Review by New York Times Review
THE RACIAL DIVIDE between black and white Americans so thoroughly defines the nation's culture that it extends across the burgeoning population of Americans who are neither African nor European in descent. In the absence of a host of native-born celebrities of their own, Hispanic, Muslim and Asian Americans are generally obliged, for the time being, to select their cultural icons from the existing menu of white and black athletes, authors and entertainers; they place their order, and their self-conceptions often pale or darken in accordance with their cultural consumption. In this black-or-white sense, the chef and impresario Eddie Huang is unique among Asian-American writers. Huang's debut memoir, "Fresh Off the Boat," which detailed his pugnacious years of youth and young adulthood and his profound affection for hip-hop music, concealed, behind its tales of crude violence in the parvenu suburbs of Orlando and its narrator's relentless code-switching, a subtle tracing of the continuities between black culture as imagined by Huang and Chinese culture as incarnated by his parents. Both prized family ties above all else; both took corporal punishment for granted; the cuisine of both, in its creativity with scrap ingredients, testified to a long history of poverty and resourcefulness. Small wonder, then, that Huang should find himself most at home immersed in the collected works of Mobb Deep and Tupac Shakur. It was a testament to Huang's rhetorical finesse as well as his blunt enumeration of harsh social facts and personal truths that, by the end of his memoir, a careful reader might concede to him the right to deploy, in his selfassertion, some portion of a street vernacular developed by black Americans for their own use. As with any great rap album, the composition of the audience for "Fresh Off the Boat" was uncertain, questionable, open: Huang had created a narrative in which readers - Asian, black, Hispanic, Muslim, even white - could find a recognizable image of their anxieties and ambitions. Like Bellow's Augie March, he had rooted himself in American soil without compromising his immigrant identity; whatever Huang's eventual vexations regarding the TV sitcom based on his book, it's clear that in the book he had succeeded in making something of himself. Huang's second memoir, "Double Cup Love," is, quite literally, a far cry from its predecessor. A majority of the book takes place not in the United States but on the Chinese mainland as Huang, with his younger brothers and assorted local retainers in tow, samples various native dishes in the hopes of enhancing his own; meanwhile, he anxiously awaits the arrival of his American girlfriend, Dena, to whom he intends to propose marriage. Dena and her family are white, a fact that occasions no small amount of "Seinfeld"esque tergiversation on the part of Huang, if no one else. His mother, questioned by her son, doesn't care - "No! So silly! Your dad Chinese, he the worst. Ha ha, no, I love your dad, but it doesn't matter. Who cares if not Chinese?" - and her response is typical of every other Chinese person Huang sounds out on the prospect of his marriage. He's hardly wrong to touch upon the inherent social, cultural and moral tensions of a love relationship between an Asian man and a white woman; still, the absence of resistance from the culture he frets about betraying leaves him talking essentially only to himself. The brashness of "Fresh Off the Boat" was an offense mechanism evolved by its author to overcome the barriers put up by Americans, especially white Americans, to recognizing his existence. But in China, Huang's presence and opinions are welcomed without conflict - as a friendly, overworked, underpaid massage therapist he interviews on the job notes, he's generous, smart, kind, prosperous: "a very special Chinese man." Who would begrudge him his happiness? Overt antagonism has been Huang's muse, and its absence leaves "Double Cup Love" a baffled and elliptical book compared with its predecessor. Its loose meditations on cuisine, Chinese culture, dating history, touristic exploits and fraternal drama constitute rich ingredients that, in the absence of a firm, unifying tone, never quite cohere into a real dish for the reader. Huang remains as dynamic and intelligent as ever at the sentence level, but productively exploring his anxieties regarding whether a straight AsianAmerican man can be loved by a woman outside his race, and can love himself sufficiently to return such love - this would require a far more vulnerable mode of candor than the one with which he bracingly proved that AsianAmerican men could throw down, deal drugs and get rich. For now, Huang's depictions of girlfriends and recountings of his love life seem most compelling during obsessive - even "psychotic," in his own words - scenes of intrusion and strife. Here as elsewhere, Huang is taking after his parents, but in this case his emulation brings him no reward. At the heart of "Fresh Off the Boat" lay a secret awareness that the ultraviolent tendencies (and keen business sense) instilled in the narrator by his parents had, in fact, prepared him perfectly to integrate into the savagery of American life. What "Double Cup Love" shows, though, is that overcoming the formidable obstacles to romantic intimacy imposed by such an upbringing will have to be something Huang achieves all by himself. ? FRANK GUAN works in special projects at n+l, where his criticism appears regularly. His other writing has been published in The Nation, The New Republic, ARTnews and Artforum.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
