This was a dream come true for a guy who used to battle-rap other kids in his junior high school bathroom. Jin, who was raised in an ethnically and economically mixed section of North Miami Beach, got into hip-hop the way millions of other kids do: listening to the radio. "I heard LL Cool J, Naughty by Nature, even Kris Kross," he says. "Then I started going to the record store and demanding, like, 'Yo, what's the newest artist out?' . . . and just stockpiling all these different artists. Eventually that made the transition from listening to starting to write my own rhymes . . . and then the hobby just turned into my life."
Jin's parents, who owned a series of moderately successful Chinese restaurants, expected him to go to college. But by 17, Jin had other plans. "Everybody was like, Oh, what college am I gonna go to, getting ready for the SATs. But that wasn't really part of my focus, whereas the music was."
Of the references in his music to his ancestry, Jin says, "That's what hip-hop is all about -- all of the most successful artists have been real adamant about who they are."
(Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)
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Like Eminem, who honed his battle rhyming while fending off white-boy barbs, Jin developed his freestyle skills by defending his background. Possessing an inner wisenheimer helped. "I would like to say I lean toward the witty side," he says. "But sometimes not everybody sees you as witty. They just see you as obnoxious Jin." A family tradition also shaped Jin's technique. "There's always a lot of wisecracks, joking in the family, so I picked it up from them."
And it was family that got him to New York: The Au-Yueng clan was deeply shaken by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. Within a few weeks, Jin's parents relocated to New York to be closer to Jin's grandparents, who live in Chinatown. The move brought Jin to the capital of hip-hop.
He worked the city's rhyming circuits, battle rapping against the street-corner crews that compete in Times Square and also going against the more socially conscious underground performers known as "backpack" rappers. The following year, he landed his spot on BET. "That was a life-altering experience," he says. "It was the catalyst for everything."
As soon as Ruff Ryders co-CEO Joaquin "Waah" Dean checked out Jin on "106 & Park," he knew he wanted to sign him. "When Jin is under pressure, he performs very well," says Dean. "What makes him really good is that he can use your environment against you. He can use the guys you come with, the people in the crowd, name brands, the stars in the audience -- he'll use what you say against you. That's the key. Whatever you say, he can take it, reverse it back to you, and deliver it. And make you feel like 'Oh, man, why'd I say that?' " Of course, there was something else Dean noticed. "We have never seen an Asian rapper lay it down the way he does," he says. "If you never seen Jin, you'd think he black, a regular rap artist. You wouldn't even think he Asian. He sounds like he belongs in the game."
Several weeks ago, Jin won the "Fight Klub" lyrical sparring competition at the annual Mixshow Power Summit, a hip-hop industry event held in San Juan, Puerto Rico. According to summit attendees, folks got so wound up during Jin's freestyle that they overturned tables and threw money on the stage.
Says Dean: "I'd put him in the ring with anybody right now after what I seen in Puerto Rico."
With all the hype surrounding Jin, there has been much speculation about why his debut album was delayed repeatedly -- enough times that fans put together an online petition in the hopes of advancing its release. (It was finally released Oct. 19, and debuted at number 54 on Billboard's album chart.) Asked about this, Jin blames "politics" between Ruff Ryders and Virgin Records, which closed a joint-venture agreement last year. His publicist at Virgin says it's because Jin kept recording new tracks as he attracted better and better producers, among them Kanye West and Wyclef Jean.
Last November, Jin was with friends at Yello, a Chinatown nightclub, when an argument broke out. One of Jin's close friends, rapper Christopher "L.S." Louie, was shot in the back. Police have named a suspect in the shooting -- reportedly an aspiring rapper himself -- but no arrests have been made.
While Jin was lucky to escape without injury, he says the headlines were "frustrating."
"Asian rap war leads to shoot- ing in Chinatown," he intones. "Sounds like a good story, right? And that's exactly why they called it that. . . . But the only accurate thing about all of that is probably Asian, that's it. Gang wars? No. Rap wars? No. It had nothing to do with any of that. . . . The magazines, newspaper . . . they were exploiting it."
He adds: "These guys that were there that were involved in the shooting, I didn't know them . . . All their motive was, like, 'Yo, that's Jin and I don't like him, so I'm gonna try to threaten him, I'm gonna pull a gun at him, I'm gonna try to rob him.' "
"But of course if [the media] just wrote it like that, it wouldn't be exciting," he says. For rappers, those kinds of headlines can boost album sales. Several of Jin's fellow Ruff Ryders have enjoyed the notoriety that accompanies repeated run-ins with the law, but he insists thugging isn't really his style. "That's not the type of mystique I want," he says. (Indeed, Jin, who made his big-screen debut as an auto mechanic in the street-racing movie "2 Fast 2 Furious," hopes to emulate a different kind of hip-hop icon. "I wanna be like Will Smith," he says. "Just an overall, well-respected entrepreneur. He's a family man, you know what I'm sayin'?")
Being the first Asian rapper to get this far invites other kinds of negative press. Earlier this year, Entertainment Weekly ran a story headlined "Jin's Bad Rap." The piece, which used terms such as "gimmicky" and "culturally insensitive" to describe him, also criticized the "Learn Chinese" video. "The video doesn't just confront race and racial stereotypes; it verges on exploiting and perpetuating them," scolded the writer.
But Jin has his defenders: In a recent Village Voice review, Janet Tzou praised Jin's use of pejorative terms for Asians, writing: "Jin's visceral rage and proud swagger reclaim these slurs the way black rappers use 'nigga': he makes them his own."
Jin figures he had a specific message in mind. "Nothing against these guys, but let's say you're watching a Jay-Z video and you see once again in the beginning, they're ordering Chinese food and you see a Chinese guy coming up to deliver. That's kind of like, yo, was that even necessary? What was the point of that?" he says. "Me doing it is from a different light. You see Jin, I'm in the video and I'm delivering Chinese food . . . I'm making fun of it, and saying, 'Okay, we know this is how you view us, but this is not all we do.' "
It's inevitable that different people will interpret Jin in different ways.
"It's all upon the person that's watching it. They decide if I'm embracing it or exploiting it. On one hand, people might be like, 'Yo, this guy doesn't even know his own heritage. He doesn't even know who he is. He thinks he's black.' . . . Then on the flip side, you have those that be like, 'Uh, he's always mentioning that he's Chinese, always talking about being Asian. Nah, this guy is just a gimmick,' " he says.
"There's just a certain energy I have to carry, and I'm doing my best to carry it," he says. "At the end of the day, if I can look myself in the mirror, and not be like, 'What the hell is wrong with you?' that's really all I can do."
