Eddie Huang is a is a renaissance man with a string of

Eddie Huang is a is a renaissance man with a string of careers: lawyer, TV host, restaurateur and author. His raw, funny and sometimes extremely profane memoir, Fresh Off the Boat, came out two years ago. It’s a brutally honest story about his life as an Asian-American kid, reconciling two cultures.

That book is now an ABC sitcom, also called Fresh off the Boat. The show has retained at least some of that raw sensibility, but getting a story so nuanced and intense onto network television was very difficult for Huang.

“The network tried to turn Fresh Off the Boat into a cornstarch sitcom, and me into a mascot for America. I hated that,” Huang wrote for New York Magazine. “This show isn’t about me, nor is it about Asian America. The network won’t take that gamble right now.”

An extended version of that article appears on Vulture.com.

But in the end, he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin, Huang feels reconciled with the show. “As a milestone, as a kind of quarter-mile mark … it gave me hope and promise for how much further we can go,” he says.

“It takes a lot of chutzpah to launch a network comedy with a pilot addressing the word ‘chink,’ yet it works because it’s the safest bet the studio could have made.”

Fresh Off the Boat premieres on Feb. 4.