How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents

by Jimmy O. Yang

still calls the show “2 Broken Girls.”

Guam slept in a ten-foot-square closet in the living room next to my bed. It was like having a pet that was a two-hundred-pound forty-year-old Guamanian man.

Acting is the only job where physical discrimination is allowed. I once auditioned for something with the character description “NO FAT PEOPLE!!!” in caps with three exclamation marks. Ironically, it was for a McDonald’s chicken nuggets commercial. I never try to look for the reason why I didn’t get a job; I just try to do better in the next audition.

Eight months and twenty-five auditions went by and I had completely forgotten about the Deep Tech audition.

I was getting paid SAG-AFTRA union minimum scale, which was the lowest amount you could legally pay a union actor. It was a little over nine hundred dollars per day. That might sound like a decent payday for one day of work, but an actor would be lucky to work more than two days a year. I started to panic about my stagnant career. Making nine hundred bucks twice a year wasn’t exactly the Hollywood dream I had envisioned. I’d been to more than a hundred auditions at this point, and I’d booked a total of five small guest-star roles, a couple commercials that never aired and a movie I was cut out of. I had auditioned for everything from a Chili’s commercial to Dog with a

For my 102nd audition, I got another email from Jeanne McCarthy’s casting office. It was once again for the role of Jian Yang, now spelled with an a in Jin, and the show had changed its name from Deep Tech to Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley was already in production and this Jian Yang character had become a smaller two-line part in episode three. I later learned the original pilot was never shot and the script was completely rewritten. Not booking that first audition had nothing to do with me at all: the original Jin Yang was written out of the pilot in the process. It was like finding out your crush rejected you because she was actually a lesbian. I felt slightly better about myself.

was happy to make another nine hundred bucks, but there was something special about this two-line part. The creator of Silicon Valley was also the creator of Beavis and Butt-Head, my commencement speaker at UCSD, Mike Judge. When I was sitting in the audience as a hungover college student listening to that commencement speech, I had no idea I would become an actor; I was an economics major destined to be a miserable desk jockey. Five years later, I was at a table read, sitting across from the man who inspired me to pursue my dreams.

My friend Fred Stoller, a longtime character actor, who guest starred as Raymond’s cousin in Everybody Loves Raymond, said it best: “You know what the difference is between playing Raymond’s cousin and Raymond’s brother on the show? About forty million dollars.”

The only people at the farmer’s market bar at noon were alcoholic degenerates who were already drunk. Everyone looked like they had been through at least two divorces and three rehabs.

We are so busy chasing our goals, sometimes we forget about the thrill of the chase. We only realize the goal wasn’t the prize when we get there. It was cool to be in the same room with Sir Pat Stew and Jen Ann, but I honestly had more fun at Denny’s than the Golden Globes party. Maybe Charles Dickens and UCSD chancellor Fox did have a point after all: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.”

Then I realized, the chase is never over. I just needed new challenges. It’s satisfying to cross out a goal, but it’s even more exciting to write down new ones. So I wrote down some even crazier goals: Become a series regular on a TV show Stop driving Uber Get my own apartment Win an Oscar Meet Snoop Dogg

What I learned was more than the accent itself. I noticed how crudely people treated a foreigner. The mechanic was quickly annoyed because he could barely understand me, the cashier at the grocery store avoided eye contact and the post office lady couldn’t be more frustrated trying to explain the difference between priority and first-class mail to me.

“Wow, that Chinese dude is awesome.” And I want girls to watch these roles and say, “I need to find myself a Jian Yang or Danny Meng. These guys are fucking sexy.” My mission is not to avoid playing an immigrant; my mission is to make Asian immigrants as sexy as Ryan Gosling.

Playing a boyfriend might not seem like a big deal, but playing a white girl’s boyfriend is like the Holy Grail for Asian actors. It has always been rare for an Asian male to go out with a white female in mainstream media. Jackie Chan never had a white girl; Bruce Lee married a white girl in real life but he never had a white girl in the movies. But on the flip side, Lucy Liu had plenty of white beaus.

It’s exciting to chase after a new goal, but it’s meaningless if you can’t sit down and enjoy the moment.

No, random people still look at me and holler, “Hey, Karate Kid!” “Jackie Chan!” “Bruce Lee!” The color of my passport doesn’t matter; most people will always see me as Asian before they’ll think I’m American. It’s hard to put ethnicities aside in the melting pot of America. Sometimes I identify so much with my ethnic background that I forget what I’m really about as a person.

I felt more American than ever. America is now “where I came from.” I made it! I’m an American!

I hadn’t been back to Hong Kong in seventeen years. A part of me had always avoided going back to the motherland. I was nervous it would ruin the perfect childhood I remembered; I didn’t want to risk changing the perception of the positive memories I had from Hong Kong. What if Hong Kong is nothing like I remember?

We had all experienced being seen as Asian before being seen as American, British or Australian.

It wasn’t about choosing to hang out with people of the same skin tone; it was about hanging out with people who shared the same point of view because they had gone through the same experiences. One of my favorite lines in the Crazy Rich Asians script was “I didn’t have to explain myself that I’m Asian here, I’m just another person.” During the Crazy Rich Asians shoot in Singapore, everyone saw me as who I am. I wasn’t just the Asian kid; I could just be the funny guy, instead of the Asian guy who is funny. I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders. It was the first time in seventeen years that I didn’t have to prove to anyone, or myself, that I was more than the token Asian guy.

The old Chinese culture blends perfectly with the new Westernized world. The city felt alive. In LA, I can walk for fifteen minutes and not see a single soul in a land of strip malls. In Hong Kong, you can’t help but bump shoulders with the hundreds of people crossing the streets with purpose. There’s an adventure in every corner of this controlled chaos. Even with all the people and stimulation in the streets, I felt a sense of ease in Hong Kong. It felt like home.

I was still a big-city Hong Kong boy at heart. I never really lost my Asian-ness; I just covered it up with an American façade. In Hong Kong, I didn’t have to answer the question “Am I Chinese or am I American?” anymore. I was just another person. I was just me. The weight of being an immigrant and the weight of being defined as an Asian American were gone.

I had forgotten that there was a place in this world where I wasn’t judged for my ethnicity, and I was the norm. I felt at peace.

They were the real Crazy Rich Asians; I was just an actor pretending to be them.

When I came home to LA from Hong Kong, I felt like I had left my real home to come back to the place I called home. Before I was ever an immigrant, before I was an Asian American, I was just a kid who didn’t know what either of those things meant. I’ve spent my entire adult life figuring out how to American. Fitting in became the only consistent part of my life. And no matter how American I tried to be, I’d always felt like an outsider. And no matter how long ago I left Hong Kong, it would always feel like home.

If it wasn’t for my family, I would not have emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles, and if it wasn’t for the American mindset of pursuing what I love, I would not have been a stand-up comedian. I don’t have to be solely defined by where I came from, and I am more than just where I end up. I am as Chinese as I am American. Can I see myself living in Hong Kong again? The people are great, the food is amazing and it’s one of the most vibrant cities in the world. But there is one very important thing that America has to offer. The same thing that made my family and so many others before us immigrate to America: boundless opportunities. That is what makes the American dream uniquely American. When I quit finance to become a stand-up comedian, my parents thought I was a crazy person. And they were right; I would be considered insane anywhere else in the world, except in America. Americans are encouraged to dream big and do anything we set our minds to. The United States is the only country where the pursuit of happiness is the right of its citizens. Jay-Z went from the Marcy Projects to drinking champagne on a yacht and marrying Beyoncé. I went from struggling with the English language to doing stand-up comedy and becoming a Hollywood actor.

I’d rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American.