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Why one Singaporean identifies with TV’s Fresh Off The Boat

SINGAPORE – There is a lot of hype surrounding the new American sitcom, Fresh Off The Boat, and deservedly so, because it is pretty funny stuff.

SINGAPORE – There is a lot of hype surrounding the new American sitcom, Fresh Off The Boat, and deservedly so, because it is pretty funny stuff.

Set in the late 1990s, the show is based loosely on American chef Eddie Huang’s memoir of the same title about his formative years as a child whose Taiwanese family experiences severe culture shock when they move from cosmopolitan Washington, DC, to a suburb in Florida. His stereotypically inept and badly-dressed father now manages a cowboy-themed restaurant, and his hilarious tiger mum (played by Constance Wu, undoubtedly the breakout star of the show) has the pleasure of delivering zingy one-liners you’ll want to write down and file away.

Anyone can relate to Eddie’s classic fish-out-of-water story, and I more than most. As a child, because of my father’s job, I was abruptly transplanted from Singapore to the land of the free and the home of the brave. And we’re not talking New York City, Washington, DC, or any other metropolis with a large and established Chinatown.

You know that John Denver song, Country Road? “Almost heaven — West Virginia; Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River”? Yup, that place is real. And that’s where our family settled: Waynesboro, Virginia; population: 15,000; in the Shenandoah Valley, with the rolling blue mountain peaks in sight from our windows.

We probably weren’t the first Asians the townspeople had seen, though. There was, after all, a Hunan restaurant about 30 miles — I mean, 48km — away.

I was too young to be into hip-hop like Eddie is — although I remember my classmate’s older sister being a fervent New Kids On The Block evangelist — but Fresh Off The Boat does a pretty accurate job at bringing out the flavour of being the only Asian kid at school.

When Eddie gets straight As, his mother storms into the principal’s office and intones ominously: “School is too easy,” and demands to know where the nearest after-school tuition centre is.

I won’t say I was the class nerd, but I will tell you that we had a reading programme that gave you a sticker for every book you read, and if you collected 20, you’d get a free pizza at Pizza Hut. (This initiative, while well-intentioned, was not properly thought through — were they trying to breed a generation that responded to reading in a Pavlovian manner?) Let’s just say that I was at Pizza Hut quite regularly. And that some of the kids in my class couldn’t even read.

You see, my elementary school believed in free and creative learning, so they taught language skills by encouraging the kids to spell according to how we thought the word sounded. This caused my Asian tiger mum’s eyebrows to shoot up higher than the star-spangled banner at full-mast. It trampled provocatively on her twin principles of rote learning and moral absolutism.

Still, it didn’t do me much damage — and neither did her home schooling — because after a year or two, we moved back to Singapore. But before I could partake in the experience that unites all Singaporeans — sitting for the Primary School Leaving Examination — my father’s job took us elsewhere once again; this time, to the exact opposite of the land of the pilgrims’ pride. We moved to Shanghai, China.

If you thought adjusting to life in small-town America was difficult for a Singaporean, well, adjusting to life in China was on a whole other level. And we’re talking about China in the 1990s, mind you.

And that brings me to my brilliant proposal for a Fresh Off The Boat spin-off: A Westernised Asian family moves to China and gets the culture shock of their lives.

Fresh Off The Banana Boat will be eminently watchable. The father will run a xiao long bao restaurant in as clueless a manner as possible. The Eddie character will listen to Jay Chou in an attempt to fit in at school, in spite of understanding only 10 per cent of the lyrics. And the sweet-as-Apple-Pie mum will valiantly attempt to keep the Dionysian spirit alive in her offspring by home-schooling them in abstract painting and interpretive dance.

Story arcs will involve trying to fit in with the neighbours by learning mahjong, the art of bargaining in Mandarin and hilarious faux pas involving stinky tofu. An entire episode will be dedicated to learning to cross the road.

That boat’s going to sail, right? In fact, maybe I should make like Eddie Huang and write my own book. Wait, did somebody say “book”? Excuse me while I get some pizzas.

Catch Fresh Off The Boat on Sundays at 9.50pm on FOX (Singtel TV Ch 330 and StarHub TV Ch 505).

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