How It Started

Hello! As you may know, I wrote a book called “Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks?” that comes out February 3^rd. It’s a more personal and humorous account of my rise and fall and rise again to become the emperor. To get you to want to buy the book, here’s an excerpt that recounts my very precious childhood. Hope you enjoy!

The book is now available for pre-sale and I hope you consider buying a copy. Use code “UBIUBI” for 25% off.

Chapter 3 - How It Started

It’s at least a little necessary to go into my background. Plus, some of it’s funny.

I was born in 1975 in Schenectady, New York. My parents were immigrants from Taiwan who met in college. Dad was a physicist for GE. His specialty was making screens flatter. He would jump up and down on them. Kidding, he worked in a lab. He grew up on a peanut farm in southern Taiwan with no floor, so he’s a bit of a roughneck. He spits a lot. He swam in the local pond and came back from college to do farm work during the summers. He got out of Taiwan by doing well on a test and studying physics.

He hated the cold. Why was he in upstate New York? Because GE was the only place that would hire him. He wasn’t getting offers because his PhD advisor wasn’t a fan. But his advisor was away when GE was hiring. So they shrugged and made him an offer. He later moved to IBM a few hours south in part to escape the cold.

Dad was a pro wrestling fan. We would watch WWE together, and he would narrate like the matches were real. “Rabish Rick is too powerful for him. Look at that move. So devastating.” Even I knew that they were staged.

When I was twelve or so, Dad hit a deer with his Ford Escort. The deer was dead, but Dad thought that it was a waste of food, so he took the deer, tied it to the top of the car, and drove to a butcher to get it chopped up. I came home to a freezer of frozen venison. My Dad never got the car repaired because he thought it was a waste of money, so the dented car was a permanent reminder. The deer didn’t taste great.

Another time my Mom had a couple friends over. Dad didn’t want to socialize so he took off. He wasn’t an attentive driver. That time he backed into my Mom’s friend’s car in the driveway and then drove off without saying a word. She had to come back in the house and say, “Excuse me Nancy, but I think your husband rear-ended my car.” My Mom was mortified. It was the lamest hit-and-run ever. Insert Asian driving joke here.

When Dad wanted to take us for a treat we would head to McDonald’s. We would pour out two large fries into a pile in the middle of the tray and snap them up while eating our McNuggets or Big Macs. What we didn’t notice for quite a while was that Dad had a habit of tossing the end of the French fry he was eating back in the pile; I guess he didn’t want to eat the part of the fry that he had touched. By the end of the meal there were a bunch of tiny fry ends that my brother and I unwittingly ate for years! When we realized what was happening we were furious.

My Mom is more or less an angel. She and Dad met at UC Berkeley, where she got a Bachelor’s in Math and a Master's in Statistics. She’s the glue to our family and the reason we talk to other people. She would shake her head every time she washed the dishes: “Hooo, when I was in college, my job was to wash test tubes in the lab. Your Dad said if I married him, I would never wash dishes again. So what do I do every night? Wash dishes.” She took us to piano lessons and Chinese school and tennis camp. By day she was the Director of Computer Services at the local public university, SUNY Purchase. She gardens, arranges flowers and is now an award-winning pastel artist. (Seriously, check out nancyyangart.com. Love you Mom!)

I was a very quiet, nerdy, sensitive kid. I got named “Most Pensive” in pre-school because I never talked. I read comic books and fantasy novels and played with action figures, Star Wars and GI Joe in particular. My older brother and I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and spent endless hours crafting characters and having adventures. My characters tended to take one of 3 forms: the suicidal warrior, the scarred magic-user, and the happy-go-lucky thief.

My parents didn’t know what pajamas were. I went to sleep in whatever clothes I wore that day my entire childhood. It was only in middle school that I figured out that wasn’t cool. I also regularly wore the same clothes multiple times a week, until another kid called me a ‘dirtbag’ and I had to figure out what they were talking about.

There was a “country day” in my middle school where we all brought in food from our parent’s culture. Most kids brought in pasta or Italian sausages. I brought in a rice cooker of fried rice. The other kids freaked out – “You eat this at home? Your house is like a Chinese restaurant?” I didn’t tell them about the “Vitasoy” soy milk or bean curd in the fridge.

My town, Somers, was 96% white, with a high concentration of Italians. I suppose you’d call them “Guidos” in 80s parlance. When Platoon came out in middle school, one of the kids kept standing next to me saying, “You see that? That’s the way the gook laughs.”

I was one of the only Asian kids in town. There was one other Chinese girl in town and everyone said we should date. We both hated it.

I got reminded of my race quite often. Here are some of the more memorable samples:

“What’s up, chink.”

“Hey Yang, how’s the wang?”

“Hey . . . you . . . wanna fight?” said with mouth moving but no sound coming out, to imitate a kung fu movie with bad dubbing.

“Ching chong ching chong.”

“Hey Yang, are you related to Long Duk Dong?”

“Hey, you know what Chinese use for blindfolds? Dental floss!”

“Hey, Yang, you hungry? You want a gook-ie?”

“Hey Yang, I see where you’re looking. No interracial dating.”

“Hey Yang, what’s it like having such a small dick? Everyone knows Chinese guys have small dicks. Do you need tweezers to jerk off?”

Middle school kids are creative.

It didn’t help that I had skipped a grade and was thus smaller and scrawnier than most of my classmates. I was the last kid picked in gym for most any team. I remember one day we were playing softball, and I got stuck in the outfield to minimize the chances of my getting involved in a play. Of course the ball got hit right to me. It was a pop-up fly ball, eminently catchable. It hung in the air for what felt like forever.

“Catch it! Catch it!”

I raised my glove to catch the ball. The sun hit my eyes. I squinted up. And . . .

The ball hit the heel of my glove and popped out.

“Ahhhh! Throw it, throw it!”

The batter was sprinting around the base paths. Another kid in the outfield who had come over grabbed the ball from the ground and threw it toward the infield. He then looked at me with a pained look on his face and shook his head.

Here’s a pic to give you an idea of what we were working with.

The braces were coming soon.

I had a few natural responses to the ridicule. I became quite self-conscious and alienated. I wondered if I did indeed have a small dick. There were many days I wanted to avoid school.

Last, I became very, very angry.

As you can tell, the book is a bit different for me and tells stories I never could before. I hope you check it out and pick up a copy! Here is a link to pre-order; use code “UBIUBI” for 25% off. Also, dates are up for my book tour next February so maybe I will see you in person soon to sign this bad boy. Hope your holidays are going great.