Level 3 Letters About Literature in California

L E V E L 3 WINNER, LEVEL 3 Victor Liu Saratoga Fresh Off the Boat, Eddie Huang What’s up Eddie? I figured that starting this letter with a “Dear” and ending it off with a “Sincerely” or something along those lines wouldn’t be the right way to address a friend or a long-lost cousin that I haven’t met yet. But believe me, I’m not an Eminem-chasing Stan-I’m like you, just another Asian-American kid trying to navigate his way through the tangled maps of his immigrant parents’ American Dream. The only difference between us is that you’ve been in the driver’s seat of your journey for the past thirty-five years; I’ve just embarked on this voyage. Of course, I’ve seen you through my laptop screen on multiple episodes of Viceland’s Huang’s World and The Atlantic interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I think my first true connection with you happened between the front and back covers of your memoir-turned-TV-show, Fresh Off the Boat. Those 276 pages gave me a glimpse into the life of a modern Chinaman living next to Disney World-a universally relatable picture of a yellow boat finding its way to shore in a sea of rough, white waves. I gravitated towards Fresh Off the Boat because you, Eddie Huang, went against the grain. You were either too stubborn or too brave to think about repercussions before you acted out against subtle or not-to-subtle racism; regardless of what may have motivated you to slam Edgar’s hand into that microwave or to pummel AK’s face into the asphalt, I wish I had the guts to deal with what racism I faced at school or at Boy Scout summer camp (yeah I know, it’s painfully ironic). But, instead of fighting back like you gradually learned to do, I did absolutely nothing. I’m not completely condoning your exact response to racism, but I laud you for having one to begin with. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club attempted to connect me with an outdated mid-20th century Asian American experience that vaguely referenced the veiled racism Asians dealt with on a national level; your memoir immersed into a more contemporary, personal Asian-American narrative-you didn’t shy away from mentioning the “ching chong Eddie Huangs” and “chinky eyes.” Fresh Off the Boat was, and has been in a way, an unlikely and unconventional GPS to pilot my own Asian-American experiences. Enjoying and wanting to pursue writing and the humanities as an Asian-American living in the Bay Area had been more of an afterthought before I picked up Fresh Off the Boat; admittedly, I had incorrectly believed that we Asians were cookie-cuttered and formulaic, all destined to be doctors, computer engineers, lawyers or something in-between. When you dabbled in the streetwear industry and put your law career on an indefinite hold to open your restaurant and chase your passions, I was sold-I could be an Asian-American writer, just like you have been. I may not have had the courage to go against the grain to fight off (not physically of course) racism like you did, but I could at least go against the grain this time around and do what I wanted to do, not what my community told me to. And while critics have been quick to single out your colloquial tone, frequent usage of slang, and cryptic pop-culture references in the memoir, I think that has made it all the more impactful and transformative for my personal growth. You tell it like it is, no sugarcoating, like that heavy-handed “Asian parenting” with which we’ve become familiar. Fresh Off the Boat is a medicine that has let me take a bird’s eye view of our place as Asian-Americans in the midst of white-picket-fenced neighborhoods and underground hip-hop, and you don’t offer an accompanying spoonful of sugar. In many ways, I like to think that we’re two halves of the same Asian-American, second-generation boy. There are some tell-tale similarities in your memoir. You grew up idolizing Kareem and admiring his “ill sky hook;” I grew up kicking soccer balls and futilely attempting to “bend it like Beckham.” We both grew up loving tomatoes and egg cooked over rice, and we knew something was about to go down when our parents called us by our full Chinese names. We came to school with our stinky, exotic lunches and at one point, both wished we could trade our yellow skins, straight black hair, and hazel eyes for white skins, curly blonde hair, and those coveted sky blue eyes. And as always, we grew out of our desires to drench ourselves in shallow American whiteness with equally L E V E L 3 superficial excuses-you when you realized you couldn’t handle the macaroni and cheese, me when I realized wearing shoes in the house would make everything dirty. In other ways, I realized that we couldn’t be more diametrically opposed. Emery was your victim when you practiced RKOs and emulated other WWE moves; I was too scared to jump off the top of the slide onto the tanbark in a fast-paced game of playground lava monster. Your dad ruled the streets of Taipei with a .45, and your uncles compared their double barreled shotguns on lazy weekends; my parents have never seen-let alone touched-a firearm up close. You could, and probably still can, quote any O-Dog line from Menace II Society; I get weak at the sight of blood, whether it’s fake or real. You’re a Renaissance Man of sorts, but not in a stereotypical Asian sense. Instead of participating in math competitions and joining debate club in school, you tried out for the football team and almost single-handedly ran a restaurant. You needed to mature faster than you should have and lost part of your childhood to survive neighborhood bullies, overly demanding middle school football coaches, and the streets of a racist Orlando; I think I still have a lot of growing up to do-I’ve been lucky enough to avoid all of that in a community that ostensibly places education above everything else. But despite our differences, I also like to imagine that if we both grew up in the same circumstances on the same coast, we’d have more or less been the same person. And what made us different wasn’t nature, but rather nurture: that we shared desire to relentlessly chase our passions-you with your streetwear and restaurants, me with my writing-regardless of what our surrounding conditions might tell us to do, is a fundamental similarity that makes us more alike than we are different. I don’t think Fresh Off the Boat taught me how to definitely deal with racism. Just like you said, the “go back to your Chinas” will persist (you live in the heart of New York City, and you still get that at least three times a year!). Fresh Off the Boat did, however, teach me what no teacher or school textbook could: I learned to pick the path I wanted to follow on that labyrinthine map of our parents’ American Dream. So, I want to thank you for being an older brother and a role-model to Emery, Evan, and in a way, me too. From one self-proclaimed human panda to another, Victor Liu My hometown of Saratoga, California might be located at the center of the Silicon Valley, but my interests lie in the humanities. My desire to explore my passions beyond the technology and innovation, which I have been fortunate enough to be exposed to, through an Asian-American lens led me to read Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat and address my letter to him. In my free time, I am an Eagle Scout of my Boy Scout troop, a captain of my speech and debate team, an editor for the school newspaper, and an amateur poet/photographer. I really wish I could dunk a basketball on a standard NBA hoop, but unfortunately, not all of our dreams can come true. L E V E L 3 HONOR AWARD, LEVEL 3 Hayden Bixby Upland High School, Upland To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee Dear Ms. Harper Lee, My grandfather says he picked up his copy of your book right around when it was first published in 1960, right in the heyday of the civil rights movement. Your name has been in my family for three generations. He never read many books throughout his lifetime, but To Kill a Mockingbird was always the closest to his heart. My father and his parents worked endlessly to get my father into college in the 1980s, and when it finally happened, my grandfather gave him his old and tattered copy of the book. He read it one day while he was supposed to be studying for his midterms, and he says that his life changed forever because of it. I have never seen my grandpa’s copy of the book; my father has it stored somewhere in the garage. But my copy is fine, and the story that is held within its pages will never change. Before I read the book in seventh grade, I was very quick to make judgments about people as soon as I met them. I automatically assumed my new next-door neighbor was weird and creepy when they first moved in during sixth grade, just like how Scout automatically believes what Jem and Dill tell her about Boo Radley.

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