Fresh Off the Boat

A Memoir

By: Eddie Huang

Narrated by: Eddie Huang

Length: 7 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

"Long before I met him, I was a fan of his writing, and his merciless wit. He’s bigger than food." (Anthony Bourdain)

Eddie Huang is the 30-year-old proprietor of Baohaus - the hot East Village hangout where foodies, stoners, and students come to stuff their faces with delicious Taiwanese street food late into the night - and one of the food world’s brightest and most controversial young stars. But before he created the perfect home for himself in a small patch of downtown New York, Eddie wandered the American wilderness looking for a place to call his own.

Eddie grew up in theme-park America, on a could-be-anywhere cul-de-sac in suburban Orlando, raised by a wild family of FOB ("fresh off the boat") hustlers and hysterics from Taiwan. While his father improbably launched a series of successful seafood and steak restaurants, Eddie burned his way through American culture, defying every "model minority" stereotype along the way. He obsessed over football, fought the all-American boys who called him a chink, partied like a gremlin, sold drugs with his crew, and idolized Tupac. His anchor through it all was food - from making Southern ribs with the Haitian cooks in his dad’s restaurant to preparing traditional meals in his mother’s kitchen to haunting the midnight markets of Taipei when he was shipped off to the homeland. After misadventures as an unlikely lawyer, street fashion renegade, and stand-up comic, Eddie finally threw everything he loved - past and present, family, and food - into his own restaurant, bringing together a legacy stretching back to China and the shards of global culture he’d melded into his own identity.

Funny, raw, and moving, and told in an irrepressibly alive and original voice, Fresh Off the Boat recasts the immigrant’s story for the 21st century. It’s a story of food, family, and the forging of a new notion of what it means to be American.

©2013 Eddie Huang (P)2013 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Mercilessly funny and provocative, Fresh Off the Boat is also a serious piece of work - and an important one. Eddie Huang is hunting nothing less than Big Game here - a question, a conversation, an argument: Who are we? If somebody’s going to put a thumb in your eye, it should probably be Eddie Huang. He does everything with style." (Anthony Bourdain)

"Brash, leading-edge, and unapologetically hip, Huang reconfigures the popular foodie memoir into something worthwhile and very memorable." (Publishers Weekly)

"Eddie Huang has a delightfully funny and down-to-earth narration style that captures the cultural nuances, mannerisms, and speech patterns of a diverse range of characters.... [H]is affable persona, expressive reading, occasional chuckles, and intentional digressions from the book to directly address audio listeners make his story and performance compelling and charming." (AudioFile)

Inspiring story

As a first generation Chinese American, fresh off the boat, it is an inspiring book. Love Eddie’s stories.

ill.

Audible requires fifteen words to post this. These are they. Read this book. For real.

Coming to America 2.0

What made the experience of listening to Fresh Off the Boat the most enjoyable?

hilarious and fresh take on a memoir, albeit maybe a bit premature in his career. Huang is eloquent and very entertaining.

delicious

I had no idea the extent of Eddie Huangs life and story. it was fresh and delicious

Inspiring

The realist a book can get. Everything written from the mans childhood til his success. Just a beautiful work of art. Eddie Huang, an inspiration.

this was an amazing book and I had a lot of fun li

this was a lot of fun to read so I'm glad I got this title

eddie thanks for keepin it 100

best shit ive read in a long time 5 stars bro everything was relatable coming from an asian household.

Great story

Is my second time listen to this overall an awesome storyteller. I can't wait to visit your restaurant!

Great bio of a man finding his identity!

Some may call him a wannabe hip hop artist. but Eddie Huang is an original. He may sound black with all of his rap style language, but he found his Asian American, and specifically his Taiwanese American identity. He traveled and did everything from drug selling to practicing law. But his purpose on life was to blaze a trail as Eddie Huang, chef, Taiwanese American, entertainer.

Amazing book!!

Loved this book from beginning to end! Just to keep myself from finishing it the first day I kept restarting over and over. I swear in some parts of the book I felt like it was mirroring some parts in my live. Eddie is a great author, narrator, and inspiration to all us black sheep out here just trying to make it!