Jimmy O. Yang, a Chinese-American actor, stand-up comedian, and writer discusses his new book, "How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents".  Jimmy is best known for starring as Jian-Yang in the HBO comedy series Silicon Valley, and is also starring in the upcoming film "Crazy Rich Asians".

Moderated by Gretchen Howard.

Get the book here: https://goo.gl/JCTfXs

I am 1 of the partners at Capital G, which is Alphabet's growth equity investing fund.

And I have the privilege and honor of introducing you to my friend, Jimmy O.

We're going to have a little chat here, and then we'll open it up to questions.

And just as a little incentive, if you don't have the book already, those who ask questions will be the first to get your very own copy of the book.

I'll be signing it, taking pictures afterwards.

All right, so we're going to start in the beginning.

Yeah, I was born in Hong Kong, and I moved to LA when I was

That was after the handoff from the British colony back to China.

And I think there was a lot of worry there.

It's probably 1 of the reasons why our family moved here.

And when I first came, I couldn't really speak English very well, kind of like Jing Yang.

And I'd learned English in Hong Kong how kids here would learn Spanish.

And I didn't understand the simplest slangs, like what's up, like they don't teach you that in school, like what's up.

And eventually I learned a lot of English by watching BET Rap City.

So yeah, and then it just progressed from there.

But even before you moved to LA, Let me see if I get this straight.

Your parents were originally from Shanghai.

And then I learned Cantonese from school.

Yeah, and then English somewhere came along.

So how did that even feel as a kid, even before you got to the US, not knowing how to speak really good English, just being in Hong Kong but having parents who came from the mainland?

Yeah, I was kind of already the foreign kid.

Because whenever I speak to my parents, they'll be like, oh, that's the Shanghai boy right there.

There's like an internal almost hierarchy and a semi-racism within Chinese people.

Like Hong Kong people always think they're better than other mainland China people.

And so they always call me like the Shanghai boy.

And so maybe that was like my first experience of assimilation, which really came in handy later when I came to America, when I was actually the foreign kid.

Already sort of felt like an outsider in Hong Kong.

Everything was just like a two-story strip mall.

And you walk down the street, there's nobody in the street.

It was like, is this Mad Max or what's going on?

And the first day my grandpa took us to his favorite American restaurant.

And that was my favorite restaurant in Hong Kong.

Because Pizza Hut in Hong Kong is like a gourmet restaurant with like seafood pasta and like real like gourmet soups and stuff you know.

And I saw the real authentic American version and it was just like a hole in the wall in an oven.

How is the real version worse than the foreign version?

And then grandpa, it was like, this is my favorite American restaurant.

We arrived at the strip mall and It was El Pollo Loco.

And then it was like the first time I experienced like American freedom inside of El Pollo Loco.

Because if you think about it, they give you so many choices.

There's dark meat and white meat, which my grandpa was like, don't ever order the white meat.

There's corn tortilla and flour tortilla.

You get the flour tortilla because the corn tastes funny.

And then, you know, you get a glass of water and you can go to a soda machine and get whatever you want.

to the salsa bar and just get whatever you want.

You can go home and saute that stuff for some dish later.

All right, so after you ate your little chicken taco, you go to middle school in LA.

It's inside of LA unified school district, so it's very diverse.

It's the first time I ever met a black person, a white person, a Latino person in real life.

Because in Hong Kong, obviously, all you had was Chinese people in my school.

And it was crazy, because I'd seen these different types of people on TV, but I never met them.

I was about, I don't know, like 4'10, really scrawny little kid with glasses.

And I just remember the first day, I was pretty good at basketball back home in Hong Kong.

And then when I came, I was in eighth grade.

And I'm like, yo, this is what America's about.

I couldn't even grow any hair at that point.

And I was just, you know, my English wasn't that good, so I was just trying to fit in.

I thought you were a ping pong star back in Hong Kong,

I was very stereotypical growing up in Hong Kong.

But in Hong Kong, you're just another dude.

Did you bring your skills, though, to the middle school?

Maybe until college, when it became like a beer pong game.

So middle school, is this when your BET love affair with television started?

I remember the first day of school, people were telling me to sag my pants.

I'm in the locker room changing into my PE clothes and the kids are like, hey, hey, put your shorts down!

And I'm like, oh my God, what is going on here?

And apparently it's a culture of sagging your pants back in the early 2000s.

If you pull it all the way up, they call you John Stockton.

There's different, like people wear boxers here.

In Hong Kong, we wear like tighty-whities, and people make fun of me for that.

So I learned a lot, not just about the language, but culture from watching BET.

And then how was it, sorry, your middle school, then you go to Beverly Hills High School,

And the subtitle of the book, well, the title is How to American an Immigrant's Guide to

So we're going to talk about, you're still not quite in the disappointment phase in high school, right?

So who did you hang out with in high school?

I wanted to hang out with, I wanted to find a group of Chinese kids I can kind of really hang on to.

When you don't really know the language, you kind of long for that, something that reminds you back home.

But there wasn't really a lot of Chinese kids in high school.

So I ended up just hanging out with a bunch of random misfits, right?

Like I had a couple Persian friends, a friend from Bangladesh, and then a friend, 1 Chinese friend, and then a Korean immigrant friend.

So it was a great group of different people.

And we're never the cool kids, but we also weren't super lame.

We just never fit in with any particular group.

weren't the athletes or anything like that.

I started to find my people, and I started a rap group.

That's what happens when you watch too much BET.

Well, what I did, I knew I was a horrible rapper, So I recruited my buddies who can rap, and I just made the beats.

It was me, my black friend Julian, and then my other friend Yuji, who was half black and half Japanese.

So it was perfectly 1 and a half Asian guys and 1 and a half black guys.

And we called the rap group the Yellow Panthers.

I sold maybe a couple of bootleg CDs in school.

And then you sell it for like $5 to some kids.

wasn't like a porn site that bought 1 of your songs or something?

My first paycheck I really made in show business was from a website called FudgeStick.com.

It used to be a site, a porno site, and I used to post my beats that I made online.

And this guy called me 1 day, he was like, hey, are you Doc West?

Which is like the wackest name ever, right?

Dre and Kanye West, I just combined the 2 and called myself Doc.

And he called, he was like, hey, so are you Christian?

He's like, well, so I'm in the adult entertainment business and a lot of Christian people aren't down with what I'm doing.

And my name's LeBron James, that was his name.

And can I use it for a trailer for 1 of my pornos?

See all Talks at Google transcripts on Youtube

How to American | Jimmy O. Yang | Talks at Google