell where the TV is permanently stuck on ESPN. Actually, I could argue that’d be heaven for me.

  I started praying to Jesus after this near-death experience. “Lord, thank you for saving me from smoking chewy—that’s a joint laced with cocaine, in case you’ve never heard of that.” I felt my life going down an even steeper spiral. When I went back to school, I spent most of my sophomore year locked inside of my room, trying to not die again. I needed to do something drastic to snap out of this slump.

  FOREIGN FOREIGN EXCHANGE STUDENT

  In my junior year at UCSD, I moved into an apartment in San Diego with my high school friends, Phil from the lunch table, who also went to UCSD, and our mutual friend Bobby, who also went to Beverly Hills High School. Bobby’s specialty was peer pressure. Whenever I didn’t want to go out with him, he’d put on a full-court press. “Come on, Jimmy, don’t be a pussy. Jimmy, come on, man, why are you being like that?” And he wouldn’t stop until I went with him. It was annoying at times, but I desperately needed someone like Bobby to pull me out of my funk. One day, Bobby threw out a grandiose idea:

  “Jimmy, let’s go study abroad in Italy.”

  “What? No way. Studying abroad is for rich white girls, I can’t afford to go to Italy.” Really, I didn’t want to go because I was scared of yet another change. Since I moved to America, my whole life had been a study-abroad trip.

  “Come on, Jimmy, why are you being like that? We are going to go to Italy and drink wine, eat pasta and hang out with hot Italian girls. Jimmy, come on, don’t be a pussy.”

  A month later, I was sitting on a plane next to Bobby on the way to Italy. I took out an extra twenty thousand dollars in student loans and we spent the next semester in Florence.

  It was yet another new start for me. The great thing about studying abroad was that I wasn’t the only foreign kid; everyone was the foreign kid. While everyone tried to get used to the new country, I’d already had a master class in assimilation. Bobby and I shared an apartment with a group of fellow study-abroad students from all over the States. Tim was a fashionable gay man from Florida; Nick was a straightforward New Yorker; Josh was a streetwise chef from Wisconsin; and Alex was a half-Korean, half-white hippie from San Francisco. It was like a season of The Real World minus the hot tub. We were all from different parts of America, but we all felt like foreigners in Italy. While everyone felt like a fish out of water, I felt right in my element.

  The Italians were not as politically correct as people in America. I passed by the Florentine flea market when I walked back to our apartment every day. The merchants peddled everything from overpriced truffle oil to miniature souvenir statues of David. It was a tourist trap and I looked like an easy target. Every time I walked by the market, the Italian merchants would greet me with three different greetings from three different Asian languages. “Konichiwa!” “Ni hao!” “Annyeong!” But they’d never just say, “Hi, how are you?” in English. Then I’d turn to the merchants and say, “Yeah, good day to you too, sir.” One merchant continued the charade with a bow and said, “Xie xie.” I wanted to respond, “Xie xie to your madre, bitch.” But I restrained myself. Even though I was an American student who spoke better English than them, they still insisted I was a Chinese tourist.

  Aside from a few konichiwas from ignorant merchants, studying abroad was an absolutely amazing life-changing experience. I took classes that were barely classes. I had a wine-tasting class where we got drunk on high-end wine every week; a food critique class where our homework was to eat at amazing restaurants and write about it; an architecture class where we browsed the historical Florentine sites like tourists; and a class called History of the Mafia. Yes, that was the real name of a real class, where we literally watched The Godfather: Part II with our ex-mafioso teacher. It was more like a summer camp than school. None of these credits transferred back to my economics degree in UCSD, but who cares? I was having the time of my life. I forgot about my near-death chewy experience and my near-deportation episode in Tijuana. Every weekend we’d visit a different city or a different country: Rome, Milan, Amsterdam, Dublin or Barcelona. We partied at the coolest Italian nightclubs and smoked hash in front of the Santa Croce church; being sacrilegious never felt so good. It was exactly what I needed to break out of my funk. I felt the world had finally opened up and I was no longer trapped under my Chinese family rules, my boring college curriculum and the confines of a dreadful retirement home. It was the first time I felt the freedom of being an American, and I had to go to Italy to find it.

  When I came home to the States, I felt like I was coming to America for the first time again. I’d forgotten how wide the streets were in California, and I’d forgotten how to dress like a Californian. Everyone was driving down the Pacific Coast Highway wearing T-shirts and sandals, and I was trying to walk three miles to the grocery store rocking an Italian blazer. The study-abroad trip was such an amazing experience; it raised the bar for my standard of living. It made me not ever want to go back to my inadequate life back home. I felt a purposeful depression. I wasn’t sad; I was unsatisfied. I wanted more out of life. I needed to step my life up.

