We are 6 days out from publication and I couldn’t be more excited.

It’s been 13 years since I published Fresh Off the Boat and from 2013 to 2020, I really didn’t grow.

Success insulated me from looking at my own reflection or hearing the voices of the people who really cared about me and it was easier to point at all the positive things happening at work while ignoring how my personal life was falling apart.

Being alone on a mountain in Taiwan for most of 2020 broke me open and when I returned to America a woman who’d curved me for 2 years on a dating app decided to fire a message out of the blue saying:

“What I’m going to do here is pretend like I didn’t ignore this message for 2 years. How are you?” she said.

It was hysterical. Who would receive such a half-assed triple late response?

A fantastically intrigued and extremely lonely man sitting on his couch in Mid-City.

The woman who messaged me was of course Natashia and she changed my life.

In all my prior relationships, I’d get to a point where exclusivity, marriage, or even children were on the horizon and serious questions around my family would arise. As I’ve written about at length and discussed on the pod, there was extreme violence and domestic abuse in my family. My father is/was a tough guy from Taiwan that once stabbed a crossing guard at the age of 12, I’d seen him pull a .45 on a guy at a gas station who tried to force us off the road, he’d dragged my mother across the kitchen floor several times and beatings were a monthly occurrence in my house growing up.

As an adolescent, I was constantly in crisis. From the age of 11, I was in and out of meetings with social workers at school, then juvenile court at 17 for assault, then eventually full-on felony probation with weekly check-ins and drug tests. At the age of 19, I was facing a felony assault with a motor vehicle charge from a drug deal gone bad and my life looked over.

Somehow I persevered and this family that I survived became the portrait of Asian America getting Asians back on television for the first time since Margaret Cho did it in 1994 (5 years before the Knicks were last in the NBA Finals I might add).

We’d made it!

We were a MODEL FAMILY despite everything!

We were vindicated!

That success stunted my family’s growth as well as my own.

The first few months dating were always easy. People found me fun, liked the work, and enjoyed the lifestyle, but you can only beat around the bush for so long.

Eventually, you have to tell people who you are.

And that’s where the trouble would begin for me. When people criticized my parents, I argued saying things like “it’s cultural” or “America is a brand new ass country” or “you don’t have a place to judge them”, but deep down the biggest problem was that I agreed with them…

My family was broken. No amount of success could put it back together after every thing that had happened.

In 2023 a couple months after Natashia and I were fake married in Santa Barbara - fake married because my parents didn’t mail in the certificate - I was flying back from London after a Baohaus Pop-Up when I saw an article on New York Magazine about beige flags.

These were some of the beige flags highlighted by the article:

• Having the exact same breakfast every single day

• Always needing a blanket regardless of temperature

• Preferring Pepsi over Coke

• Taking an entire day to drink one (1) mug of coffee. (Extra beige points if they sometimes only finish half and put it in the fridge for tomorrow.)

• Putting their parents’ contact info in their phone by their full name instead of “Mom” and “Dad”

I joked to Natashia that if only these were our red flags life would be so nice…

But I was happy and seen and understood with Natashia so I started to write Come Undone right there on the plane. A novel about two red flags making it right despite every thing in their harrowing past.

I’m going to put an excerpt of my favorite chapter below in the hopes that it will entice you to join us at any of these tour dates:

6/16 Eddie Huang with Natashia Perrotti and Chris Jackson | The Strand (NYC)

6/18 Eddie Huang with Ottessa Moshfegh | Live Talks Los Angeles (LA)

6/19 Eddie Huang with Mark Padoongpatt | The Writer’s Block (Las Vegas)

6/20 Eddie Huang with Dave Schilling | Godmothers (Santa Barbara)

6/23 Eddie Huang with Jon Raymond | Powell’s City of Books (Portland)

6/24 Eddie Huang with W. Kamau Bell | City Arts & Lectures (San Francisco)

6/26 Eddie Huang with Lillian Li | Literati Bookstore (Ann Arbor)

7/23 Eddie Huang with D. Watkins | East City Bookshop (DC)

If you cannot physically be there, it would mean EVERYTHING to me if you would consider pre-ordering the novel here. There is nothing I love more than writing and I will make every one a deal here. If the novel hits bestseller first week, I will make this substack free for eternity. All that I ask is that you support us this week.

