On “Fresh Off the Boat,” the new ABC family sitcom based on the memoir of the same name by the rowdy, bawdy chef Eddie Huang, the young Eddie is played by Hudson Yang, an amiable 11-year-old with an air of preternatural chill. In the book, Eddie is a bit of a rabble-rouser, but on the show, he’s a fast-learning fish out of water with a gift for comic self-presentation.
At home, Hudson is part of a different legacy. His father, Jeff Yang, now a columnist for The Wall Street Journal, was one of the most prominent Asian-American cultural critics of the 1990s and a founder of A. Magazine, a glossy title highlighting influential Asian-Americans that aimed to capture an underdocumented cultural moment and to meaningfully brand Asian-American cool.
Scarfing down some after-school pizza with his father one recent day on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Hudson did not appear to be in the least frazzled about his place at the crossroads of decades of Asian-American cultural politics. He had recently returned to school after three months in California shooting the show’s first season, and he had pre-algebra and the Indian subcontinent on his mind. “I don’t think the grades are gonna be very good, Daddy,” he said with aw-shucks mischief.
Still, Jeff Yang said, Hudson understands the big picture: “He’s aware of the enterprise, if you will, and how different the enterprise that I was engaged in and grew up on is from the one he lives with.”
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Mr. Huang’s show, his memoir, the way his life has unfolded — “it isn’t even intentionally against” the vision of Asian America that Mr. Yang spent so much time building, he said.
“I just wasn’t aware,” Mr. Huang added. “I was shamed for a long time for not being Asian enough. Everyone called me ‘rotten banana’; everyone gave me a hard time.”
He wants Hudson to wave his own flag, even if it means gradually erasing traces of the memoirist from a show based on his life. “I try to tell him, ‘Don’t worry about being me,’ ” Mr. Huang said, adding, “At some point, you have to transcend race and be an individual.”
A version of this article appears in print on February 1, 2015, on page AR24 of the New York edition with the headline: A Bloom in TV’s Asian-American Desert. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