  THE BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD GUY

  The college graduation ceremony felt more like a deadline than a celebration. It marked the day when I’d go from being a student to officially becoming an unemployed adult. After my trip to Florence, I didn’t want to settle for any mundane job like I settled for a mundane college experience. But what should I do with my life? How am I supposed to find a job if I don’t even know what I want to do? I didn’t want to go to my graduation ceremony. And I was also very hung over from the night before when I tried to drink my problems away. I planned to pop Advils and watch SportsCenter in my bed all day, and then of course, Bobby gave me no choice.

  “Hey, dude, let’s go to the graduation together.”

  “Nah, I can’t sit in the sun for four hours with a hangover.”

  “Come on, Jimmy, don’t be a pussy. The guy from Beavis and Butt-Head is going to be the commencement speaker. It’s going to be awesome.”

  “The Beavis and Butt-Head guy?”

  The Beavis and Butt-Head guy was, of course, Mike Judge, the man who created Beavis and Butt-Head, King of the Hill, Office Space, and the man who’d eventually create an HBO show called Silicon Valley.

  I watched Beavis and Butt-Head whe
n I first came to America. Even though I didn’t have a strong grasp on the English language yet, it made me laugh out loud with the way it was drawn and its weird sayings. I had no idea what Cornholio meant, but “I am Cornholio, I need teepee for my bunghole” was absolutely hilarious. Beavis and Butt-Head and The Simpsons were the only shows I watched that weren’t on BET.

  I didn’t think anybody cool ever graduated from UCSD. So I dragged my ass to the graduation ceremony with a pounding headache. Our chancellor, Marye Anne Fox, kicked off the commencement ceremony with a quote: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” It was the lamest quote from A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. I immediately started to regret coming to this ceremony.

  She droned on for another five minutes with generic “inspirational” remarks, and it felt like two hours with my massive hangover. Finally, they introduced Mike Judge. Mike looked way different than I had imagined. He was an athletic middle-aged dude with a sleekly shaved head, dressed in a polished black suit. He looked more like Jason Statham in The Transporter than the guy who drew Beavis and Butt-Head. He came up to the microphone in front of a thousand graduating students. “Ahh-huhuhuhu.” He opened with the classic Butt-Head noise and continued in Beavis’s voice. “Graduating class of 2009, hee-hee-hee.” Then he switched gears to the familiar Hank Hill voice. “Boy, I tell you what, Class of 2009. It is indeed my pleasure to be with you this afternoon.” Then Boomhauer came to life. “The dang ol’ Chancellor Fox, man, the dang ol’ thank you very much.” The crowd lit up and I forgot I had a hangover.

  Mike talked about how he graduated UCSD with a physics degree because that’s what everyone said he should do. “Our high school guidance counselor and adults in general had us all convinced that if we just got a degree in science, jobs would just come raining out of the sky.” He had always wanted to do comedy but didn’t think it was really possible. After graduating, he settled for a job in Silicon Valley, during the original tech boom in the eighties. He soon realized he couldn’t deal with the cultish, overachieving culture in that world, so he quit and became a touring musician. He was just as lost as I was. He then stumbled into an animation studio, and finally saw his dream of doing comedy materializing as a possibility. “For the first time, I was motivated. I was a man on a mission,” Mike said in his speech. Shortly after, Beavis and Butt-Head was born, and the rest was history. He left the job that everyone told him he should do to become one of the most successful comedic voices in America.

  That speech spoke to my lost, hungover college self. I couldn’t imagine wasting my life away at a job based on an economics degree I never cared for, but I was too afraid to find my passion. I could hear my dad saying, “Doing what you love is how you become homeless.” Finding a passion seemed as unrealistic as the Yellow Panthers winning a Grammy. Mike’s commencement speech gave me the permission that my parents never gave me; it gave me the permission to quit what others thought I should do and find something I was truly passionate about. I wanted to find the thing that made me tick. And when I eventually stumbled into a comedy club, I felt that feeling of stumbling into the animation studio he described in his speech, and I knew I’d found that thing I was passionate about. And as fate would have it, Mike Judge would be the one who gave me my first big break in pursuing what I loved. Mike cast me on Silicon Valley five years after that commencement speech, not knowing I was sitting in the audience that day.

  Pursue what you love, not what you should.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOW TO

  STAND UP

  My dad had set me up with an internship at Smith Barney, a prestigious financial consulting firm his friend worked at. I interned at their ritzy Beverly Hills office under one of their top financial advisers; it was the internship every parent dreamed of for their kid. I felt like a baller; I reconciled tax documents for their millionaire clients, I did analysis on mutual funds and my boss handled Kevin Sorbo’s finances, a.k.a. Hercules. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Needless to say, I hadn’t met a lot of celebrities before then and I was easily impressed. I had a blast during the first few weeks of the internship, daydreaming about a successful future that my dad would be so proud of. But after a month at that office, the routine set in and an intense dread of being stuck behind a desk for the rest of my life came over me. Am I really going to be reconciling Kevin Sorbo’s taxes for the rest of my life? That became a recurring nightmare of mine; in the dream, I would be crunching numbers on an old Dell desktop and Hercules would come up behind me and crack me with his whip. “Faster, you mortal!” Then I’d cry to the image of his diversified mutual fund portfolio.

