Taylor Takahashi and Pop Smoke in Eddie Huang’s Boogie.
Photo: David Giesbrecht / Focus Features
When we talk about what it means to “see yourself on the screen”, we generally assume that it is good when some aspect of your life experience is reflected back to you by films and television. But that doesn’t describe the acute embarrassment I felt – alongside reluctant recognition – when watching a particular scene in Boogie. In it, the film’s eponymous main character watches a tape of a 30-year-old tennis match with his father (Perry Yung), a recording of what Chin declares “the greatest moment in Asian American history”: 17 years- the old man Michael Chang winning the French Open in 1989. Boogie – who was born Alfred Chin, but prefers to follow what he calls his “stripper name” – is a senior high school student and basketball star who was still more than a decade at the time of Chang’s important victory, and he tries frustratedly to argue that the years since then have certainly had something to offer. What about Yao Ming carrying the flag at the Olympics? He is not American, his father points out. That girl who designed the Vietnam War memorial? Not bad for Maya Lin, but it hasn’t been anything yet about becoming the youngest male player in history to win a Grand Slam. And despite all their shared obsession with basketball, Junior and Senior of Chins are united in contempt for Jeremy Lin, who, as Mr. Chin sniffs, “gave Jesus credit.”
Boogie is the debut in the direction of the restaurant owner and TV personality Eddie Huang, whose memories of 2013 became the basis of Fresh off the boat, a sitcom he later rejected for cleaning up the darkest aspects of his childhood. This film, about the dreams of the NBA and the domestic struggles of a Taiwanese teenager from American Queens, is fiction, but it is also clearly his attempt to do something more courageous than FOB and more faithful to your perspective. (Huang also launched Boogie as the talking uncle Jackie, who occasionally appears to give advice or terrible news about Mr. Chin’s business.) The rebel main character, played by rookie Taylor Takahashi, is Huang’s revenge on the Jeremy Lins of the world – with his tattoos , his arrogance and the way he starts his relationship with black classmate Eleanor (Taylour Paige), looking at her at the gym and saying to her, “You have a beautiful vagina.” Somehow this works for him, perhaps because Takahashi – a 28-year-old Japanese American who met Huang through a recreational basketball league – exudes tranquility on the screen, even though it is obvious that he left his adolescence behind some time ago. Boogie is a vehicle for Huang’s frustrations about strangling model minority stereotypes and a representation of his fantasy of an Asian-American actor – the one who fucks (albeit with an explosion of recent doubts about the size of his dick) and who plays ball well enough to get the attention of colleges, though not scholarship offers. The pressure is on Boogie because his family cannot afford to pay for school any other way. As their mother’s concern (Pamelyn Chee) makes clear, they can’t even pay their household bills.
Huang and I are children of the 80s, at an age closer to Boogie’s father than we are to Boogie himself. As a half Chinese child growing up on the outskirts of the Bay Area, I didn’t know anything about tennis, but I kept control over Michael Chang anyway, the way I did (and still do) the knowledge of all the mixed Asian actors in the business. . What is at the heart of this impulse is not just the desire to see yourself, but a yearning to be second-hand, for influence – a yearning that can be youthful, yet powerful. It is powerful enough in Huang that he never really got over it. Watch Boogie is to ask whether, for Huang, the most difficult part of the Asian American experience is being perceived as not cool. Perhaps this is why he allows Chin to advance on whatever perspective the film’s Gen-Z protagonist might have: Huang seems to humbly cling to Chang’s own formative memories of triumph on a global stage, while ignoring the fact that that Chang has less in common with Boogie than with Jeremy Lin, which Boogie scornfully describes as “crazier for Jesus model-minority than Asian”. There is a maddening and disregarded quality to Boogiethe emotions of Asian American masculinity, and never as much as in the film’s tense relationship with blackness.
Boogie it takes place in the Chinese enclave of Flushing, but it is the darkness against which the main character feels the need to measure himself. In theory, the dramatic tension in the story has to do with Boogie getting a scholarship, but in practice, it’s shifted to whether Boogie can prove himself by defeating the best player in town, whose name is Monk, and who is played by Pop Smoke in the late rapper’s first and only role. It is not a part that involves a lot of dialogue because Monk serves more as a symbol of Boogie’s (and Huang’s) insecurities than a character. Boogie stares at Monk through the wire fence around the court where Monk reigns supreme and almost destroys his relationship with Eleanor after discovering that Monk was his previous sexual partner. If Boogie he has contempt for those he sees as aspirants to the whites’ surroundings, he considers blackness with a turbulent mixture of greed and resentment. Just as Boogie and her father agree that beating Monk is somehow the solution to the fact that “no one believes in an Asian basketball player”, Boogie feels the need to emphasize to Eleanor that she will never understand what it is like to have parents put their sacrifices over their heads. She has to remind him that he is fighting his own racial trauma. It is not a scene about the search for common ground; it is a unidirectional demand for pain recognition.
And certainly, especially in this time of increasing violence against Asians and Asian Americans, there is something understandable about this desire to be seen and to have experiences of intolerance, marginalization and struggles of recognized immigrants. Is very bad Boogie it is so limited in its conception of what this pain entails that its main character’s anguish tends to lean more towards self-pity than anything broader. At the BoogieAs a defining discourse, its protagonist laments the lack of imagination in the production of meat and broccoli, a classic Chinese-American take-out dish that, in his opinion, Italians and Greeks and other cultures have their own variations. Meat and broccoli support neighborhoods, Boogie admits, but it’s another way to discount your community. “The Chinese people could be so much more if this country didn’t reduce us to beef and broccoli,” he concludes, a line that sounds as incredibly tacky as it honestly means.
Boogie it may be centered on a teenager who was born in the 2000s, but his ideas about Asian-American identity and being Chinese in America are vague, just a few decades ago, and don’t seem to have gone through many exams in the time that has passed since then. Whatever the desire to be real from which the film was born, at the end of the day it seems like a sign that it’s time to grow up a little.