"I was once a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant myself. I was Jian Yang. When my family immigrated to America from Hong Kong, I was a thirteen-year-old boy who looked like an eight-year-old girl.My life growing up in Hong Kong was like a bad stereotype. I played the violin, I was super good at math, and I played Ping-Pong competitively. In China, people take Ping-Pong seriously. It's not just a drunken frat house game; Ping-Pong is a prestigious national sport. The Ping-Pong champs in China are national heroes, like Brett Favre without the dick pics."-from How to American
Jimmy O. Yang is best known as quiet troublemaker, prank caller, and hacker house-squatter Jian Yang on the Emmy-nominated HBO show Silicon Valley. This spring, he'll achieve what he jokingly calls The Holy Grail of Asian Actors: playing a white girl's boyfriend (alongside Melissa McCarthy in the film Life of the Party). And this summer, he'll appear in what he (only kind of jokingly) refers to as the most Asian studio film ever-Crazy Rich Asians, based on the New York Times bestseller of the same name.
In his memoir How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents, Yang shares the beginning of his journey to stardom, starting with his family's emigration from Hong Kong to Los Angeles when he was a teenager. In a perfect storm, Yang, who didn't speak any English, hit puberty upon arrival in L.A. and found himself caught between the duality of his family's traditional Chinese values and the independent spirit of American culture. So he did what any clever young immigrant would do: He set out to learn American customs by watching BET RapCity. How to American details Yang's assimilation and education while dodging his parents' relentless attempts to convince him to pursue a more practical career. Much to his parent's disappointment, Yang quit a promising internship in finance to pursue an unlikely career in comedy. When his minimum wage job at the Comedy Palace didn't pay the bills, Yang went from DJing at a strip club ("I was pairing R&B songs with strippers like a sommelier at Spago suggesting which red goes best with the beef Bolognese"), to selling used cars, to driving for Uber. But eventually he achieved the American Dream, landing as a series regular on an award-winning TV show and, in 2016, becoming a US citizen.
With thoughts ranging from the first time reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, to the best way to befriend a bouncer named Beast, to the art of silencing racist hecklers, Yang uses firsthand experience to examine the timely subjects of immigration and the presentation of minorities in Hollywood.