When we first cast Jimmy O. Yang in Silicon Valley, I didn�t know anything about him. I just had a good feeling about him based on his audition. I had no idea that the accent he was doing was not the way he normally spoke and that his persona was very different from that of the character he was playing in our show, Jian Yang. I also didn�t know that he had graduated with a degree in economics from UCSD, the same school I graduated from many years earlier, or that he graduated in 2009, the year that I gave the commencement speech, and that he had attended it and apparently had been somewhat inspired to go into comedy by what I said. I found all this out after we had been working on set for a couple days.

Jimmy and I hit it off right away and became fast friends. As you�ll notice when you read this book, he�s a funny guy with an interesting and unique perspective on things in this country. You don�t often hear the stories about Chinese immigrants. At least it seems that way to me. I think maybe it�s because we Americans just don�t ask. Jimmy and I hung out quite a bit and I became interested in his story. It�s an interesting one. He�s had quite a journey. From being a child Ping-Pong star in Hong Kong, to coming to America and becoming a stand-up comedian, achieving his dream of being a strip club DJ only to discover how sad and depressing that is, to becoming a successful TV and movie actor, Jimmy has really experienced America like few have.

When we were shooting the first season of Silicon Valley, we had no idea if the show would become a hit and go on for more seasons, or if it would flop and be quickly forgotten. We were all just working away trying our best to make it good and hoping it would work. Jimmy always had a great optimism about him, and when we�d talk about the show it would make my cynical ass believe that maybe it could be a hit.

And then it was. And as we went on to do additional seasons, Jimmy�s character quickly became a cornerstone of the show. He also became my favorite character to write for around season three. There�s something great and stoic about Jian Yang that Jimmy embodies perfectly. I know that sometimes language-barrier jokes can be considered easy by comedy snobs, but Jimmy makes it all work in a really great way.

I was already getting a sense that Jian Yang was becoming a favorite character on the show, but it really hit me when we were doing a panel at Comic-Con San Diego in 2016. We were in one of the big rooms with a couple thousand people (I�m bad with crowd numbers but it was at least that, maybe three or four thousand), and someone asked if there was going to be more Jian Yang next season. This was followed by thunderous applause, which was followed by even more thunderous applause when I said yes. Jimmy was officially famous.

Part of my inspiration for the show Silicon Valley came from back when I was working as an engineer. And at my first engineering job, I had an Iranian friend who worked there too, who said something that always stuck with me. He said that this really is the land of opportunity, but most Americans just don�t see it because they�re simply too used to it. They don�t appreciate it and they don�t take advantage of it as much as people who move here from other countries do. When you come to America from a place like Iran, you get here and you just marvel at all the opportunities and the freedom. Reading this book, you get the sense that Jimmy had that same experience, and he did not waste the opportunity at all. He worked his ass off for everything he has.

Jimmy�s experience is uniquely American. You just don�t hear these kinds of stories from other countries. Okay, somebody slap me. I�m getting too patriotic.

Here�s something I�ll never forget about Jimmy. Before the first season of Silicon Valley had aired, Jimmy and I were sitting at the bar at a restaurant in Santa Monica. (Now when I�m out with him, we are often interrupted by fans who recognize him and want to take selfies.) I was asking him about China. He was saying that if you�re an ordinary American and you go to China, it�s like being a movie star. Everyone stares at you and wants to be around you. He said it�s the same if an American goes to Cuba. Then he paused for a second, looked down at his drink and said, �There�s nowhere I can go.� Well, Jimmy, now there�s nowhere you can�t go without being recognized like a star. Welcome to America, Jimmy O. Yang.

Mike Judge

�I eat the fish.�

I said this to my roommate, in my thick Chinese accent.

�I know you eat the fish, but when you clean the fish, you can�t just leave the fish head and guts and shit in the sink, because the whole house smells like a bait station. So you got to put it in the trash, then take the trash out. Do you understand?� my big, curly-haired American roommate explained to me, pointing at the leftover fish parts in the sink.

I stared at him, confused. And I replied, �Yes, I eat the fish.�

�Motherfuck!� he howled in complete frustration.

