“Aziz Ansari Is Everywhere”
By James Yeh, originally published in VICE Magazine (2015)
Illustration by Elizabeth Renstrom / courtesy of Netflix
A few days before the show's release, I met Ansari for lunch at an upscale bagel spot in SoHo, where the hostesses and server greeted him with familiarity (whether it was as a celebrity or a regular customer was hard to say). Although he now lives in Manhattan—and has on and off since enrolling at NYU in 2001—a lot is made of Ansari's being a native son of South Carolina, where I was born and raised, also by Asian immigrant parents. I wanted to know what his experience of growing up in Bennettsville, a town of 9,000 with an Asian population of less than 0.5 percent, was like.
"It was weird," he said, "but it was one of those things where I'd never lived anywhere else or had a frame of reference to know it was weird at the time. I was the only minority; it was only white kids in my school. People always ask me, like, 'Were people racist?' And I'm like, 'No, not really.' I mean, occasionally, but it was never super mean, not as mean as, like, other crazy stories I've heard from friends."
This wasn't the answer I had expected, given my own experience of small-town South Carolina, which I found to be a fairly antagonistic place, more in line with the nuanced if blunt observations to be found in Ansari's act, when he describes the state as a crossroads between racism and good biscuits.
Read more in VICE Magazine.