Readers first met Huang, a celebrity chef and co-owner of BaoHaus, a sandwich shop in Manhattan, and his idiosyncratic Taiwanese American family in Fresh off the Boat (2013), now a television series. The peripatetic author returns in a chronicle that is part travelogue, part memoir, and all together deeply personal. Huang recounts how he enlisted two brothers to accompany him on a trip of self-exploration in China. His goal is to open a pop-up restaurant in Chengdu, a large, modern city in Southwest China, to see if his food appeals to the modern Chinese palette. Other concerns, such as love, are on his mind. Huang is excited to show his visiting girlfriend his family's ancestral Mothership. Wanting to please his parents, but serious about his non-Asian girlfriend, Huang talks with his mom about marrying Dena. She responds in her quirky way, So silly! Your dad Chinese, he the worst. Ha ha. Huang's reaction to this revelation is surprising but not out of character. Anyone who likes Huang from his other ventures will enjoy hearing his hip-hop-inflected voice on these pages.--Kaplan, Dan Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Huang gives readers another punch of passion in his second memoir (after 2013's massively successful Fresh Off the Boat). With his gift for conversation, edgy humor, and deeply knowledgeable palate, readers get a sense of a young chef on a serious quest. As Huang finds love, he continues to wrestle with his family and the business, discovering a nagging ache that calls him back to the motherland. Yearning to discover whether his cooking will satisfy foodies in China-not just the flock of fans at his ever-popular N.Y.C. restaurant, Baohaus-he tests the waters in Chengdu and cooks his heart out. "Something about it was the same, but different, as if the spirits circling me had been present all along but were suddenly visible." Through an endless stream of hilarious basketball metaphors, pop culture one-liners, and what Huang affectionately calls "Chinglish," his passion for food and determination to get things right-in the U.S., in China, and in his heart of hearts-mark every page. Agent: Marc Gerald, Agency Group Talent. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
BaoHaus celebrity chef Huang (Fresh Off the Boat, 2012) returns with a fresh mlange of hip-hop patter, Chengdu street cuisine, and Asian-American identity politics. Can a politically charged, wildly successful chef find love and happiness in the new millennium? The author was determined to find out after bumping into Dena at a popular bar in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. But before he could take that leap into the foreign land of commitment, he decided that he had to address something else that had been eating at him for a while. Sure, he has been able to conquer hipster palates with his Taiwanese steamed buns, but what Huang truly hungers to know is what Chinese people living in the homeland think of his cooking: "I'm Chinese, but I grew up in America. What if I'm a fraud?" With his romance with Dena still blossoming, Huang corralled his brothers and headed for China. His initial impression of the city of Chengdu isn't necessarily appetizing, but it's vivid: "a disgusting mummy lair accented with a touch of pre-Cory Booker Newark, neatly encased in a delicious cocoon of coal smogthe views are so spectacularly putrid that it makes West Philly feel like Queen Anne's world." Huang possesses a fiery descriptive flair capable of splicing disparate cultural references with the acuity of a yakitori grill master: "Paris'll put you to bed with butter and burgundy; Houston'll drip it up in au jus and drape it out with horseradish; and Chengdu'll set your mouth on fire, then extinguish it with Newport [cigarettes] guts." The lingo is dense and can veer wildly from delicate descriptions of the author's all-time culinary favorites to his decidedly eccentric bathroom habits. But when he reaches full boil, Huang's exchanges between family and friends can be laugh-out-loud funny. Once fully communed with his Chinese roots, Huang realized that he needed Dena by his side, and what began in Brooklyn finally came to fruition in China. A challenging author continues to bravely bare his soul along with his best dishes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
