Just Another Quick-Witted, Egg-Roll-Joke-Making, Insult-Hurling
Chinese-American Rapper
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Published:
November 21, 2004
The first time Jin Auyeung heard LL Cool J's ''Mama Said Knock You Out,'' he
fell in love. It was the mid-90's, the latter years of hip-hop's golden age.
But Jin was about as far from the hip-hop nation as you could get. He was 12
years old, growing up in North Miami Beach, the son of hard-working young
immigrants from South China who owned a strip-mall Chinese restaurant. Before
discovering LL Cool J, his musical tastes consisted of New Kids on the Block
and, he says, ''a lot of Michael Jackson.''
But ''Mama Said'' turned Jin into a hip-hop head. In his spare time, he
scribbled down and memorized his hero's anthem. Then at parties, whenever the
D.J. played ''Mama Said,'' Jin would plant himself in the middle of the dance
floor and channel LL verbatim. After he reached high school, Jin expanded his
repertory to include the younger artists who dominated hip-hop in the 90's,
like Nas, Biggie Smalls and Wu-Tang Clan. At night, instead of doing homework,
Jin would sit in his bedroom, transcribing Tupac lyrics and committing them to
memory.
North Miami Beach was racially diverse; Jin's family lived on a block with
blacks, whites and Latinos. Still, Jin's parents made it clear which side of
the racial divide they wanted him to come down on. Their restaurant was in a
black neighborhood, a dozen blocks from their house, but they tried to keep Jin
off the soul train. Asian merchants and their black customers have often been
on uneasy terms. Jin's parents were no exception. As Jin put it to me: ''Their
view was that some of them'' -- meaning African-Americans -- ''are ignorant to
us, so we're going to assume that all of them are ignorant to us. I couldn't
explain that these were my friends.''
No surprise, then, that Jin's love of hip-hop didn't go over so well with
his parents. ''When I was listening to Michael Jackson, it was like: 'Oh,
that's cool. He's listening to music! It's cute,' '' Jin said. ''Conflict
didn't arrive until I started listening to rap music, and then it was like:
'Yo, what is this? You really think you're black, Jin? Bottom line -- you're
not black, Jin.' ''
Jin's parents moved to Queens in 2001, and Jin, now 22, still lives with
them. They haven't given up on the idea of him marrying a nice Chinese girl,
Jin said, though they have given up on him divorcing hip-hop. They respect the
fact that Jin has gone from imitating LL Cool J to competing with him. Over the
past three years, Jin has earned acclaim in the hip-hop world for ''battling''
-- a venerable ritual, dating back to the early days of hip-hop, in which two
rappers verbally assail each other. Two years ago Jin's pugilistic skills
earned him a contract with Ruff Ryders, the record label. In its early years,
Ruff Ryders enjoyed success with hitmakers like Eve and DMX, but Eve has left
the label, and DMX isn't the platinum-record machine of past days. The company
hopes that Jin's first release, ''The Rest Is History,'' will improve its
prospects.
The record came out last month, and a few weeks before, I had lunch with Jin
and his mother, April Auyeung, at Virage, a restaurant in the East Village.
Offstage, Jin has none of the battle rapper's occupational arrogance.
Baby-faced and 5-foot-6, he talks and jokes incessantly. At lunch, he ordered
chicken Parmesan and bantered with his mother, reminding her of the family line
about Jin's passion for rap lyrics. ''We used to joke that we'd brought home
the wrong baby,'' she said, laughing and gazing over at her son.
Jin's mother's admonition -- ''You're not black, Jin'' -- echoed throughout
his childhood. But Jin never saw himself as anything but legit. Being Chinese
didn't bother him; being confined by it did. So today, Jin accepts his status
as the Great Yellow Hip-Hop Hope, but at the same time, he hates being called
the Asian-American Eminem. It's complicated: he knows he isn't black, but he
has chosen a medium defined by blackness. Which means that whether he's rapping
about sweatshops, ladies, Tiananmen Square or partying, Jin is always dancing
on the color line.
From the age of 5, Jin helped out in his parents' restaurant. He started by
doing small errands and graduated to cleaning toilets, delivering food and
counting money. Rap became Jin's escape. He started reciting his own lines, and
then he took to making crude demo tapes, recording himself rapping over the
instrumental B-sides of his favorite singles.