The whole crew burst out in laughter. That was my second day on the set of Silicon Valley, an HBO show created by one of my comedy heroes, Mike Judge. It was my big break in Hollywood. My character, Jian Yang, is a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant whose struggle with the English language often leads to comical misunderstandings with his buffoonish roommate, Erlich Bachman, played by the impeccable T. J. Miller. It felt natural for me to play this character. I was once a fresh-off-the-boat Chinese immigrant myself. I was Jian Yang.

When my family immigrated to America from Hong Kong, I was a thirteen-year-old boy who looked like an eight-year-old girl. I didn�t even speak enough English to understand the simplest American slang. On my first day of school in America, a girl came up to me and said:

My life growing up in Hong Kong was like a bad stereotype. I played the violin, I was super good at math, and I played Ping-Pong competitively. In China, people take Ping-Pong seriously. It�s not just a drunken frat house game; Ping-Pong is a prestigious national sport. The Ping-Pong champs in China are national heroes, like Brett Favre without the dick pics. Everyone from your five-year-old neighbor to your seventy-year-old aunt knows how to slice up some sick spins. My parents signed me up for Ping-Pong classes early on. I had quick feet and a lightning backhand. Soon I was competing in the thirteen-and-under Hong Kong championship leagues. I always had good form, but I was always smaller and weaker than the other kids. My dad would give me a pep talk before every match:

My family emigrated from Hong Kong to Los Angeles in 2000, when I was thirteen years old. Thirteen is an awkward transitional period for any prepubescent teen. Not only did I have to learn about my newly found pubes, I had to move to a new country, learn a new language and assimilate into a new culture.

My parents moved to America hoping for a better college education for my brother and me. To most foreigners, America has the most prestigious universities and the best job opportunities for college graduates. Ironically, the only people who might disagree with that sentiment are people who actually live in America. The grass is always greener and the college diplomas are always shinier from a different country. Even though Hong Kong is one of the biggest metropolitan cities in the world, it just doesn�t seem to have the same opportunities America has. You can make it big as a banker, a real estate developer and a doctor in Hong Kong, but you can literally be an astronaut, a rock star or anything you want in America. We moved here believing in the American dream.

Los Angeles seemed like an easy choice for my family. My aunt and my grandparents had already immigrated and they had lived in LA for more than ten years. And my parents wanted my brother and me to go to USC or UCLA, both of which later rejected me. At least my brother is now a proud UCLA graduate, so the immigration wasn�t a total loss for my parents.

I was scared to leave the only place I�d known, but I couldn�t wait to see all the massive mansions, fancy sports cars and beautiful people that I�d seen in Hollywood movies. I thought I was going to be neighbors with Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston. The first day my family got to Los Angeles, we visited my grandparents in Beverly Hills. But it wasn�t anything fancy like I had expected from Beverly Hills. They lived in a quaint little four-unit apartment complex on the edge of town. We walked up some old misshapen stairs to their unit. Coming from the skyscrapers in Hong Kong, I was very amused by this little two-story building. I�d never been to anyone�s home that didn�t require taking an elevator. The apartment had a dull dusty scent; it was some kind of old-people stench. I used to call it �Grandpa smell.� It was a small space and my grandparents had put a familiar Chinese touch to it. From the kitchen to the living room, it was filled with Chinese newspapers, Chinese food and furniture from China you�d never see in other American households, like this small plastic stool you�d squat on in the kitchen; people used it to prep the food on the floor level. You can only find that in China. It was a classic Chinese immigrant�s home where Chinese d�cor met American architecture.

That day, Grandpa took my dad and me to his favorite restaurant in Los Angeles. I was ready for my very first American feast and I was excited to explore Tinsel Town. Three generations of Chinese strolling down the beautiful streets of LA. We walked down La Cienega Boulevard, a main artery of LA. Every building we passed by was wide and short. In Hong Kong, every building was slim and at least twenty stories tall. That�s the only way to cram seven million people on an island the size of San Diego. It was nice to leave the concrete jungle and see the wide-open California sky, but at the same time Los Angeles felt a bit empty and lacking in humanity. There were only a few pedestrians on the streets; it was eerily vacant compared to the human sardine can I was used to in Hong Kong. The streets were massive gray pavements with six lanes of traffic and a narrow sidewalk. This was definitely a town built for cars, not humans. We walked by a few strip malls with dreary dry cleaners and generic burger shops. I�d never seen a strip mall before. Every mall in Hong Kong was a monstrous shopping center that stretched vertically for multiple levels. These monotonous strip malls with flat white paint looked like the lonesome Wild West with the proverbial tumbleweed rolling by.

