Eddie Huang: Come Undone
Author, chef, and filmmaker Eddie Huang discusses his debut novel exploring Asian American masculinity through satire and romantic comedy.
Why we picked this
Huang's memoir Fresh Off the Boat was a provocation as much as a personal history — Come Undone moves into fiction but stays in the same territory of identity, masculinity, and who gets to tell Asian American stories.
Eddie Huang built BaoHaus in New York’s Lower East Side, wrote the memoir Fresh Off the Boat — which ABC adapted into a long-running sitcom — and has worked as a filmmaker and food commentator on the intersections of race, culture, and American identity. Come Undone is his debut novel, a work that uses the architecture of satire and romantic comedy to examine Asian American masculinity: what gets invented, discarded, and mourned in the translation between cultures.
The City Arts & Lectures appearance gives Huang a platform to discuss the shift from memoir to fiction and the specific freedoms that novelistic form allows. Where the memoir demanded a factual account of his own experience, the novel lets him build characters who are both more extreme and more representative of pressures that are broadly felt.
Sydney Goldstein Theater hosts this kind of author conversation well. The intimacy of the space suits a writer whose work is fundamentally about personal stakes and cultural collision.