First week sales really matter for writers and I want nothing more than having the opportunity to continue doing this work.

On to the excerpt…

Chapter 4: Genuinely Repulsed

I can tell when someone is pushing me away as a strategy to ultimately get closer and it doesn’t work. You have to be genuinely repulsed but involuntarily curious like Janine for it to work.

There was a period in my late-20s and early-30s where I was dying to be in love like Anna in Frozen. I kept asking my therapist what he thought about my relationships as if paying someone $300 an hour meant I could pass off all the decisions I didn’t have the confidence to make myself.

“First of all, Hubie, let’s ask the question. Why love? Why is this important to you?”

“It’s the only thing Will Hunting thought was worth it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Good Will Hunting. In the movie Will Hunting is a genius who can do anything he wants, but he chooses to get drunk with his friends in Southie and drive a beat-up car with mismatched doors to go see about a girl instead of working for the NSA.”

“Ah yes, the Matt Damon and Ben Affleck film.”

“Yeah, that one.”

“It’s a wonderful film, but why does it hold so much weight in your mind.”

“What do you mean? I like the movie.”

“Sure, but you like a lot of films. Why this one in particular?”

“Why not this one?”

“We can get to the why not, but let’s start with why?”

“I mean it’s clear isn’t it? I don’t understand why therapists make you say things you already know. Will Hunting’s foster parents beat him too.”

“But you’re really just living Will Hunting’s answer to his issue aren’t you? How do you know that driving off into the sunset in pursuit of Minnie Driver is for you.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t drive into the sunset for Minnie Driver. She’s far too stable. I’d do it for someone like Lana Del Rey.”

“Why Lana Del Rey?”

“She’s born to die.”

“Why would you want that?”

“Dr. Polanski if I have to explain, it’s not hot. Just trust me. You want someone born to die.”

“Hubie, why do you want someone born to die?”

“Ok, when you watch Deer Hunter and see the Russian Roulette scene are you repulsed or turned on?”

“Repulsed!”

“See, I’m turned on.”

“But WHY?”

“Because people who are born to die want to FEEL shit. I want to put the gun to my head and see what’s really really good. If you’re constantly worried about staying alive, you’re not actually living.”

“Hubie do not put a gun to your head.”

“I’m not going to put a gun to my head. A lot of what I say here is bullshit, but you get the point. I need to FEEL it.”

***

I wanted to be in the playoffs playing meaningful games feeling all the things, but every time I met someone new and tried to get intimate with them, Dr. Polanski would tell me I was simply infatuated.

“Alright if it’s not love, then what emotion do you think is at the core of it all?”

“Core of what?”

“The core of intimacy.”

He got up walked slowly across the room and turned on his fan. I don’t know if he was toying with me or stalling for time. He walked back across the room, sat down, crossed his legs, and spit it out.

“Curiosity. Curiosity is at the core of intimacy. Where there is curiosity, there can be intimacy. And where there is intimacy, there can be love.”

“Like Russian roulette. ”

“If you must…”

I accepted the doctor’s definition, but I don’t think I would have arrived at that same idea independently. On my own I may have said something like “desire.” The desire to be intimate, the desire to be bound, the desire to feel shit. Love always needed to feel like a choice to me for it to feel real. It needed to be intentional or at least willing, not a compulsion or an obligation. It had to be desired. Which of course, thank you Dr. Polanski, goes back to my relationship with my mother.

You’re supposed to love your child according to simple biology and there were moments when my mother did. There was a lot of sacrifice, duty, and maybe, sometimes desire. She wanted to love me, but whether she wants to admit it or not, there were insane lapses where she threw that love out the window, down the stairs, or into the side of the house. Which she literally did one time when she wanted to scare my dad in the middle of an argument. He was prepping his next volley when she ran out of the house, put me in the car, slammed it in reverse, and drove through the bushes until she rammed into the side of the garage.