My nuclear family has always been the rock in my ever-changing life. We settled into our new lives after our first year in America. My dad had gotten a steady job as a financial adviser, my mom worked as a teller for a Chinese bank and my brother got into UCLA. On the surface, everything was seemingly working out perfectly for this immigrant family. But while I was trying to fit in in school, my parents were dealing with their own struggles as adult immigrants. My dad landed a job as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch, but it was a commission-based job. He didn�t know many people here in America yet, let alone people who would trust him to invest their money. He always acted like everything was fine, but I could hear the arguments between him and my mom about the mounting credit card debts. I felt responsible being a vestige in that household, and I stopped asking for the newest Jordans or the newest video games. I�d rather wear flip-flops to school than be homeless.

Mom had an especially hard time assimilating to America. Her English wasn�t very sharp and the language barrier kept her from getting the jobs she wanted. She took a job as a menial bank teller in a Chinese bank twenty miles away, barely making minimum wage. Aside from hanging with some family friends, she never found her footing in the community. Mom was often quite lost during English conversations; she�d just politely nod and smile. When a foreign person doesn�t understand something, instead of saying, �Pardon me� they�ll just nod their head and smile �yeah, yeah, yeah.� Behind that cordial smile, I knew she felt terribly uncomfortable.

Mom got a job offer from Shanghai two years after we moved to LA. It was a general manager position at a chic clothing store opened by a famous Chinese artist. It was exactly the kind of job she loved and thrived at back in Hong Kong. It�d be a sizable pay raise from being a bank teller, and some much needed income for the family. But this would also mean she�d have to move to Shanghai, without us. We had a serious family discussion on whether or not she should take the job and go to Shanghai. I still remember that day vividly. Dad is an old-school guy. He wanted her to stay because there was nothing more important than keeping the family together, but I knew her mind was already made up. She said to me:

For Asian kids, going to college is like going to elementary school. It�s mandatory. Asian parents are never proud of you for going to college; they are just not disappointed.

My dad had set me up with an internship at Smith Barney, a prestigious financial consulting firm his friend worked at. I interned at their ritzy Beverly Hills office under one of their top financial advisers; it was the internship every parent dreamed of for their kid. I felt like a baller; I reconciled tax documents for their millionaire clients, I did analysis on mutual funds and my boss handled Kevin Sorbo�s finances, a.k.a. Hercules. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. Needless to say, I hadn�t met a lot of celebrities before then and I was easily impressed. I had a blast during the first few weeks of the internship, daydreaming about a successful future that my dad would be so proud of. But after a month at that office, the routine set in and an intense dread of being stuck behind a desk for the rest of my life came over me. Am I really going to be reconciling Kevin Sorbo�s taxes for the rest of my life? That became a recurring nightmare of mine; in the dream, I would be crunching numbers on an old Dell desktop and Hercules would come up behind me and crack me with his whip. �Faster, you mortal!� Then I�d cry to the image of his diversified mutual fund portfolio.

I started to hate everything about the internship, and I couldn�t wait until my three-month sentence was over. I hated mutual funds, I hated CNBC and I hated Hercules. But at the same time, I knew how proud my dad was of his son who was following in his footsteps to become a financial adviser. He�d ask me with a sweet sense of pride on his face: �How�s the internship going?� �It�s going great! Today we worked on a couple Vanguard funds.� I said it with a fake stapled grin on my stupid face. I didn�t have the heart to tell him I hated the internship and I thought Vanguard funds were fucking stupid.

