Apparently the literary gods declared the past couple of weeks as a time to read hip hop memoirs. Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir by Eddie Huang was first up, followed shortly by City Kid: A Writer’s Memoir of Ghetto Life and Post-Soul Success by Nelson George. Both deal with coming of age in a time of hip hop, although at very different times (Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five Vs. Wu-Tang Clan). Likewise they both center on being ‘the other.’ Whereas Nelson wasn’t black enough, comics weren’t so cool in the projects, or too black, he was a pioneering ‘black’ music journalist at primarily white establishments, Huang was either too american or not american enough. Huang was a hip hop kid with chinese parents but living in a vanilla void of Florida; his dad ran a steak restaurant but had to hire a white kitchen head cuz no one trusted a chinese guy for anything but take-out american chinese.

The main thing these two have in common is not only being different but owning it and not being afraid to be different. In both of their cases adversity has only pushed them that much harder to become trailblazers. The cream rises to the top, solid reads.