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

by Jimmy O. Yang

And at my first engineering job, I had an Iranian friend who worked there too, who said something that always stuck with me. He said that this really is the land of opportunity, but most Americans just don’t see it because they’re simply too used to it.

Here’s something I’ll never forget about Jimmy. Before the first season of Silicon Valley had aired, Jimmy and I were sitting at the bar at a restaurant in Santa Monica. (Now when I’m out with him, we are often interrupted by fans who recognize him and want to take selfies.) I was asking him about China. He was saying that if you’re an ordinary American and you go to China, it’s like being a movie star. Everyone stares at you and wants to be around you. He said it’s the same if an American goes to Cuba. Then he paused for a second, looked down at his drink and said, “There’s nowhere I can go.” Well, Jimmy, now there’s nowhere you can’t go without being recognized like a star. Welcome to America, Jimmy O. Yang.

Pay back your parents when you start working. We were all born with a student loan debt to our Asian parents. Asian parents’ retirement plans are their kids.

figured it was better to disappoint my parents for a few years than to disappoint myself for the rest of my life.

Grandpa finished the order with three cups of water. He said to us, “They make their money by overcharging you on soda. You can just get a free water cup and fill it with whatever you want.” My mind was fucking blown. You can pour your own soda here? And it’s free? Wow! Jesus could turn water into wine, but in America you could turn water into Dr Pepper. What a beautiful country.

If I had gone to an American school with a lot of other Chinese kids, I would not have been forced to assimilate, and I would have probably turned out to be the dude selling dim sum in Chinatown.

It was a blessing to have a buffer year at middle school before being judged by the unforgiving teenage peers in high school. It was a year of American cultural boot camp, a year for me to learn English, a year for me to assimilate. I went into high school with my pants sagged, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and ready to catch some footballs. ’Murica!

Chinese Culture Club was a nice safety net, but it felt like a regression. I didn’t want to spend the next four years of high school hibernating with three other Chinese kids inside of a dank classroom; I could have done that back in Hong Kong. I wanted to have the all-American high school adolescent experience. I wanted to play in the homecoming football game, I wanted to take a road trip in my dad’s car and I wanted to go to prom with a white girl. I didn’t care about hanging out with the cool kids, but I was tired of being the foreign kid. All I wanted to be was a “normal” American kid.

Whenever I watched BET, I forgot I was a small foreign Chinese boy and I felt like a badass gangsta. I started imitating how the rappers walked and how they talked. I would go up to my classmates and say, “Yo what up, dog. Our geometry teacher is a bitch, homie.” I learned how to speak proper American English from watching BET. I consumed at least three hours of music videos a day. These music videos were snippets of different versions of the American dream. They shaped my adolescence and they inspired me way beyond my high school years. Aside from Big Pimpin’, here are some of my favorite music videos that taught me about America.

I had no idea that I was supposed to be matching the rhythm of the music. I was literally just talking over the music. When Chris played me the beat again, I mechanically bobbed my head to the kicks and snares, but I couldn’t follow the tempo. And that’s when I realized that this was exactly what the Comicview comedians meant when they said, “White people got no rhythm.” This Chinese boy got no rhythm.

I wanted to go to prom with a high school sweetheart. I mean who wouldn’t? But I had no date in sight, so I just said fuck it and pretended to be a cool antisocial kid who didn’t care about prom. A part of me felt like I was missing out in life, but the other part convinced myself, Who cares? You were never trying to fit in anyways. Own the coolness of being a rebel badass who don’t give a shit about prom.

As the guard ushered me out of the room, the Asian border patrol officer said one last thing to me that I’ll never forget: “Don’t do that again, or we’ll send you back to where you came from.” Those words shook me to my bones. I felt like the lost thirteen-year-old foreigner again. All the Pledge of Allegiances, American football and BET Rap City didn’t change anything; I was still just a foreigner living in America. And worst of all, this came from an Asian American person. I was angry. I was angry that an Asian brother sold me out. I was angry that he thought he was better than me. I was angry that no matter how hard I tried, I was still a foreigner. I couldn’t come up with a response that wouldn’t send me to prison. I just took the comment and silently walked out.

After graduating, he settled for a job in Silicon Valley, during the original tech boom in the eighties. He soon realized he couldn’t deal with the cultish, overachieving culture in that world, so he quit and became a touring musician. He was just as lost as I was. He then stumbled into an animation studio, and finally saw his dream of doing comedy materializing as a possibility.

The only female contact I’d gotten lately was getting my ass handed to me in jujitsu. I was destined to be unemployed and play Madden with Phil at my dad’s for the rest of my life. And that’s when I googled “local open mics.” When people google “local open mics,” they are one step away from googling “What’s the least painful way to kill myself?” It’s the last frontier before giving up on life.

Reality always strikes when you’re having too much fun. I was finally finding some meaning to my life at the Comedy Palace, but I soon realized my sixty-dollar weekly paycheck wasn’t paying the bills. I was living way below the poverty line, even for a comedian. I ate instant ramen with a ninety-nine-cent can of Vienna sausages five nights out of the week. I’d save up enough money to go to either Denny’s or pig out at HomeTown Buffet once a month. Maybe Guam was right about trying to win the lottery. I was praying for a car to plow into me so I could get some insurance settlement. My dad was right all along: “Pursuing your dreams is for losers. Doing what you love is how you become homeless.”

Acting is like a never-ending job interview. You have to constantly prove yourself through the grueling audition process just to get another day of work. There are so many elements that are out of the actor’s control. They could have chosen someone else for the job because I was too short, too young or too weird-looking. Acting is the only job where physical discrimination is allowed.