During my last week of the internship, Dad delivered some breaking news: �Jimmy! My friend at Smith Barney said he wants to offer you a full-time job when you graduate! Congratulations!� I�d never seen him so excited. I�m sure this was one of the happiest moments of his life, but in contrast, this was one of the most dismal moments of my life. Tears of joy almost rolled down from his eyes, while tears of absolute sadness almost poured down from mine. �Oh� that�s great.� I uttered those words like a zombie. The thought of looking at mutual funds for one more day, let alone for the rest of my life, made me feel dead inside. I felt like I was stuck in a terrible relationship, and I didn�t know how to break up with my girlfriend who thought everything was going perfectly. Dad wanted to go out for dinner that night to celebrate.

The names of the people in this chapter have been changed in order to protect their identities and my safety. Yes, this chapter is about to get gangster.

I�d only been to a strip club once in my life when I was eighteen years old. Phil took me to a high-end strip club with velvet curtains and chandeliers in Westwood in LA. I was blown away by how beautiful the dancers were. They didn�t look like strippers; they looked like sorority girls from USC. They probably were actual USC students trying to pay off the astronomical tuition. I was not a very confident eighteen-year-old, and I was sure the strippers could smell the virgin on me. Phil offered to buy me a lap dance but I was afraid of the unknown behind those VIP curtains, so I turned it down. I wasn�t interested in throwing money behind the brass railing in exchange for a pair of blue balls. I wanted to be an insider who knew these girls on a real-name basis. I wanted to be a strip club DJ just like Guam. Guam was definitely no role model, but my young and impressionable libido was incredibly envious of him sleeping with eighty strippers. Becoming a strip club DJ was the only way to instantly transform myself from a sexually frustrated chump to a world-class stripper whisperer. Being a strip club DJ became my American dream.

I was working at the used car lot during the day and then putting in work at the Comedy Palace every night. Old Larry at the car lot had a friend named Shooter who came to visit him at the lot every week. They knew each other from AA or �Nam or something, I forget. I think it was AA. Or maybe it was AA in �Nam. Larry lived in Shooter�s apartment. When you are sixty years old and you still crash at a buddy�s apartment, you know you have made some serious mistakes in your life. Shooter was a notorious figure in the San Diego underworld. Word on the streets, Shooter did twenty years of hard time in prison for something involving a dead body. I didn�t dare to dig any deeper. He wasn�t affiliated with any particular gangs, but all the gangs respected him. Shooter also owned a strip club in San Diego.

Shooter was in his sixties; he rocked a thin Mohawk and wore a pair of black plastic Choppers sunglasses. Have you ever looked at a guy and you know he could kill you without flinching? Well, Shooter looked like he would beat that guy to death with a sledgehammer. Whenever he entered a room, he exuded a dark aura of power. He was like the Undertaker from the WWE, except this was real-life hellfire and brimstone. I was scared, but absolutely fascinated by him. Every time Shooter came in, I looked up at him in awe. I thought gangsters were so cool, let alone a gangster who owned a strip club. Larry had told Shooter that I did stand-up and Shooter quickly took an interest in my comedy. He probably noticed the admiration in my eyes. The first time he talked to me, I was as nervous as a nerdy high school freshman talking to the starting varsity quarterback.

�Hey, kid, I heard you do stand-up,� Shooter said to me in his gravelly Mickey Rourke voice.

Even though I knew he was a gangster, I tried to stay composed and talk to him like any normal person. �Yeah, I�m usually at the Comedy Palace. You should come by sometime,� I replied.

�Sounds good. I can bring some of the girls from the club.� In case you�re wondering, by �girls� he meant strippers. I could barely contain my excitement. I couldn�t wait to show off my soon-to-be stripper fans to the boys at the Comedy Palace.

I realized talking to gangsters is like talking to celebrities; you just have to treat them like normal people and not freak out over who they are. They don�t like to be treated differently; they just want a genuine conversation like everyone else. Gangsters have feelings too.

That weekend, Shooter rolled up to the Comedy Palace in a white stretch limo. One by one the strippers girls strutted out of his car. Everyone in the parking lot stopped and stared. I proudly whispered to Guam and Tarrell, �That�s my boy, Shooter.� Guam nodded in approval. And without taking his eyes off the girls, all Tarrell said was, �Damn!� It was one of the coolest moments of my life.