It’s been hard for me to untangle the idea of love from the feeling of smashing my face into the passenger side door because she leveraged my health and safety like a put option against Dad.

I thought love—at least the love of a parent for a child—was built into our biology. When I started to suspect that it wasn’t, I held out hope that my mom could still achieve it if she wanted it bad enough. Desire might bridge the chasm.

Curiosity is a weaker force. It seems fleeting and whimsical, not sturdy, anchored. You can’t trust curiosity. I wouldn’t build a relationship on an emotion that was so ephemeral.

For a while I chalked up my therapist’s answer to Western Culture. It’s the typically flimsy thing an American would answer to an existential question. As a person hailing from a 5000-year-old culture, I’m deeply distrustful of answers like this from someone whose country was invented 200 years ago. Next to the rest of human history, American thought sticks out like Spring Break.

***

All this shit was swirling in my mind because I realized that I was curious about Janine and was seriously considering missing the NBA Draft to hang out with her, which felt psychotic.

But I liked it. Irrational behavior gets me going.

Why do I love the Knicks?

Because they’re doomed by James Dolan.

They’ll never win. They’re fated to eternal failure.

That’s what makes it fun to cheer for a team that plays in the world’s greatest arena, but hasn’t been the world’s greatest team since 1973. You buy all the gear, watch all the games, scream your heart out knowing that at the end of the season you will have done everything you could, and the Knicks will lose.

They’re a born to die-ass team.

So I decided to miss the draft and blame Janine when the Knicks inevitably drafted the wrong player.

***

I went to the spa, bought a day pass, and sat in the waiting room in a robe with Knicks Cityscape Boxer Briefs on underneath for good luck. There were some nice Marcona Almonds, a bowl of chocolate covered cherries, and a well-placed assortment of mediocre herbal teas.

I tried it all since it was free.

I asked them to put the NBA Draft on in the waiting room, which they did but without sound. It bothered me, but once I saw the NBA Draft on in the waiting room of a spa I understood.

It made no sense here.

The people in the waiting room looked at the television with disdain as if they were from a more evolved planet of rich people that had created pop culture and sports to make money and entertain plebes like me but never consumed themselves, like Funyuns or something.

A thought crossed my mind that if I ever got so rich and disconnected that sports no longer interested me, I’d schedule my assisted suicide.

***

Then Janine walked into the waiting room fully dressed ready to go.

“Oh, you came,” she said looking at me surprised.

“Of course I came. Did you expect me not to come?”

“Honestly, yes.”

While the people who saw the NBA Draft as a nuisance made me feel out of place, this type of verbal intercourse made me comfortable.

“Well, it looks like you don’t want to shvitz,” I said.

“No, I’m sorry. I don’t want to get all sweaty right now.”

“Let’s go for a walk then.”

She peeked at her two-tone Cartier Panthère as if to check the time. I reached out for her arm and turned the dial towards me.

“Like you actually set the time on this thing.”

She laughed snatching her arm back from me realizing we were from the same planet.

“FINE HUBIE! Get changed and we’ll go for a walk. Jesus Christ you’re insufferable.”

“I don’t need to change.”

“You can’t go out with nothing on under there.”

“I got the city on my dick.” I said flashing her my Knicks Cityscape Boxer Briefs.

***

She made me change.

Told me it was uncouth to be walking around with a man in a robe and spa slippers. That it was too intimate for two people who barely know each other and that it was giving Anna Nicole Smith with geriatric J. Howard Marshall, which I thought was a vibe.

Regardless we walked out into the desert.

“I’ve never walked outside the property when I come here.”

“It’s the best part.”

“I may change my mind, but right now I tend to agree,” she said taking it all in.

“Do you change your mind a lot?”

“No, not really. I make accommodations, but that’s not really changing your mind right?”

“No, that’s just choosing to do something for someone else’s convenience despite knowing how you actually feel inside.”

“Right. I tend to do a lot of that.”

“Really? You don’t seem that accommodating.”

She shoved me playfully and I decided to be dramatic and roll down the side of a sand dune.

“Oh my god, personal injury! You owe me pussy.”