I usually get pretty nervous when I get on set. I am nervous I’ll botch the lines, I am nervous I haven’t done enough homework on the character and I am nervous people will discover I am an economics major trying to fake his way into being an actor. But something felt very natural about being Jian Yang. It was as if I’d been playing him for years. I felt like I was playing an earlier version of myself.

Everything I’d ever worked for materialized in that sentence. Every bad audition flashed in front of me and they liquefied themselves and seeped out of my eyes as I sobbed. The weight of everything my dad expected of me lifted off of my shoulders. I sat there quietly for a moment. Then I gathered myself and screamed in the phone: “FUCK YEAH!!!!!!!!!!” The Chinese family in front of me shielded their kid from me and hustled off of the trolley. I screamed again into the sky: “FUCK YEAH!!!!!!” I knew my life was about to change. I called my dad to share the monumental news. “Dad, Silicon Valley is going to make me a series regular!” “What is that?” “That means I’ll get paid more money, and I’ll be under contract with HBO!” “So you have a job?” “Yeah! As a series reg—” “Good.” He had no idea what series regular meant, but he was satisfied that I finally got a job.

Being a series regular meant I didn’t have to drive Uber anymore; it meant I could finally call myself a full-time actor. It also meant that my dad was wrong; pursuing what I loved didn’t make me homeless after all. I was now full-time Jian Yang. I had to get in touch with my former fresh-off-the-boat self. I had to remember how to immigrant again. I listened to Chinese radio for an hour before every scene to get into Jian Yang’s Chinese state of mind. And before the start of every take, I repeated a mantra in Mandarin, “ (Wo Bu Zhi Dao),” which means “I don’t know.” This summed up Jian Yang’s entire being. He always has a general “I don’t give a fuck” attitude. Either he doesn’t want to deal with it, or he genuinely doesn’t know what is going on.

If stand-up was my bachelor’s degree in comedy, Silicon Valley was my PhD.

I would pay to be on a show like this. (My agent suggested I don’t say this, so I can continue to get paid to be on the show.)

Then some people are shocked when they find out I sound nothing like Jian Yang: “Oh my God, we love Silicon Valley! We didn’t even know you speak English in real life. We thought that was your real accent!” I bet nobody ever said to Johnny Depp, “We love Pirates of the Caribbean! We thought you were a pirate in real life!”

I had achieved one of my biggest goals when I became a series regular on Silicon Valley, but I felt more lost than ever. Now what? I was meandering around in my apartment not knowing what to do next with my life. I panicked. It was scary to feel empty in the presence of success. So I called my mentor, Sean Kelly, as I always do when I’m lost. I asked Sean, “What should I do now?” And he said: “Start back at square one, with an even crazier goal.” 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

Every immigrant has felt that way: “Nobody cares about me here.” I know I definitely felt that way when I first came to America. I might not have been able to relate to being carjacked at gunpoint by terrorists, but I could surely relate to the loneliness of being an immigrant.

didn’t sleep a wink that weekend and got on set with massive dark circles under my eyes. My eye bags felt like grocery bags and my face looked like a panda. I’m pretty sure I aged five years in two days. I pretended to be the perfect boyfriend while my body was about to shut down from methamphetamine. I somehow managed to power through the scenes without collapsing. Luckily, the scene was an eighties-themed party scene, so everyone looked ridiculous anyway. Maybe this was method acting for this party boy, or more precisely, meth acting. I survived that day and practically went into a coma and slept for twenty hours. Nobody ever found out this perfect boyfriend was doing meth on the weekend, until now. Little did they know Jimmy was far from a perfect boyfriend; he was a dipshit who let random girls stick drugs in his mouth.

When I got off the stage, I walked through a thick cloud of weed smoke and saw Snoop Dogg. Snoop gave me the coolest handshake and said, “Good job, homie.” This was the crowning moment of my career. Become a series regular on a TV show Stop driving Uber Get my own apartment Win an Oscar Meet Snoop Dogg

This time, instead of asking myself, Now what? I had learned to enjoy the Now. Looking back to see how far I’d come from making music at Chris’s apartment to making music in Too Short’s studio gave me a brand new perspective. It’s exciting to chase after a new goal, but it’s meaningless if you can’t sit down and enjoy the moment.

The main differences between a US permanent resident with a green card and a US citizen are the right to vote, the right to sit on a hung jury and the right to not get deported if you claim you’re a US citizen at the Tijuana border.

Everyone congratulated me for becoming an American citizen. But I didn’t feel any different. I was still Asian. I was now officially an American person with an American passport, but I still looked like the same Asian kid who didn’t know the Pledge of Allegiance. Nobody in any part of the world is going to come up to me and say, “Hey, American guy! Cool passport! Rocky Balboa!” 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 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.

Just a few months before the trip, I reconnected with a couple of my grade school friends from Hong Kong through Facebook. My old classmate Ku Chun came across my stand-up set from The Arsenio Hall Show on YouTube. In the set I talked about being from Hong Kong, so he looked me up on Wikipedia and found my Chinese name. I was indeed the same kid he sat next to in third grade.

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.

“Dad, are you proud of me?” He replied earnestly, “In a Chinese family we don’t have to say it all the time. You should know that I’m always proud of you.” Deep down, I knew that, it was just nice to hear him say it.

Even though we might never say “I love you” to each other in Chinese culture, there is so much love in these two human beings I truly hit the lottery in life to have them as my parents. My dad once told me: “Having you as my son is like winning the lottery… Not the Mega Millions jackpot, but like a small twenty-dollar prize.” Some things never change.