  I started to hate everything about the internship, and I couldn’t wait until my three-month sentence was over. I hated mutual funds, I hated CNBC and I hated Hercules. But at the same time, I knew how proud my dad was of his son who was following in his footsteps to become a financial adviser. He’d ask me with a sweet sense of pride on his face: “How’s the internship going?” “It’s going great! Today we worked on a couple Vanguard funds.” I said it with a fake stapled grin on my stupid face. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I hated the internship and I thought Vanguard funds were fucking stupid.

  During my last week of the internship, Dad delivered some breaking news: “Jimmy! My friend at Smith Barney said he wants to offer you a full-time job when you graduate! Congratulations!” I’d never seen him so excited. I’m sure this was one of the happiest moments of his life, but in contrast, this was one of the most dismal moments of my life. Tears of joy almost rolled down from his eyes, while tears of absolute sadness almost poured down from mine. “Oh… that’s great.” I uttered those words like a zombie. The thought of looking at mutual funds for one more day, let alone for the rest of my life, made me feel dead inside. I felt like I was stuck in a terrible relationship, and I didn’t know how to break up with my girlfriend who thought everything was going perfectly. Dad wanted to go out for dinner that night to celebrate.

  “Where do you want to go? Anywhere you want.”

  “Dad, listen…” There was no way to let him down easily; I just had to do it. “I don’t want to work for Smith Barney.”

  The joy disappeared from his face. He was in shock. He was in denial. He was blindsided. He asked me a question that he prayed I’d say yes to: “Do you have another job?”

  “No.” I couldn’t even make eye contact with him.

  He walked away, mourning the loss of his son that night.

  I went from a dream internship to becoming every parent’s worst nightmare. My dad thought I was delusional. He was too disappointed to ever confront me face to face, so he tried to passive aggressively get me back on track by sending me emails from CareerBuilder.com. “Jimmy, did you check your email today?” He’d say it in a deep, emotionless tone, making sure that I sensed his disappointment. “No, not yet.” “Check it, I sent you three links from CareerBuilder.com. Real people are hiring.” And this happened for years to come. I couldn’t imagine the torment I put my dad through during those years. It was probably like having a son hooked on heroin, and he sent me CareerBuilder.com job leads instead of rehab brochures. To his credit, he never gave up on me. One could argue that not taking a “legit” job in order to find my passion was one of the stupidest decisions in my life, or now in hindsight, you could say that I was brave for making such a risky decision; but for me it wasn’t even a decision. Taking a chance was the only way I could live with myself. I’d rather take a chance and fail miserably than to have never tried at all.

  LOWBALL JIM

  “What made you get into stand-up comedy?” Many people have asked me that question, and I can never give them a rosy answer that’d satisfy them. I’ve heard other comedians answer that question with a beautiful life story. “I used to sneak into the movie theater and watch Eddie Murphy’s RAW with my brother and it changed my life. From that day on, my only goal in life was to become
a stand-up comedian.” And “The day my brother passed away with a congenital heart disease, I went onstage to my very first open mic.” Beautiful, but who gives a shit? I’m not afraid to disappoint people and answer the question with the simple truth.

  “So what made you get into stand-up comedy?”

  “I was fucking desperate.”

  I was twenty-one years old when I did my first open mic. Twenty-one was supposed to be the prime of my life where I partied every night, did Ecstasy and had unadulterated sex with hot strangers. Instead, I was stewing away in my dad’s apartment playing Madden with Phil during my last summer vacation from college. I couldn’t accept this as my reality, especially after coming back from Florence. Phil’s an awesome dude but the thought of playing PlayStation in my dad’s apartment for the rest of my life gave me an anxiety attack. I wanted to party like Mike “The Situation” on Jersey Shore. I wanted to live!

  I needed to expand my horizon and find a community of friends. So I decided to sign up for a Brazilian jujitsu class because I was a fan of the UFC, but I totally forgot people actively try to break each other’s arms in this sport. In my very first jujitsu class, the Brazilian instructor mounted on top of me and demonstrated a guillotine choke in front of the class. Before I could tap out in submission, the front of my esophagus was pressed against the back of my spine and I almost passed out. I thought he had cracked my windpipe; luckily I only had a sore throat for two weeks. People always tell you, “Never give up. Don’t be a quitter.” Those people have never gotten choked by a Brazilian jujitsu black belt. I should have quit halfway through day one, but like a good idiot who believed in old idioms, I stuck with it for three painful months.