That night, I felt like a gangster myself. When you are on the good side of a gangster, you feel safe and invincible. All the comedians were extra motivated that night and we put on a killer show. I could see Shooter and the girls clapping their hands, laughing like innocent children. For a moment, Shooter went from a feared gangster to a regular, happy audience member. That�s the magical thing about stand-up comedy. No matter who the audience member might be, if you can make him laugh, you�ve got a fan for life.

After the show, the girls came up to me one after another to give me a hug. �Oh my God, you were so funny!� �Hilarious!� �That was amazing!� These positive affirmations from the strippers felt as legit as a raving New York Times review. Sean, Tarrell, Guam and all the other comedians looked on in awe. I got all the street cred I could ever wish for that night.

Then Shooter walked over to me and simply said, �Good job� as he made his way into his limo. I knew this was my chance; I saw my American dream of working at a strip club flash in front of my eyes. I seized the moment and I ducked my head in the limo before Shooter closed the door.

�Hey, do you need a new DJ for your club?� I nervously blurted out.

�You free this Thursday?�

FUCK. YES.

Shooter still owed me some back strip club DJ wages when I left San Diego, but I was willing to forgo four hundred bucks to not confront a notorious gangster. I packed all of my worthless possessions into my two-door, four-cylinder Toyota Celica and headed back to LA. I didn�t want to crawl back to my dad�s apartment as a failure, and I definitely didn�t want to live in that Chinese retirement community again. I�d rather try to survive on my own with the two thousand dollars I had in my college checking account. So I went on the most trusted site on the Internet, Craigslist, and found a living room for rent for three hundred bucks a month from a random dude in Hollywood. I had no idea how I was going to make it, but I was determined to never live with a bunch of old ladies talking about their periods ever again.

A couple of my comedian friends in LA told me they struck gold in the commercial acting game. My friend Will said he had done an Absolut Vodka commercial two years ago. One day of work on that commercial had made him sixty grand in residuals. Sixty grand?! If I can just book one commercial a year, I�ll be rich! Sixty grand sounded like a million dollars to this retired strip club DJ. I made it my goal in Hollywood to become a filthy rich commercial actor. I just needed to survive on ramen noodles for six months until I booked my first commercial. It seemed like a flawlessly sound financial plan. Pssttt, I can do this, easy! Then I quickly realized I had to deal with the age-old question in Hollywood: Where do I start?

Will told me he started as an extra in that Absolut commercial, then the actor who was supposed to play the security guard in the commercial didn�t show up, so the director picked the biggest (possibly fattest) extra on set and bumped him up to play the security guard as a featured actor. And boom! Sixty grand. Will told me about the infamous Central Casting office in Burbank. It�s the first stop for everyone who comes off the Greyhound bus to Hollywood, where they sign up to be an extra. He also told me that if I collected three union vouchers for being an extra, then I�d be eligible to become a member of the Screen Actors Guild, the SAG union. Everyone who has ever been on-screen, from Audrey Hepburn to Brad Pitt to vodka commercial Will, is in SAG. Wow, so you�re telling me one day, if I sign up to be an extra, I can be part of SAG and go down in history with Bobby De Niro in Hollywood? That would be beyond my wildest dreams. Little did I know that there were 160,000 members in SAG and 95 percent of them were unemployed on any given day. But my ignorance outweighed my doubts, and I scurried to the Central Casting office to sign up to be a star.

Central Casting is like the open mic for actors; there�s zero barrier of entry and it was filled with desperate people. Every day there are packs of people lined up to �register� to be an actor. Everyone had to grab a number and wait in a folding chair, inside of a cold gray building, just like the DMV. It was more like herding sheep than becoming an actor. You fill out some paperwork, wait for them to call your name, take a passport photo, then off you go to be a star in Hollywood. They compile a database of people who are willing to work on set for minimum wage and then they call you if they need a person to blend into the background of a commercial, TV show or movie. There are many words for extras: background actors, background artists and, my favorite, atmosphere. I quickly realized this isn�t where dreams come true; it�s where people sign up to be warm flesh bags that are as unnoticeable as the air in the atmosphere.