“You are such a fucking idiot. I do not owe you pussy!”

“I missed out on bouillabaisse at Tetou because of you and now the restaurant is closed.”

“I didn’t tell you not to come back to the restaurant.”

“How was I supposed to go back to the restaurant after that?”

“After what? That was nothing.”

I rolled over covered in sand and looked up at her from a low angle. She was absolutely stunning and I didn’t have a movie to reference.

“You don’t want pussy that’s owed anyway,” she said.

“No, I want pussy that’s given.”

“Or you could just come get it you bitch.”

As soon as she said it she turned like a free safety tracking a deep ball and started running back toward the hotel, so I chased her.

It wasn’t Russian Roulette, but it was a lot of fun chasing this woman through the sand dunes. She was pretty fucking fast, and I had to work to stay within a cute distance. We got within 600 feet of the hotel entrance and she looped back around.

I was almost out of breathe, but I followed.

After a minute or two, she decided to roll down the side of a sand dune.

I rolled right down on top of her and picked up where we left off in Cannes, but after a few seconds, she put a stop to it again.

“That was cute, but I want to delay pleasure.”

“Delay pleasure.”

“Yeah, I want to hang out.”

“You want to hang out with me?”

“Yeah.”

I can’t express the sense of relief I felt believing that someone actually wanted to hang out with me.

I swore I must have experienced this before with someone, anyone, a friend, an acquaintance, someone must have wanted to hang out with me just to hang out with me but I couldn’t remember anyone else who wanted to hang out without something desired or exchanged.

Camantha brought a lot to the table, but it was clear she wanted something.

Vigo I loved, but there was always some type of transaction underlying our relationship.

Eventually, I stopped thinking, laid down beside her, and looked up at the sky.

***

“City, desert, mountain or ocean?” I asked.

“Hmmmmmm, I’m usually ocean, but honestly desert is giving today. What about you?”

“Desert. Always desert.”

“Why?”

“I liked that book The English Patient.”

She looked at me with a disdain I didn’t understand.

“Don’t get all elusive on me using someone else’s art to explain how you feel, Hubert.”

“Alright!”

“Is this what you do? You play Madlibs with women?”

“No!”

She looked at me with her face turned up like she’d seen all the CCTV of my life up to this point.

“Yes! Yes! It is what I do because I’m pretty sure most people don’t want to hear what is actually going on in my head.”

“And why’s that?”

“Cause there’s a lot of bad shit in there.”

“Lucky for you I like troubled beef.”

“Am I troubled beef?”

“You’re naughty.” she said and looked away.

“How so?”

“You just are. You like a finger don’t you?”

“Yeah, but that’s anatomic.”

“Sure, but you have to be a little naughty to really love it.”

“How did you know I would love it?”

“There isn’t always a logical explanation, Hubie. Most interesting things in life contain zero logic. You just press the fucking button.”

I leaned in to kiss her, but she grabbed me and then rolled out. I wouldn’t say she curved me, but she eluded me and we went back to laying.

“I don’t think anyone actually likes the desert more than the ocean,” she said.

“Why would you say that?”

“People who prefer desert just don’t think they’re good enough for the ocean.”

After that, we were both silent.

***

I couldn’t tell if I was dreaming or still conscious wandering through old thoughts laying in the desert with Janine.

I was back in the house where my Dad beat the shit out of my Mom.

I told her we should call the cops and she told me that if I called the cops, I’d end up in a foster home cause she didn’t know how to make money in America.

I accepted it because it made sense. It didn’t feel good, being smart and rational, but I did it.

I didn’t call the cops and I didn’t fight back and she never left him, but we did run away sometimes to the Red Roof Inn with a Friendly’s across the street. My Mom would get three scoops: pistachio, pralines and cream, strawberry, on a banana split with fudge, caramel, wet walnuts, whipped cream, and a cherry on top. Mom was a real pretty bitch until she got fat eating ice cream when we ran away.

