“Our parents were ‘fobby’ and cared about us and wanted to instill their culture in us. I’m grateful for that.”
Last week, ABC announced that it is picking up the sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, which was originally a memoir by Taiwanese-Chinese-American writer Eddie Huang. With its release, "fresh off the boat" — a margin phrase usually abbreviated to FOB — will be on major network television, the most mainstream space in America. As a result, some important conversations have begun about the term and who gets to use it.
In an interview with BuzzFeed, Huang said, "I would never call myself an American, I'm a Taiwanese-Chinese-American. My parents came here in the late '70s and had me about three years after they'd lived in this country. So I consider myself fresh. You can't tell me to not consider myself something."
On Twitter and in the comments sections of every article written about Huang's sitcom, it quickly became evident that everyone with an immigrant experience — no matter how distant or immediate — had a nuanced, complicated relationship with the phrase "fresh off the boat." We asked some of our colleagues to share theirs.
Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed
I was raised in Taiwan but later attended an international high school. At Taipei American School, FOB insinuated more about class than race. It was mostly USA-raised Asians who leveled it sneeringly at their local classmates — if I dressed really "local" and not Ja Rule/Dell Guy enough, some yuppie douche would say, "What are you, a fucking FOB?" Most of my high school friends, like me, learned English late in their lives. We went to karaoke parlors, sang 陳昇 and 阿妹, and rented Japanese comics from dusty stationery stores. We were never invited to bottle-service parties at posh nightclubs, but really, so what?
The weird thing, though, was that even in the midst of Taipei, FOB meant you were less desirable than some Ryan Seacrest cosplayer who'd probably grow up to earnestly love David Guetta and Instagram lobster rolls. But a solid counterculture at my school wore the FOB label with pride — dressing in uniforms borrowed from local schools, smoking cheap domestic cigarettes, loudly slanging in Taiwanese in the hallways. In Taipei, after all, not being FOB meant being a smug self-segregated expatriate.
My "Asianness" would later be a liability in my American college, but I was never stung by the word "FOB" itself, just by strangers silently deciding I was a less vibrant, likable, or interesting human being based on my cultural affect. That never manifested itself in the F-word.
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