There was every type of person waiting to sign up in Central Casting, from a midwestern mom, to an authentic Montana lumberjack, to the super-good-looking dude who truly believed he was destined to be a star. It was kind of beautiful in its own way, to have a place where people who would never hang out with each other came together to pursue the same dream. But as beautiful as that might sound, realistically, only one out of a hundred thousand of us flesh bags would ever make it in this town. I�m sure this was the point where many of these people who left their lives behind for their big Hollywood dream realized, Fuck, what am I doing here? At least that�s how I felt that day at Central Casting. I started to second-guess myself for not taking the job at Smith Barney. Maybe I am delusional. And just then, a dude snapped a picture of me, perfectly capturing all of my regrets in that moment. That was my first headshot in Hollywood. I was now officially signed up to be a star. Shit. I went home, and by home, I mean a random Craigslist guy�s living room with my twin-size mattress.

Random Craigslist guy was a twenty-year-old black dude named Nathan, but he insisted people call him Nathaniel. He was smaller than me but had twice the pizzazz, a gay man having the time of his life in Hollywood. I never figured out what he did for a living, but he somehow managed to rent this apartment and throw the occasional party. One night he invited his buddies, five gay Latino dudes to be exact, to the apartment for a little get-together. They seemed like nice, friendly dudes, and I mostly kept myself occupied playing Halo on the Xbox. What Nathaniel didn�t tell me was that all five of his fabulous Latino hunks planned on crashing in the apartment that night, and he could only accommodate one of them in his room, because, well, Nathaniel believed in monogamy. The other four dudes would crash in the living room with me. Whatever. I guess I�d finally have my first all-American slumber party.

It was three in the morning, I lay down on my bed, but all of them were still taking tequila shots. Then two of them started making out right next to my head, and the other two were egging them on. I kept my eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. Then I kept hearing one dude repeatedly say, �Hey, Pablo, you�re a power bottom, huh?� For people who don�t know what a power bottom is, I�m not going to explain it in this book; just google it on UrbanDictionary.com. Look, I love gay people, but if anyone, gay or straight, starts talking about taking it up the ass next to me when I sleep, I�m right to feel a little uncomfortable. I didn�t want to know what was going to happen beyond this point, so I kept my eyes closed, put on my headphones and started blasting Jay-Z at max volume. Till today, I have no idea what exactly happened that night. All I know is there were four dudes with perfectly trimmed eyebrows next to me and one of them was a power bottom. By the time I woke up, nobody was there anymore. Maybe it was all a dream? It was definitely all a dream. Right?

There were a lot of things I chose to not understand when I lived with Nathaniel. The second month I was there, he had trouble coming up with his eight-hundred-dollar share of the rent. I had already given him my precious three hundred dollars, so this was beyond frustrating. What if he takes my three hundred bucks and we still both get evicted? That�s bullshit! When I asked him, �Hey, are you going to be able to come up with your rent?� he would just brush me off and say, �Don�t worry about it, I�ll get it.� I tried my best to not worry about getting evicted and prayed that Pablo or his four friends would loan him some money.

It was now the twentieth of the month, the landlord had already come and knocked on our door twice and I was sure the third time was going to be the end. I was about to either be homeless or institutionalized in the old Chinese people community. I was stressing out so badly, no amount of Halo or Jay-Z could distract me. And Nathaniel was just chilling in his room without a care in the world. Then around four o�clock in the afternoon there was a knock on the door. I turned off the TV and jumped under my covers, pretending nobody was home.

[JIN YANG] (20s) PLEASE SUBMIT TALENT WHO ARE NATIVE BORN ASIAN THAT SPEAK ENGLISH. TALENT MUST HAVE GREEN CARD OR BE US CITIZEN WITH PROPER PAPERS. A resident at Erlich�s incubator, Hacker House, Jin Yang is a tall, skinny ASIAN Tech geek who speaks in a THICK ACCENT with every other word being either s**t, f**ck, mother**ker or dude. Role slated to start shooting approx. 3/2�3/5. POSSIBLE RECURRING GUEST STAR

I got an audition email with this very interesting character description. It was for a new HBO pilot called Deep Tech, which somehow sounded too nerdy and too sexual at the same time. Jin Yang was a Chinese hacker who coded like the wind and cursed like a Cambodian pirate. The character was so foreign, they needed to make sure the actors auditioning for this character had proper paperwork. They were looking for an authentic Chinese immigrant actor who was just foreign enough to have a green card. I was born to play this role.

