[MUSIC PLAYING]
[APPLAUSE]
SPEAKER: I'm going to give you a hug.
JIMMY O. YANG: Thank you.
Thank you.
SPEAKER: All right.
JIMMY O. YANG: Hey, gang.
Thanks for coming out, everybody.
I appreciate that.
Is there a dog here?
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: Yes, there is.
Google has a dog open-door policy.
So Jimmy wrote a book recently.
It's called "How to American."
We're going to have a little chat here,
and then we'll open it up to questions.
And just as a little incentive, if you
don't have the book already, those who ask questions
will be the first to get your very own copy of the book.
JIMMY O. YANG: Ooh.
So exciting.
I'll be signing it and taking pictures afterwards.
SPEAKER: Exactly.
Yeah, all right, so we're going to start in the beginning.
JIMMY O. YANG: Hi.
SPEAKER: You were born-- hi.
You were born in Hong Kong.
Tell me about that.
Let's start there.
JIMMY O. YANG: Yeah, I was born in Hong Kong,
and I moved to LA when I was 13.
SPEAKER: In 2000.
JIMMY O. YANG: In 2000.
That was after the handoff from the British colony back
to China, right?
And I think there was a lot of worry there.
It was probably one of the reasons
why our family moved here.
And when I first came, I couldn't really
speak English very well, kind of like Jian-Yang, you know?
[LAUGHTER]
I learned English in Hong Kong how kids here
would learn Spanish.
So it's not very well.
And I didn't understand the simplest slangs,
like what's up.
They don't teach you that in school, like what's up, right?
[LAUGHTER]
Eventually I learned a lot of English
by watching "BET Rap City."
That was like my thing.
Yeah, and then it just progressed from there.
SPEAKER: But even before you moved to LA--
let me see if I get this straight.
Your parents were originally from Shanghai.
JIMMY O. YANG: That's true.
SPEAKER: They spoke "Shang-lan-ese."
JIMMY O. YANG: We speak Shanghainese back home.
SPEAKER: Shanghainese.
JIMMY O. YANG: And then I learned Cantonese from school.
So I speak Cantonese in school.
And then I watch shows in Mandarin.
SPEAKER: So no wonder you're confused.
JIMMY O. YANG: Very.
Yeah, and then English somewhere came along.
SPEAKER: So how did that even feel as a kid
even before you got to the US not knowing how to speak really
good English, just being in Hong Kong
but having parents who came from the mainland?
JIMMY O. YANG: Yeah, I was kind of already the foreign kid,
because whenever I'd speak to my parents
they would be like, oh, that's the Shanghai boy right there.
There's like an internal almost hierarchy of semiracism
within Chinese people.
Like Hong Kong people always think
they're better than other mainland China people,
so they always called me like the Shanghai boy.
So maybe that was my first experience
of assimilation, which really came in handy later
when I came to America when I was actually the foreign kid.
SPEAKER: Already sort of felt like an outsider--
JIMMY O. YANG: Yeah.
SPEAKER: --a little In Hong Kong.
OK, so you get to the US.
You're in LA.
What's your first day in the US?
What happens?
JIMMY O. YANG: It was just complete culture shock.
Because Hong Kong was like Manhattan.
You've got buildings 25 stories high.
It's a concrete jungle.
And then you came to LA.
The streets are like six lanes wide.
Everything was just like a two-story strip mall.
And you walk down the streets, nobody in the street.
So it's like, where am I?
It was like this is "Mad Max" or what's going on?
[LAUGHTER]
And the first day, my grandpa took us
to his favorite American restaurant.
We walked 45 minutes down the street.
First of all, we passed by Pizza Hut,
and that was my favorite restaurant in Hong Kong.
Because Pizza Hut in Hong Kong is like a gourmet restaurant
with seafood, pasta, and real gourmet soups and stuff.
And I saw the real authentic American version,
and it was just like a hole in the wall with an oven.
I'm like, what is this?
How is the real version worse than the foreign version?
I was panicking.
SPEAKER: So where did Grandpa take you?
JIMMY O. YANG: And then grandpa--
he was like, this is my favorite American restaurant.
We arrived at the strip mall, and it was El Pollo Loco.
It was a Mexican fast-food place, but it was amazing.
And it was the first time I experienced American freedom
inside of El Pollo Loco.
Because you think about it.
They give you so many choices.
There's dark meat and white meat,
which my grandpa was like, don't ever order the white meat.
That's dry and rough.
That's for American idiots, OK?
Get the dark meat.
There's corn tortilla, flour tortilla.
You get the flour tortilla because the corn tastes funny.
And then you get a glass of water,
and you can go to a soda machine and get whatever you want.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: Not exactly how it works.
JIMMY O. YANG: And then you go to the salsa bar
and just get whatever you want.
Get some onions and cilantro.
You can go home and saute that stuff for some dish later.
It's freedom, people.
AUDIENCE: Hey, Jimmy.
I'm Vince.
Thanks for coming out and writing that book.
It's awesome hearing this story.
I was curious.
I love your role on "Silicon Valley,"
and there's some cringe-worthy, semi-stereotypical Asian
moments.
I'm wondering how you reconcile that with yourself
having lived through that.
JIMMY O. YANG: Yeah, I think it teeters
the line of being a stereotypical character
and then portraying an immigrant character and humanizing it,
right?
I know a lot of especially American-born Asian actors that
don't even--
they won't even audition for a part that
has an accent or something.
And for me, I kind of disagree with that
because I was the kid that was foreign.
I was the kid with an accent.
So my job is not to judge that but to portray him
in a humanizing, funny way to make them look better.
I think that's more important than shunning those people out.
Because one of the most painful things when I first came here
wasn't the fact that, say, Black people, Latino,
white people didn't accept me because I was a foreign kid.
I expected that.
But one of the most painful things was the American-born
Asian people didn't accept me, because they didn't want to be
grouped in as like a FOB, as like the Fresh-Off-the-Boat
guy.
So I kind of feel pretty strongly about that
where I want to make immigrants just as appealing and just as
sexy and just as funny as a perfectly
English-speaking person, and I think that's important.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
Thanks for repping the FOBs.
AUDIENCE: Thanks for coming out.
As someone who's navigated that really complicated space
of giving up the more guaranteed,
regular, salaried job to kind of pursue something
that could be a spectacular failure, what kind of advice
do you offer or could you offer to someone
trying to decide whether or not to take a chance on something
that could not work out?
JIMMY O. YANG: Good question.
I think for me, I just almost couldn't
live with myself not doing what I love.
I always think it's better to try something and fail
miserably than to have never tried at all, so if you sum it
up in that sentence.
And I talked to some startup people.
I think those guys are really brave,
and they're artists, too.
Because they could be working somewhere for like $200,000,
but they started-- they decided to take a chance.
And one guy told me-- he was like, all you're missing
is maybe two years of opportunity costs.
But you can always go back to doing something safer.
So yeah, you're just only losing a couple years.
You're fine.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
JIMMY O. YANG: Just pretend you're in a coma or something
if it didn't work out.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER: I think we're all very lucky that we got
to hear your story in writing--
JIMMY O. YANG: Thanks, guys.
SPEAKER: --TV, and in the movies.
[APPLAUSE]
JIMMY O. YANG: Thank you.
SPEAKER: [INAUDIBLE]
JIMMY O. YANG: Thank you.
Thank you.