‘Fresh Off the Boat’: The Search for Porn

By Julianne Hing Feb 18, 2015

Do you remember life before the Internet? A time before YouTube? "Fresh Off the Boat" is set firmly in that era, when there was no readily accessible universe beyond the physical community you inhabited. And if you were a middle school-aged social outcast looking to score some friend points with your white classmates, that meant scrounging around for porn, or any approximation thereof. Print was great, video even better.

That, readers, was the central conflict of Week 3, Episode 5 of "Fresh Off the Boat," the historic and oh-yes-they-went-there sitcom inspired by restaurateur and professional provocateur Eddie Huang’s memoir by the same name. In this episode young Eddie gets invited to his first sleepover, a huge coup as he continues his endeavor to fit in at his new Orlando, Fla.,  school where he and a black kid named Walter are seemingly the only two kids of color around. Walter, noticeably, isn’t invited, and Eddie betrays his social desperation when he ditches camaraderie with Walter for the white kids. The head white kid (who’s a recurring character and yet, as far as I can tell, nameless) says he’s got a copy of his brother’s swimsuit edition of Sports Illustrated to oohs and ahhs from the other kids. Eddie’s in, until his mom forbids him from going.

On Twitter last night, Asian-Americans joked about how they, too, were never allowed to attend sleepovers. (Thanks to the arch parenting hysterics of Tiger Mom Amy Chua, this Asian practice has already been introduced to non-Asian audiences.) Who knows about other kids’ parents? Eddie’s mom Jessica declares. Pedophiles abound, she’s recently learned watching the nightly news.

Jessica suggests that Eddie invite the kids to their house. Except in order to shift the tide in his favor Eddie will need to locate something resembling sexual content. When stealing a tape from the video-rental shop gets ruled out, Eddie’s stuck. He’s hosting his first sleepover that evening and facing the prospect of utter humiliation in front of his would-be friends.

Then Jessica’s obsession with the terrors lurking behind every corner pays off. With the help of American TV newsmagazine shows, she’s convinced her husband that the family restaurant needs to conduct trainings on workplace sexual harassment.  One of Eddie’s classmates mistakes a sexual harassment prevention video for porn and the boys settle in for what they assume must be illicit material. Eddie wins points, even though the boys have no idea what they’re watching.

But all that doesn’t even cover the best parts of the episode, which come in the last five minutes. When Eddie’s video gets circulated around school, Eddie’s dad, Louis, is forced to give him "the talk." He never really gets down to the basics, but details plenty more and emphasizes the importance of contraception. 

"Half the reason I come to this country is so you could have lots of sex," Louis tells a shocked Eddie. "Taiwan was so conservative. You couldn’t really have sex before you were married," Louis says. I bristled a bit at the reductive cultural assumptions, but Louis then proceeds to deliver a a sex-positive talk that I doubt many other actual Asian (or otherwise) parents would be comfortable giving. (My parents have yet to talk about sex or sexual health with me, and I’m 29.) As usual, Eddie’s badass grandma and sweet younger brothers provide a serious dose of cute. And Jessica doesn’t miss her chance to school Eddie, in her own way, on sexual assault. All men: Listen to Jessica Huang. See you next week.