Eddie Huang, who wrote the memoir on which the sitcom is based, is crusading to reclaim the term. If the pilot is any indication, he may just succeed.
ABC
The phrase "fresh off the boat" has been a permanent fixture of American slang for several decades, living alternatingly as a slur and a derogatory statement of fact, depending on who's tossing it and where. The one thing it has never, ever been, however, is a braggadocious badge of honor, acceptable to don in the mainstream. Until now.
For the last year, Taiwanese-American writer and restaurateur Eddie Huang has been crusading to reclaim it.
In 2013, Huang published a memoir about being the child of Taiwanese parents while growing up in the United States during the '90s. It was called Fresh Off the Boat. Shortly after that, he began hosting an online travelogue series on VICE.com, under the same audacious title. Now, a year later, a period comedy based on Huang's memoir — specifically his life as a 12-year-old who moved from Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown to a lily-white Orlando suburb — has been picked up by ABC for the network's 2014–2015 lineup. Huang will serve as a producer on the show, also of the same name. In a ballsy cultural subversion, the words "fresh off the boat" are voluntarily entering the most mainstream space in the United States.
Huang, who was born in D.C. and has lived in the United States for his entire life, has never actually been "fresh off the boat," as per its conventional definition. But Huang has neither time for, nor interest in, conventional definitions.
"I would never call myself an American," he told BuzzFeed via phone just a day after the Fresh Off the Boat trailer hit YouTube. "I'm a Taiwanese-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."
ABC
A source close to the upcoming comedy series said the title of show was Huang's choosing (and was one he fought hard for) as a nod to both the way his family was perceived when they arrived in America in the '90s, and how they saw themselves.
Fresh Off the Boat's creator and executive producer Nahnatchka Khan, herself a child of immigrant parents from Iran, was happy to support that fight. "The title certainly isn't meant to be offensive, but Eddie is who he is and he's not going to apologize for it," she told BuzzFeed. "We just took his lead."
When ABC unveiled the official trailer for Fresh Off the Boat on Tuesday, the comedy immediately sparked some heated conversations on Twitter. Comments around the forthcoming series have been a mix of hopeful and critical. The most compelling criticism was that titling a mainstream sitcom Fresh Off the Boat might normalize the term, making white Americans more comfortable with using it, not considering its origins of oppression.
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