Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)
speaker
225 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jan 2025
Jimmy O. Yang (performing a bit)’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So in a way, I think that's very true to my own experience. And I think to the Asian American experience, where a lot of times we feel invisible and that invisibility has been internalized. That we don't think about it every day, but we just accepted it. And in a way that's even more dangerous.
Yeah, in a way, like, or we're only good for this job or that job. You know, like the tagline of the show, the poster of the show is me getting kicked out of a window, you know, and, which is a fun scene. I'm not going to give too much away. But, it's break out of your role. That's the tagline of the show. And I thought it really is that it's breaking out of the role that society expects you of.
It's breaking out of a role that your family expects you of, you know, and we all have that Asian or not, you know, like my family expected me to be an engineer, a good student, definitely not a comedian, you know, and an actor. And society expects me to be the model minority, you know, And then I have to prove to myself that this is possible.
Oh, man, that was a very interesting experience. I wouldn't call myself a method actor, but I do find the process of doing certain things for the character very interesting, right? Yeah. So I was like, Willis has never left Chinatown. He's lived in an SRO all his life, and he's struggled all his life. I've done that. I have drove Uber. I have been a waiter in a restaurant, many things.
But that was years ago. So I'm like, let me re-experience some of that. And I bought a $1,500 Toyota Corolla on Craigslist. It barely worked. It was like a 1998. And on the paddle shifter, you know how you have D, R, and neutral for reverse and drive? This doesn't have any letters on it. So you have to kind of guess where your shifter is.
And in order to get into the driver's side, you have to crawl in from the passenger. Just the anxiety and the trouble you have to go through... to get to work, to get from A to B, was very informative of someone who's struggling. But then it was interesting. I showed up to work the first day on set. I'm the lead of the show. I'm number one on the call sheet, right? I felt pretty proud about that.
I worked all my life to get there. And then when I got to the gate at Fox Studios, the gate guard was like, do you have your ID? And then I was like, I gave her my ID and my legal name's a little different. So I was like, oh, it's just check under Jimmy. And she's like... While your name's not on there, pull over to the side. You have two minutes. Call whoever people you hear to see.
If not, you got to turn around. I was like, no, no, no, no. I'm the lead of the show. She was like, I don't know you. I don't care. Just pull over. And I was treated so poorly. That really helped me get into character. Because I kind of forgot about that. And that's the struggle that Willis and many, many people has been through. And that will either crumble you or light a fire under your butt.
And I think that's what it did for Willis. And that's what it did for me.
There's so much nuance within Chinese culture. With Shanghainese parents, I grew up speaking Shanghainese to them. I still speak Shanghainese to them, which is a local dialect. In Hong Kong, it's its own place, especially when I was growing up.
it spoke Cantonese and Cantonese people love making fun of people speaking Cantonese with an accent, whether it's Shanghainese accent, a Mandarin accent, whatever. So I grew up even in Hong Kong, like somewhat foreign because my parents were from Shanghai. Like my dad would show up to school, pick me up. And they'll call him 上海佬, which in Cantonese means, you know, the Shanghai guy.
You know, they're making fun of him as a foreigner, although he's also Chinese, of course. So there's cultural differences, even when I was born in Hong Kong. But I think it helped shape my, I don't know, maybe linguistic skills to have to learn Shanghainese at home, to have to learn Cantonese in school. and to have to learn Mandarin in between when I was watching Chinese TV shows.
Maybe that eased my transition when I moved here to America to learn English.
I think there's many sides of Beverly Hills. They lived in like an apartment in Beverly Hills. That wasn't very fancy at all. It was like one block away from not being Beverly Hills. And eventually my dad actually used that address. as a fake address to get me into Beverly Hills High School. I'm telling you this now. I think the statute of limitations is up. I don't think he'll go to jail.
My Beverly Hills certificate? I don't think so. But yeah, it was culture shock because Hong Kong is a big metropolitan, very vertical city, much like New York. You can walk anywhere. There's life on the streets. There's subways. You don't need a car. Whereas LA is the opposite. Everything is six lanes wide. Everything is concrete, strip malls. You can't walk.
Absolutely. The one thing that I really loved was hip hop when I first came to this country. It was so foreign to me in a way, but I was like, wow, this is the most American thing ever. And in high school, I really got into hip hop. I got into rap. I started making beats. I thought that would like make me instead of like the weird foreign kid into like the cool kind of hip hop kid.
But of course it's weird, you know, for me to try to rap, like, you know, but I really kind of dove into that. And then in college, I went to UC San Diego. It was a big Asian population. But there's also like a stoner surfer culture. So I remember I was like... I really got into like the stoner culture thinking that was mainstream America college kid that I want to get behind.
And even now, I think... Like, inadvertently? I can't even talk today.
Sorry, English is my fourth language.
You're fourth or fifth. Inadvertently, I'm still doing that. Where I... I am the commissioner of my fantasy football league. I watch every single NFL game. I love drinking a Coors Light on the weekend with my buddies or five or six, you know, just to be like really American. You know, I love very American things.
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