The Asian diaspora’s take on America
“‘Fresh Off the Boat’ kicked down the door. ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ kicked down the box office. But then it’s like, ‘Who’s running through the door?’ ” asked Eddie Huang.
The celebrity chef and author, whose memoir, “Fresh Off the Boat,” inspired the popular ABC sitcom of the same name, posed the question during a town-hall-style discussion on Monday, Oct. 29, at the Bently Reserve in San Francisco. Following a summer dubbed #AsianAugust, where several films starring Asians — from Constance Wu in “Crazy Rich Asians” to Lana Condor in the Netflix original “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” and John Cho in “Searching” — provided a watershed mo-
ment for the Asian diaspora, 100 Asian American Millennials gathered to reflect on the perhaps messier truths to their own identities, politics and place within their own community and the nation.
The discussion, which dived into topics from standards of beauty and dating to affirmative action and racial discrimination from within, was taped as an episode of a new Ozy Media show, “Take On America.” The participants surrounded a panel of guests that included Huang, fashion designer Kimora Lee Simmons, actor Harry Shum Jr. and lawyer Harmeet Dhillon.
The episode, airing on PBS on Friday, Nov. 2, is part of the show’s ambitious effort to tap into the varied patchworks of the national consciousness during this tumultuous period that Carlos Watson, Ozy co-founder and show moderator, referred to before the taping as the “new ’60s.”
“Rather than doing what people might expect, which is going to a big battleground Midwestern state like Ohio and get 500 people in an auditorium,” Watson said, the concept is organized around what might be seen as “voter blocs.”
The show, tentatively scheduled to run in 20 episodes before the 2020 election, has previously gathered 100 black men in Baltimore and 100 white women in Nashville, while future episodes are planned to host town halls of NRA members in Oklahoma City and 16-year-olds in South Florida.
The discussions are intended to provide a diversity of perspectives among these often monolithically perceived groups — and in San Francisco, this proved true.
Early discussion in the evening focused on the confusion and alienation over racial identity while growing up, with individual voices detailing decidedly distinct experiences.
“I really struggled with my masculinity and just literal physical safety because people just tried to jump me all the time,” Huang, who provided the most incisive, and often hilarious, commentary of the night, said of his experience physically fighting his way through school while growing up in Orlando.
Shum, the “Glee” star who made a cameo in “Crazy Rich Asians,” spoke of internalized racism throughout a childhood spent in the disparate worlds of Costa Rica and San Francisco, followed by a move to San Luis Obispo.
“I started to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, and I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” Shum said.
The largest diversity of opinion came in the discussion of affirmative action, a subject that has been fiercely debated while Harvard University is on trial after a lawsuit claiming systematic discrimination against Asian applicants.
“I do agree with you as a progressive to the extent that Harvard is discriminating against and profiling Asians,” said Justin Lam, a UC Berkeley law student, who lamented the lack of diversity in classrooms, in response to Dhillon. “But to the extent that the solution to that is to drive a wedge between us and other communities — I find that unacceptable.”
Dhillon, who is also a Republican National Committeewoman, argued against affirmative action and advocated for operating under a meritocracy, sparking the most nuanced debate among the crowd.
Parts of the discussion eventually spilled into a conversation about tech in Silicon Valley, where Dhillon has represented James Damore, a former Google employee who filed a lawsuit alleging that the company discriminated against conservative white men and Asian men. It proved to be one of the most contentious moments of the night.
“Just so I’m clear, your stance is to support the white man from Indiana trying to get a job at a computer science company. He needs help?” Huang asked Dhillon. The two sparred back and forth briefly, with the crowd seeming largely on the side of Huang, who earned the biggest applause of the night in his retorts toward Dhillon.
Even the moments of friction, though, were perhaps a welcome sight. It was an evening that amplified the voice of a community that has historically been connoted by silence, for a show that Watson hopes will be a “stereotype-buster.”