She would always get me a Reese’s cup. It wasn’t my favorite. I wanted the Kid’s Monster Mash Sundae which was mint chocolate chip ice cream with two M&M’s for eyes, a cherry for a nose, and Reese’s Pieces Cups for ears. It looked so sick. The Monster Mash Sundae smiled back at you.

“Eat the Reese’s Cup. You don’t want to be fat like me.”

“Who cares? We’re all gonna die anyway. Why can’t I have the Monster Mash?”

“You have something to live for. You will be happier if you aren’t fat. But this is the end for me.”

“Shut up, Mom. We can leave any time. I don’t know why you keep going back.”

“I have nowhere to go, Hubie. I stay here for you.”

That always hurt.

“Just be somebody for mom and make money. Don’t let my life be for nothing.”

As I grew from a boy to a teen, I got confidence. I lifted weights, started to box, and one day when my dad decided to drag my mom across the living room floor by her hair, I pushed him.

“What do you think you’re doing?” He snapped at me.

I didn’t respond, but he dropped my Mom. I remember the sound of her head clanking against the tile.

“You think you a man now you can hit your Dad?”

“You’re not a man!” I screamed at him and dove at his torso.

He easily eluded me and shoved me into the floor.

“Get up!” he said kicking me in the stomach.

“Get up!” he yelled again as he took his shirt off getting ready to knock me the fuck out.

I didn’t fucking care. If I died, I died.

I got up to fight him but got whacked across the back. I fell forward and cracked my face against the floor. I rolled over onto the cold tile and saw stars for a second. When I turned over to look up, my Mom standing over me with a bo staff.

“Mind your own business. You don’t have a right to hit your Dad.”

Everything went dark from there.

I don’t know what happened. I was just gone.

On Tuesday’s episode of Canal Street Dreams, we speak to about how Come Undone is in her words “lesbian coded”, which got Natashia talking about how I bond with the homies.

My love language is acts of service.

I want to be of service; I like to build things; and it’s how I bond. Natashia laughed that I don’t pick the person who’s best for a job ever.

I pick the person that I want to be friends with, which can at times be a comedy of errors if the work becomes accidentally successful and I’m stuck carrying the homie through the process.

It’s happened frequently, but whenever I stop to remember that the point of the exercise was to “build” with the homie, I find peace.

It’s ignorant and sophmoric, but I’m incapable of virtue signaling and pretending I’m not ignorant and sophmoric so I’ma keep it funky and admit that amongst men of my age, we frequently say idiotic things like:

“It’s not gay if…”

“It’s not gay if we getting money.”

“It’s not gay if it’s for the Knicks.”

“It’s not gay if you say no homo before you show me that dick pic you just sent.”

It’s important to acknowledge how idiotic men are as a species and also how badly we all want intimacy… with other men.

I Love You, Man is one of my favorite survey works on the topic.

It has some fantastic moments and is a hysterical film, but I’d like to go deeper into the shame and fear involved when doing male intimacy.

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I was having dinner with my friend the other night at a French Vegan restaurant in the West Village which was quite good. About half way through dinner he showed me a poem he wrote that was quite good. More quite good than the food I’d say.

In so many words it was about breaking up and how you can distract yourself post-break up with simple joys like new socks, new shirts, whatever makes you happy and takes your mind off things, but that as soon as you encounter intimacy, it’s a wrap.

You remember and now you feel terrible.

I would describe Matt’s voice as horny with a hint of danger that is then quickly grounded and as soon as it’s grounded, he pulls the chair out from under you with a punchline and its over.

I’d say that the trademark of his voice is that it’s elusive, but he leaves an Andes mint on the pillow for you. He’s emotionally avoidant, but kind. You can’t be that upset if you got a mint.

In this era, people would probably be very upset if you left without saying goodbye leaving a mint behind, but I’ve never expected anyone to do anything for me and I’m a fat fuck so waking up to a mint seems cool to me.

After laughing about these observations for a few moments, he asked me.

“So how would you describe your voice?”

“My voice?” I avoided.

“Yeah. You’re voice.” he insisted.

“I would say that I draw people in with humor, I’m a bit of a host. It’s like I own a bed and breakfast. Would you like something to drink? How about something to eat? Stay a while. I’ll get the bed made upstairs. Then you stay and you’re in hell.”