Jin's antics always drew a crowd. His flair for the dramatic made him a
natural for battling. At John F. Kennedy Middle School in North Miami Beach, he
liked to challenge other fledgling rappers, usually black kids. An adept battle
rapper uses his voice, timing, rhythm and wit to humiliate the opposition and
win over the crowd. But early on, it was Jin who was humiliated, succumbing
whenever his opponents hit him with an Asian joke, which they always did. ''I
used to not know how to handle it, and that's how I'd lose,'' he said. ''I'm
battling, kicking my rhymes, and he would come out and say something like: 'I'm
hot; you're cold. You should go back home and make me an egg roll.' Something
that simple, but he would have the crowd in a frenzy, an absolute frenzy. I
would fall victim to it and just wouldn't know what to say.''
Battle rappers like to say that there are no rules in the ring, but Jin knew
that if he retaliated in kind -- if he made any allusions to watermelon or
fried chicken, say -- it would be a grave transgression. Asian slurs, by
contrast, ''are absolutely too common for me to get mad at,'' Jin said.
''That's a shame, ain't it?'' Ultimately, Jin did what all sharp-witted
children of immigrants do -- he used humor, disarming his opponents with cracks
that recast his ethnicity as a weapon.
''Every person he battled had an Asian remark,'' said Cedric Reid, a high
school classmate of Jin's now at Miami Dade College. ''He was ready for stuff
like that. He would flip it on them so they knew, 'You got to come at me like a
rapper, not like a racist.' And he'd have the crowd on his side.''
As Jin raps on his new record, ''In every battle, the race card was my
downfall/Till I read 'The Art of War' and used it to clown y'all.''
In high school, Jin honed his battle skills. He won a local call-in radio
contest so many times that the station forced him to retire. He was battling at
home too, but in a different way. His parents continued to condemn his
burgeoning hip-hop career, and they also banned black and Latino kids from
their house. The war on the home front escalated when Jin turned 15 and fell
for a black girl at school. When his parents heard the news, they threatened to
throw him out of the house.
''There was an ultimatum,'' Jin said. ''The front door was open. It was
serious. . . . I left the house for two days and came crawling back. I kept
seeing her on the down-low. We eventually parted ways, but not because of my
parents.''
A year after Jin graduated from high school, his parents closed their
restaurant and moved the family to New York City, where Jin's grandparents
lived. His father went to work in the family construction business, and his
mother focused on bringing up Jin's younger sister. Jin chased battles all over
the city, winning small pots of prize money. Two weeks after moving to New
York, Jin met Kamel Pratt, who spotted him in an impromptu rhyme session at the
corner of Broadway and Eighth Street and not long after became his manager.
Pratt introduced him to the local hip-hop scene. He had a lot of time to
devote, given that Jin was his first and only client, but he eventually got him
his big break, an audition on ''Freestyle Friday.''
''Freestyle Friday'' is a popular televised battle showcase -- an ''American
Bandstand'' for the hip-hop set. The broadcast is a segment of ''106 &
Park,'' a music-video show on Black Entertainment Television. Battle M.C.'s
like Jin see the show as the fastest route to stardom. In February 2002, Jin
was offered a spot on the show in a battle against a rapper named Hassan, the
reigning ''Freestyle Friday'' champ. Neither Pratt nor Jin was impressed with
Hassan; they figured his main weapon would be the sort of Asian jokes to which
Jin was by now well accustomed -- corner stores, Bruce Lee, fortune cookies,
fried won tons and, of course, slanted eyes.
Since the rules of ''Freestyle Friday'' dictated that Jin go first, he
needed to make sure he landed an early crippling shot. He opened with a few
standard punch lines about Hassan's name and dress. Then he lowered the boom:
''Yeah, I'm Chinese, now you understand it/I'm the reason your little sister's
eyes are slanted./If you make one joke about rice or karate/N.Y.P.D. be in
Chinatown searching for your body.''
