Spiegel & Grau
February 2013
On Sale: January 29, 2013
290 pages ISBN: 0679644881 EAN: 9780679644880 Kindle: B00957T3UC Hardcover / e-Book Add to Wish List
Eddie Huang is the thirty-year-old proprietor of Baohausβthe hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the nightβand one of the food worldβs brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, Eddie wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own.
Eddie grew up in theme-park America, on a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac in suburban Orlando, raised by a wild family of FOB (βfresh off the boatβ) hustlers and hysterics from Taiwan. While his father improbably launched a series of successful seafood and steak restaurants, Eddie burned his way through American culture, defying every βmodel minorityβ stereotype along the way. He obsessed over football, fought the all-American boys who called him a chink, partied like a gremlin, sold drugs with his crew, and idolized Tupac. His anchor through it all was foodβfrom making Southern ribs with the Haitian cooks in his dadβs restaurant to preparing traditional meals in his motherβs kitchen to haunting the midnight markets of Taipei when he was shipped off to the homeland. After misadventures as an unlikely lawyer, street fashion renegade, and stand-up comic, Eddie finally threw everything he lovedβpast and present, family and foodβinto his own restaurant, bringing together a legacy stretching back to China and the shards of global culture heβd melded into his own identity.
Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrantβs story for the twenty-first century. Itβs a story of food, family, and the forging of a new notion of what it means to be American
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