“You lure them in.”

“Yeah, I’d say I’m a haunted house.”

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Last night, the New York Knicks made the NBA Finals for the first time in 27 years.

Troy, the bartender at Baohaus, passed me a bottle of Veuve from the fridge and I told him to put it back because the job is not done.

It is incredible that we’ve made it this far, but we still haven’t won shit.

We need four more wins.

But I still wanted to remember the moment so I asked every one at the bar to come outside and take a group photo. This deep in a playoff run, it’s important to poke your head up and enjoy it for a moment before locking back in.

So we did.

Usually I’ll take an Uber home after 11pm, but tonight I called my best friend, Raf, as I walked to Astor Place to take the 6-train. We spoke about surviving the Eddy Curry era, suffering Harry Potter as our point guard, the Frederic Weiss pick, the Channing Frye pick, the Kevin Knox pick, the Frank Nkitlikina pick which I watched go down at Dallas BBQ on 1st ave, all the terrible picks, fuck them picks.

We are in the NBA Finals and it was worth it…

When you haven’t been to a finals in so long, you start to wonder if you ever will. The proposition feels impossible and that despair hangs over every thing in your life.

I will tell any long suffering fan, its going to be alright.

All those years screaming at the television blaming Dolan, Thibs, Carmelo, Charles Smith, Jon Starks, (I never blamed Patrick) or even at times Spike Lee, were misunderstood.

It wasn’t anyone’s fault; it simply wasn’t our time.

When it is your team’s time, the feeling of joy usurps all the suffering and you understand how all the learning moments culminated in this victory.

Apparently it was also my wife’s time because as I scrolled the 2015 Knicks roster looking at long forgotten names like Langston Galloway, Cole Aldrich, and Jason Smith, I got a DM about the photo I posted.

In a now deleted message from a blocked account, she informed me that I would be sleeping on the couch because the woman in the photo had her arm on me.

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Lots of people are talking about how interesting this NYT 100 list is.

I truly love Ligaya and in so many ways she “discovered” Baohaus with her review. Her mans, Ahrin Mishan, also put me onto Edward Yang’s Brighter Summer Day so I’m truly indebted to this family and there is a bias.

I’m not going to analyze this list, but I will analyze the structural and macro themes that create pressure and a$$ food writing.

As a person who does write about food outside the system in bits and pieces here and there, I’d like to share why I find it nearly impossible to write anything containing truth that also isn’t corny from within the system.

1. Barrier to Entry - The difference between food and say music, literature, or film is that food cannot be consumed without spending hundreds of dollars for a lil’ taste. That is even assuming that there are restaurants in your vicinity participating in a larger global food conversation.

   If you’re in Kazakhstan eating a delicious Rice Plov, I love that for you a…

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This is Two Sheet Lasagna, an innovation from Rolo’s in Ridgewood, Queens.

From the POV of a chef, it is very rare to see actual innovation. Every restaurant and chef wants you to think they’re innovative, but most people are standing on the shoulders of giants continuing a tradition or flat out copying.

Eater has a great video of the process here and I find it ingenious. They make their own dough, laminate it, paint it with bechamel and bolognese, then bring it to life by firing it in a wood burning oven. Having tried this myself I can tell you it is a recent peak in pasta making and an absolute peak for lasagna as a genre.

Some of the best innovations are things that make immediate sense, were right there for anyone to put together, but nobody did or nobody could. When the right chef at the right time is able to pull that sword out of stone, every body wins.

Seeing and eating this dish literally put a battery in my back.

It inspired me and that’s what really great food does for chefs.

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Opening a restaurant is complete insanity.

I choose to believe that every one means well.

Why else would you do it? There’s not much money in the venture, the hours are insane, the work is back breaking, and most people coming to dine remind you clearly and consistently that you are not only working for them, but serving them.

“Could I have a sauce to dip this bao in?”

“Could you fill up my son’s water?”

“Do you mind packing this up?”

All fair, all to be expected, all within the scope of the job.

When I hire people, the dream is that they stay.