I threw on my gray pilly sweatpants and I slipped on a pair of ugly rubber sandals over my white socks. To complete the look, I put on an old faded T-shirt with chemical bonding diagrams that my mom had bought for me in Shanghai ten years ago. I looked like I crawled out of the back of a Chinese Internet cafe, and that was exactly how I wanted to look. I hopped into my Toyota Celica and drove to the legendary McCarthy/Abellera casting office in Santa Monica. Jeanne McCarthy and Nicole Abellera were responsible for casting classics like Con Air; I, Robot; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I was anxious to meet them for the first time. I read the sides twice and Jeanne McCarthy politely said, �Thank you.� A week went by and I didn�t hear from my agent. No news always means bad news when it comes to auditions.

Acting is like a never-ending job interview. You have to constantly prove yourself through the grueling audition process just to get another day of work. There are so many elements that are out of the actor�s control. They could have chosen someone else for the job because I was too short, too young or too weird-looking. Acting is the only job where physical discrimination is allowed. I once auditioned for something with the character description �NO FAT PEOPLE!!!� in caps with three exclamation marks. Ironically, it was for a McDonald�s chicken nuggets commercial. I never try to look for the reason why I didn�t get a job; I just try to do better in the next audition. Dwelling on an audition is like dwelling on a girl who told you she�s emotionally unavailable. It�s best to move on or, as my agent Jane would say, �On to the next!�

Eight months and twenty-five auditions went by and I had completely forgotten about the Deep Tech audition. During that time, I booked a guest star role on It�s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and a small part on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; things seemed to be going well. All of my comedian friends thought I was killing it, popping up on different TV shows, but I felt stuck doing one-off bit parts on different shows. I felt like a foster child, getting passed around to different families, except I was an adult who had to pay rent. I was getting paid SAG-AFTRA union minimum scale, which was the lowest amount you could legally pay a union actor. It was a little over nine hundred dollars per day. That might sound like a decent payday for one day of work, but an actor would be lucky to work more than two days a year. I started to panic about my stagnant career. Making nine hundred bucks twice a year wasn�t exactly the Hollywood dream I had envisioned. I�d been to more than a hundred auditions at this point, and I�d booked a total of five small guest-star roles, a couple commercials that never aired and a movie I was cut out of. I had auditioned for everything from a Chili�s commercial to Dog with a Blog. Is this going to be the rest of my life � pretending to eat buffalo wings in Chili�s and auditioning to talk to a dog on a Disney kids� show? Here is the audition log I kept:

I was suddenly thrown into a fantasy world. It was the HBO Golden Globes after-party at the Beverly Hilton. Silicon Valley had been nominated for Best Comedy Series and I was invited to the party along with my fellow castmates. The party was decked out in the Game of Thrones fire and ice theme with a massive HBO logo projected on the side of the Beverly Hilton. There was an open bar with top-shelf liquor, all the food a man could eat and all the who�s who of Hollywood gathered inside of one swanky party.