The crowd went wild. The show's hosts, Free and A.J., nodded and smiled. DJ
Fatman Scoop, a New York radio personality, gave the champion a stern look and
said: ''Hassan. Get focused. Immediately.'' But Hassan was too slow; he
apparently couldn't alter his original strategy. Instead he offered an Asian
joke that landed with a thud, and then with 15 seconds still on the clock, he
stopped in midflow, sighed into the mike, lowered his head and quit. Jin went
on to win ''Freestyle Friday'' for a record-setting seven straight weeks, and
by the end of his final week, Ruff Ryders had offered him a contract.
The first time I saw Jin, I didn't really see him at all. I was at a
friend's house, talking sports, when his wife began frantically gesturing at
the TV, which was tuned to BET. ''Have you seen this kid?'' she asked. Jin was
by then well into his run on ''Freestyle Friday.'' There was Jin summarily
dismantling some stiff unlucky enough to be attached to the opposing
microphone. I laughed and shrugged the whole thing off. An Asian-American
rapper? I smelled yet another gimmick: the model minority meets the miscreant.
''I think it's a shock for a lot of people to see Jin rap,'' says Serena
Kim, features editor for Vibe. And the fact is when you look at Jin, it's hard
to separate what is legitimately interesting about him from the sideshow.
There's something a little shocking about watching him rap, not only because of
specific Asian-American stereotypes -- the nerd, the overachiever, the serious
kid -- but also because of the tension that exists in America between blacks
and Asians. When I was a kid, growing up black in Baltimore, we had a derisive
name for the corner store run by Asians. No one debated it; we didn't think we
were being racist. To us, there was only one sort of racism -- the kind that
white people perpetrated against blacks.
''As an Asian-American, you're constantly confronted with race,'' says Hua
Hsu, a Chinese-American music writer. ''But you don't have that prominent a
role in the discussion. You may feel a spiritual kinship with blacks and
Latinos, but there's no real feeling back the other way.''
Making his record, Jin had to confront another sort of obstacle -- the
infamous curse of the battle rapper. As flameouts like Craig G and Supernatural
have proved, the skills that come with being a great battle rapper -- a quick
wit, good stage presence and a combative personality -- don't necessarily help
make you a successful recording artist. After Jin signed with Ruff Ryders, the
label's co-C.E.O., Darrin (Dee) Dean, tried to impress upon him that making a
record was different than winning a battle. Jin's wit and charisma would be
useful, Dean said, only if Jin could tame them between 16 bars. He would need
quality production, musicality, patience and, above all, style -- a persona to
set himself apart. Every successful rapper defines himself in a new way. 50
Cent is the gangsta reborn. OutKast's Big Boi and Andre 3000 are the kings of
eclecticism. It's not enough for Eminem to be white -- he is also hip-hop's
dark humorist. So what is Jin?
His first single, ''Learn Chinese,'' was released last year. Like his best
battle rhymes, it plays on Asian-American stereotypes while trying to rebut
them. But in emphasizing his ethnicity so blatantly, Jin risked turning himself
into a oddity. Ruff Ryders delayed the release of Jin's album several times
before it finally hit the stores. In that pause -- and with the release of
''Learn Chinese'' -- Jin developed a following that sees in him more things
than he ever saw in himself: Jin as Brandon Lee fulfilled. Jin as pan-Asia's
hip-hop ambassador. Jin as avenger of fried-rice jokes.
''I think every Asian-American kid with a passing interest in hip-hop knows
who Jin is,'' says Jeff Chang, author of the forthcoming book ''Can't Stop Won't
Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation.'' ''What little image of
Asian-Americans that is out there has been focused on West Coast, suburban,
usually middle-class or upper-middle-class Asian-Americans. What Jin represents
is a completely different kind of thing. He's East Coast and working class,
which speaks to what a lot of Asian-Americans see in themselves. He's carrying
a lot on his shoulders.''
Asian-American hip-hop enthusiasts, however, do not make for much of a
consumer market. White rappers like Kid Rock and Fred Durst could sell millions
of albums without having a single black fan, but Jin can't make it big by
selling only to the nation's million or so Asian teenagers. ''There's no
perception that there is a market out there for a yellow rapper,'' Chang said.
''Not like there is for white rappers.''
In other words, to become a commercial success, Jin has to cast his lot with
hip-hop's native constituency -- black people. ''It's extremely important,''
says Serena Kim at Vibe. ''That's the reason the Black Eyed Peas'' -- the
Grammy-nominated boho-pop rap group -- ''aren't considered a legitimate group.