Sometimes I get too close.

I know birthdays, full charts, their families, their boyfriends, girlfriends, bank balances, etc. You get very close very quickly in a restaurant and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

But when the line blurs and the personal spills into the work, I have to say, “No thank you.”

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Every day at Baohaus there are customers from our days on 14th Street or 137 Rivington Street that tell me about the last time they dined with us.

Sometimes it was 2020 in the months before the pandemic, for others it was all the way back to 2009 when we first opened, and what I’ve encountered is that each person remembers a different version of the restaurant and myself from that particular moment in time.

The old me used to get frustrated when people would talk about versions of myself in Fresh Off the Boat or Huang’s World or the era when we had a bong in the bathroom on Rivington. I’ve really struggled to grow up and be the best version of myself so anytime I had to encounter an old outdated version like a decrepit iphone in a drawer, it upset me that a version so flawed even existed.

I have a business partner who also makes a habit of talking to people I used to work with who have a lot of things to say. He collates heresay and brings it up at work during the most inopportune moments for no discernible reason when it doesn’t even apply to the task at hand. It’s as if he doesn’t believe the person I am today and seems invested in proving that I’m still the old me which I can’t understand for the life of me.

Sometimes I wonder if its because he feels ashamed about the way he’s been operating and wants to drag the other crabs down into the barrel with him. I could write 3000 words proving that sentiment, but I haven’t because I don’t find it productive. I’m at a stage in my life where pointing at people and saying, “you’re worse than me” doesn’t make me feel better.

When I see people trying and failing, I just want to pick them up or remind them that nothing is perfect on the first try, but trying is all that matters.

Perhaps that comes from being a parent watching a child you see parts of yourself in attempting things as simple as eating an avocado.

I expect my son to reject his breakfast, throw it on the ground, or in the best possible scenario actually try to eat it and then spit it out onto his shirt. It reminds me that at some point all of us struggled to eat an avocado and we’re still struggling to be better versions of ourselves doing very very difficult things.

I wanted to write about this today because I feel like everyone can relate to the idea that you want to grow, change, evolve, and perhaps be a better version of yourself despite the fact that the people around you have already decided who you are. Whether its conscious, subconscious, or vindictive, I can’t say, but it really irks me when someone who’s supposed to be a friend or partner seems to be cheering against your growth and evolution.

Personally, I don’t take people at their word, but I trust their intentions. Even if they fail or revert back to their old ways, I give them the benefit of the doubt as long as they are fighting for the better version of themselves because I believe that most people want to be good. That is perhaps naive or silly, but I think assuming the opposite would make my life significantly sadder.

The way I’ve dealt with my old self is first by laughing at it. I have to laugh at the fact that at one point in my 20s, I would wear a t-shirt sleeve on my head with a 59/50 hat over the t-shirt sleeve. I have to laugh at the fact that I thought it was a good idea to throw an all-you-can-drink Four Loko Party or that I once told a competing food truck that I would fuck their couch. I have to laugh at the fact that I got so drunk at a bachelor party I tried to throw a couch out the window in Ft. Lauderdale.

Sure there are deep seeded psychological explanations for these things, but at the end of the day, on its face, I have to take personal responsibility and laugh at myself. What the fuck bro?

You were ass.

Deep down I know that my embarrassment comes from being a person my mother doesn’t approve of since she went through so much having three kids in a home where domestic violence still persists. Despite everything I’ve accomplished, I’m just not the kid she wanted and that makes me sad.

For many years, the idea of an essential self was crippling. I would read philosophy about the idea and got upset because what if my essential self wasn’t this “radiant point of light” or “pure presence of consciousness” but instead just something my mother rejected.

For many years I performed a dumber more ignorant version of myself as a rebellion to my mother’s expectations. It felt helpless pondering whether there is an essential self we can’t choose or control and rejecting expectation feels powerful. You’re basically saying to the world if you don’t love me then fuck you and here is the terrible guy you said I was.

Are you happy now?

Helplessness was the feeling that I had to shed.