My first stop was the posh buffet line; there were rib-eye steak and three different kinds of fish. This buffet was beyond Guam�s wildest dreams. I was determined to stuff myself stupid to make up for all the times I ate at HomeTown Buffet. A man leaned in behind me to get a closer look at the salmon. I was about to tell him to back off my precious buffet fantasy, and then I turned around and realized it was Bryan Cranston. �Hey, just checking out what they have here,� That caught me so off guard that I practically screamed at him and shoved my plate of salmon in his face. �The salmon looks good! You want some?� He kindly smiled at my mini mental breakdown and turned around to say hi to his friend. �Hey, Patrick!� I looked up; it was Sir Patrick Stewart. I looked over to the bar and I saw Mike Judge, so I moseyed over to say what�s up. As I got closer, I saw that he was busy chatting with Marilyn Manson, and Dave Grohl from the Foo Fighters and Nirvana. So I back-peddled away with my overloaded plate of high-end meats. Then I saw Harrison Ford casually having a conversation with Jon Hamm, who was holding a shiny Golden Globe statue that he�d just won that night. I was so starstruck I almost rolled into a Short Round impression: �Watch out, Mister Jones!� I was hyperventilating. I walked towards the bathrooms for a breather, and there was Jennifer Aniston strolling out of the women�s room. Holy shit! I stopped and stared at her as my brain kept telling me: Don�t stare, don�t stare, don�t stare. But my body was frozen. I�m pretty sure I was experiencing a stroke at that moment. I felt like I was high on LSD, having the trip of a lifetime. This can�t be real life. Six months ago, I was driving drunk assholes in an Uber; now I am eating free salmon next to Harrison Ford? My imposter syndrome kicked into full swing. I felt like I snuck into this party. How did I end up here? I don�t deserve this! These are gods amongst men and I am just a dude who used to pay five dollars to do five minutes at an open mic. I was looking over my shoulder, waiting for a security guard to escort me out.

Being a series regular on a hit television show was beyond my wildest dreams. My very first acting coach, Caryn West, told us to write down the biggest goals we had and put them away in a box. Then we�d revisit it every six months to see if we could cross off any of these goals. With Silicon Valley, I was finally able to cross out a few of them.

I finally became a US citizen in 2015. I had been qualified to become a US citizen for several years, but it cost $725 to file the paperwork. I wasn�t unpatriotic; I just didn�t have $725 to spare until 2015. The main differences between a US permanent resident with a green card and a US citizen are the right to vote, the right to sit on a hung jury and the right to not get deported if you claim you�re a US citizen at the Tijuana border. I was finally convinced that I needed to become a US citizen when a friend told me his buddy with a green card was deported after he was charged with domestic abuse. I wasn�t planning on beating my imaginary wife, but I realized I could have gotten deported for something trivially illegal like smoking weed in public. That wasn�t a chance I was willing to take. Just to be clear: domestic violence is terrible and all perpetrators should be deported to an island where they beat each other in a giant octagon, like a Thunderdome for assholes. All the logical factors aside, truthfully, I did feel a great sense of pride in finally becoming an American citizen.

To become a US citizen, I had to pass the civics test to prove that I had a good enough understanding of American history and the English language. I had to prepare for a Q&A from a booklet, �10��Civics Questions.�

I can now find the humor when I look back at my first day of school in America, but it wasn�t very funny for the thirteen-year-old Chinese boy who had to navigate through the alien world at the time. He was lost, he was scared, he wanted to go home.

It was hard.

Every immigrant has gone through a difficult journey. My story is just one out of a million stories of people who left their home country hoping for a better future. I wish I could go back in time and tell the little thirteen-year-old Jimmy that everything was going to be just fine. He probably wouldn�t even believe what I�d tell him. �Jimmy, you are going to watch a lot of BET and start a rap group called Yellow Panthers. Then you�ll completely disappoint your parents and become a stand-up comedian, used car salesman and strip club DJ. But don�t worry, because you�ll eventually come back around and get on an HBO show called Silicon Valley!� My thirteen-year-old self would probably stare at me blankly and ask, �What is BET? What is stand-up comedian? Who are you?�

From eating at El Pollo Loco salsa bar to the Golden Globes buffet, I managed to stumble through this journey with the perseverance of an immigrant and the mindset of an American. I learned to thrive on being uncomfortable to pursue what I loved. The English language was uncomfortable, so I studied BET until it became my natural tongue. Doing stand-up was uncomfortable, so I hung out at the Comedy Palace until it became my second home. Auditions were uncomfortable, so I spent six hundred bucks a month on acting classes while I slept in some dude�s living room for three hundred bucks until acting became my profession. I never looked at these challenges as barriers; I saw them as opportunities to grow. I�d rather try to pursue my dream knowing that I might fail miserably than to have never tried at all. That is How to American.