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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
An extended version of that article appears on Vulture.com.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
Fresh Off the Boat premieres on Feb. 4.<\/p>\n