But people around me made it very difficult. When I told them my intentions or what I wanted to accomplish or who I wanted to be, they’d laugh. It was masked as humor or camaraderie, but when I look back it was very clearly their own projection of helplessness.

What I realized is that everyone feels stuck or hopeless at times and when someone else is all radiant and pure, it’s disgusting. The worst thing you can do when trying to be a better version of yourself is to tell someone else about it.

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For three days, I didn’t have a phone and it was marvelous.

Before I went to the Apple Store, I took a call from Claire Landsbaum, the deputy editor of High Snobiety. It was wonderful so when I sat down at the Genius Bar, I picked up one of the iphones chained to the table and started reading High Snob features.

The first was about Talia Ryder, who I recognized from Never Rarely Sometimes Always. I was aware of the film because one of our editors on Boogie, Scott Cummings, edited the film, is married to the director, Eliza Hittman, and got me tickets to the premiere at Sundance. If you haven’t seen the film, you absolutely should. It was my favorite film of Sundance 2020, the Covid Sundance where everyone got sick, and it’s a really incredible portrait of a young girl trying to get an interstate abortion. It’s the type of feature that feels like a documentary much like The Last Showgirl or The Smashing Machine, but about a topic that is so emotionally and politically charged.

I loved the movie, but hadn’t followed Talia’s career closely enough and the High Snob feature filled in a lot of blanks. By the time I finished reading, I felt sufficiently caught up on someone I am absolutely a fan of now.

Then I scrolled to the profile on Sage Elsesser, who I always knew as the rapper Navy Blue, but even more than that, my homie DZA’s homie that runs V$ with him. A lot of times I meet people like Sage who just seem like good people and I don’t dig too much. I like to meet them through interactions as homies, but after reading the High Snob profile, I felt like a moron. Guy was a legend from the Cherry skate video and also Paloma’s brother and I started connecting all the dots and regretted all the dumb jokes I’d told around him because I’m way too comfortable around DZA.

About 30 minutes later, I got a new phone and this morning I woke up to multiple headlines this morning about things I love being “dead”.

Without delving into the history, cultural and racial context of “the fade”, or declaring that Allen Houston objectively had the greatest fade of all-time during the 1999 Knicks NBA Finals Run, I simply checked Tyler’s stats.

Look, you tell me, but I’m confused why GQ is asking this guy to write about the death of the fade.

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For the first time in months, I had Saturday night off and took Natashia to Smithereens.

Our good friend, Michael Silber, got us seats at the Chef’s Table and it was exquisite. I don’t usually dine at restaurants where the food is overly chef-driven i.e. all the attention is on the chef, the food, the technique, the ingredients, etc because I just don’t like the feeling of being all up in someone’s ass like that.

I’m a bit more interested when the chef is decentered, there’s narrative focus, a macro point of view regarding culture, and perhaps a middle finger toward late stage capitalism which could be the metal being played in the bathroom of Penny or a restaurant that still gives bread and rice away for free.

While it is impossible to not focus your attention on the chef, the technique, and the plate at Smithereens because it is simply that good, the story is what keeps bringing me back. As a Chinese kid from Florida who thought he was Omar Epps for large swaths of his adolescent life, I appreciate Chef Nick doing white boy kaiseki a la carte at Smithereens.

I’ve seen a lot of white boy omakase or white boy kaiseki over the years and it’s like watching BumFights.

Chef Nick is absolutely shredding and what anchors his restaurant is that he’s employing Japanese technique to cook New England cuisine. It’s not fusion, it’s not appropriated, it’s a story of a chef from New England that learned Japanese technique and applied it to the cuisine of his youth.

This is literally what Marco Polo did for Italian Cuisine, what the Moors did for Italian Cuisine, and what Shaw Brothers Kung Fu Films did for Wu-Tang which is basically Italian since they’re from Staten Island.

BUT, cuisine aside, what really got our attention was the set up of the Chef’s Table in the middle of Smithereens. It feels like you’re in a dark, dingy, illicit room reminiscent of a place I may or may not have set the fire alarm off in Tokyo and got chased through the street by Yakuza when filming an HBO Special on Japanese Sex Work that never aired…

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