Chef, author Eddie Huang says TV needs to add more variety to its menu

Chef, restaurateur, author and TV producer Eddie Huang. Video shot by Mori Rothman and Elisabeth Ponsot. Produced by Nora Daly and Eric Krupke. Edited by Eric Krupke.

Growing up, chef, restaurateur, author and TV producer Eddie Huang didn’t see himself reflected in the characters on TV and in the movies. “I never watched television with any Asian-Americans that I related to or felt like were real people,” said Huang, who identifies as Taiwanese-Chinese-American. “I saw black people and I saw white people on television.”

Huang described this dearth of representation with a food metaphor. “It’s like going to a restaurant that only has chicken or pork, and some people want beef, some people want vegetables, some people want seafood.”

The new ABC sitcom “Fresh Off the Boat,” based loosely on Huang’s memoir of the same name, attempted this season to add some variety to the network television menu. PBS NewsHour reported on the show, which aired its season finale last week, after its premier in February. Its debut marked the first time a network sitcom centered around an Asian-American family in more than 20 years.

While some hailed the show as a breakthrough, others worried that the limitations of the sitcom format would serve to perpetuate stereotypes. Huang, who is a producer of the show and provides its voice-over narration, has publicly expressed his own conflicting feelings about the show on numerous occasions. Most recently, he took to Twitter, where he described it as, “so far from the truth that I don’t recognize my own life.”

Huang sat down with the NewsHour at the Museum of Chinese in America in New York City to discuss his feelings about the show and how it fits into a larger conversation about race in America.

While the show may not be representative of Huang’s own childhood experiences, Huang seems to view it as a baby step in the right direction. To complete his food metaphor, he added: “An entire race of people in America who’ve been starving for representation finally got, like, a crumb.”