They're huge, but they don't have a young black fan base. Jin has to develop
that audience.''
Jin and his producers are still grappling with how to market him. In
conversation, they try to play down Jin's ethnicity, and none of the songs on
the album are as self-consciously ethnic as ''Learn Chinese.'' But Jin does
venture out of conventional rap territory with pleas for cross-cultural tolerance,
something that, in the swaggering rap vernacular, runs the risk of unpardonable
corniness. Jin told me that he really wants to be known as a workingman's
rapper, and the best song on his album, ''I Got a Love,'' a clever tribute to
miserliness produced by Kanye West, the Chicago rapper and hip-hop producer,
follows in that vein:
That's why my old chick used to clash with me
'Jin why you get this fake Louis bag for me?'
Actually you should be happy I purchased that
I take this as a sign you don't want the matching hat.
''I can bring to hip-hop that middle-class, hard-working, 9-to-5 average Joe
who really doesn't get represented in hip-hop,'' Jin said. ''As much as I love
Jay-Z -- his lyricism, his charisma, his presence -- I can't ever truly relate.
I'm not drinking Dom. I'm not cracking 500 Cristal bottles. Flying to
St.-Tropez? I never even knew that was a real place.''
One night last June, I went with Jin to the Ruff Ryders studio in Yonkers,
where he spent four hours recording a track for ''The Rest Is History.'' Randy
(Okre Boy) Williams, Jin's session engineer, took Jin's levels and then gave
him the green light. The bass-heavy track banged out of several speakers. Jin
stood in the booth nodding, half-dancing and rhyming at his cue. The studio
grew more crowded as miscellaneous Ruff Ryders -- as the company's employees
call themselves -- filtered in, some to watch Jin, but most to check the score
from Game 2 of the N.B.A. finals. Jin finished the track around 1 in the
morning, and everyone drifted downstairs to a lounge, to hang out. While the
other members of the crew were reading magazines and killing time, Jin opened
his laptop on a long boardroom table. He connected wirelessly to the Internet,
and he started scrolling through one of his favorite Web sites, a database that
archives old hip-hop lyrics.
Jin's eyes were glowing as he focused on the screen, scanning through
hip-hop's history and his own. He came upon the lyrics for ''Playground,'' a
1991 hit by Another Bad Creation, a bubblegum kiddie group of the day, and
offered up an impromptu version of the song. Everyone cracked up. Jin kept
scrolling through the lyrics of hip-hop has-beens, a fraternity he surely hopes
not to join.
Jin's album opened at No. 54 on the Billboard chart, selling 19,000 copies
in its inaugural week. But in its second week, sales dropped to 10,000 units,
and his position dropped to No. 112. ''I didn't have any expectations,'' Jin
said when I asked him about the sales. He said he was much more excited about a
battle he had just won at the Mixshow Power Summit in Puerto Rico. He took home
a $50,000 pot and a Chevrolet Cobalt.
Whether Jin's future lies in battling, making records or both, it was back
at that table in the Ruff Ryders studio that he seemed most in his natural
element. In the end, Jin's real persona is that of a hip-hop nerd. Even on the
verge of potential stardom, or fulfilling his dream, there he was, reciting
someone else's lyrics. He was clearly still the same guy who wrote down every
word of LL's lyrics, who religiously read The Source and who used to walk
through shopping malls looking for battles.
It's an identity as real to him as race or class, but not one that will
likely make him a platinum artist. As he clicked his way around the site, Jin ran
down a few more of his favorites. At first the room was with him, offering
responses to his recital -- recalling Another Bad Creation's beef with Kris
Kross and other assorted trivia from rap history. But by the time Jin made it
to the Wu-Tang member U-God's verse in the group's 1997 anthem ''Triumph,'' the
others had grown weary.
One of the Ruff Ryders engineers looked up and half-jokingly yelled, ''Yo,
can somebody shut this kid up?'' Jin laughed, scrolled down to another song
lyric and kept on rapping.
Photo: Battle-tested: Skilled in the art of one-on-one rap competitions, or
battles, Jin faces a different test: translating verbal self-defense into a
recording career. (Photomontage by Zachary Scott)