Top 35 Eddie Huang Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “There is a lot of food culture that goes on in the home and in the community in non-traditional ways. Food is a lot more than restaurants.”

— Eddie Huang

2. “People talk about perfect timing, but I think everything is perfect in its moment; you just want to capture that.”

— Eddie Huang

3. “Just because everyone else is doing it, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t flip it over, look around, poke at its flaws, and see it for what it is yourself.”

— Eddie Huang

4. “I don’t do coupons or Reeboks. Life is too short to half-step.”

— Eddie Huang

5. “From the ground up, I was going to detox my identity of any and everything that someone else put there without my blessing.”

— Eddie Huang

6. “I wanted to inspire people not to work under a bamboo ceiling. Whatever you are – yellow, black, white, brown – you don’t have to allow your skin to define who you are or how you operate your business. There’s not one face to anything.”

— Eddie Huang

7. “I like a walking culture; I need to be in a city where you can walk everywhere.”

— Eddie Huang

8. “Not only was I not white, to many people I wasn’t Asian either.”

— Eddie Huang

9. “My entire life, the single most interesting thing to me is race in America. How something so stupid as skin or eyes or stinky Chinese lunch has such an impact on a person’s identity, their mental state, and the possibility of their happiness. It was race. It was race. It was race.”

— Eddie Huang

10. “All that time, my fears – about identity and family and love – were misplaced. It isn’t acceptance that extinguishes us, instead, it awakens us.”

— Eddie Huang

11. “People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them.”

— Eddie Huang

12. “Somehow, food has become a social equalizer.”

— Eddie Huang

13. “It wasn’t much to most kids. I mean, I was basically getting recognized for being straight dogshit, ignoring that I was straight dogshit, and doing anything in my power just to maintain my dogshittiness. I think on Urban Dictionary that’s the definition for insanity – or a Michael Bay film.”

— Eddie Huang

14. “If I die right now, I want to know I did the right thing, I made my ancestors proud, and I experienced love. Real love in its most powerful freebased form. It doesn’t have to be forever ’cause I’m not greedy. You could shoot me in the face as soon as I’ve felt it, but I want to know it.”

— Eddie Huang

15. “He didn’t understand that I didn’t hate white people. I hated whiteness.”

— Eddie Huang

16. “Revenge is always expensive, but you get what you pay for.”

— Eddie Huang

17. “When foreigners cook our food, they want to infuse their identity into the dish, they have a need to be part of the story and take it over.”

— Eddie Huang

18. “Style isn’t an excuse to cook without a standard. Style just determines the set of rules you choose.”

— Eddie Huang

19. “What they didn’t understand is that after you have the money and degrees, you can’t buy your identity back. I wasn’t worried about degrees, but I cared about my roots.”

— Eddie Huang

20. “America ain’t three fifths bad.”

— Eddie Huang

21. “But what I’m very interested in, whether it’s writing, whether it’s hosting a show, whether it’s cooking food, I’m just into the discussions of identity, culture and the politics of culture.”

— Eddie Huang

22. “I gave up trying to find friends at college and befriended dead people between the margins.”

— Eddie Huang

23. “Black culture has been a huge influence in my life.”

— Eddie Huang

24. “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.” I.”

— Eddie Huang

25. “We play into the definitions and stereotypes others impose on us and accept the model-minority myth, thinking it’s positive, but it’s a trap just like any stereotype. They put a piece of model-minority cheese between the metal jaws of their mousetrap, but we’re lactose intolerant anyway! We can’t even eat the cheese.”

— Eddie Huang

26. “For me, juicing isn’t about binging and cleansing; I try to incorporate it into a balanced diet.”

— Eddie Huang

27. “Soup dumplings, sitcoms, one-night stands – good ones leave you wanting more.”

— Eddie Huang

28. “To Americans, this may seem sick, but to first- or second-generation Chinese, Korean, Jamaican, Dominican, Puerto Rican immigrants, whatever, if your parents are FOBs, this is just how it is. You don’t talk about it, you can’t escape it, and in a way it humbles you the rest of your life. There’s something about crawling on the floor with your pops tracking you down by whip that grounds you as a human being.”

— Eddie Huang

29. “Up until my last year in college, I didn’t know what semicolons were for so I just didn’t use them.”

— Eddie Huang

30. “I didn’t allow America to sell me in a box with presets and neither should you. Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99.”

— Eddie Huang

31. “The reason we use all natural, hormone-free, antibiotic-free Berkshire pork belly, beef, and chicken is that it’s the right thing to do.”

— Eddie Huang

32. “I remember not having money, I remember having money, and neither had a bearing on who I was as a person. It affected how others saw me, but not how I saw myself.”

— Eddie Huang

33. “I’m convinced that frats are the beginning of the end for most of the people who end up running the world. It teaches them to give up individuality, independence, and even their paper for acceptance.”

— Eddie Huang

34. “Momma didn’t raise no fool. Chuck E. Cheese was for mouth breathers and kids with Velcro shoes.”

— Eddie Huang

35. “My parents always insulted each other. Mom was a good student and thought school was important. Dad agreed even though he had a chip on his shoulder because he never got good grades. He learned most things from running around on the street, but in a funny way, my dad was smarter. My mom never remembered what she learned in school because she just memorized stuff for tests; it was my dad, who had bad grades, that actually remembered everything he learned.”

— Eddie Huang

36. “Take the things from America that speak to you, that excite you, that inspire you, and be the Americans we all want to know; then cook it up and sell it back to them for $28.99. Cue Funk Flex to drop bombs on this. All my peoples from the boat, let ’em know: WEOUTCHEA.”

— Eddie Huang