Eddie Huang on his new book and Orlando gun culture

Eddie Huang has expanded his repertoire far beyond red-cooked pork buns and has lately been weighing in on the gun-control debate. I sat down for a conversation with the outspoken owner of the New York eatery Baohaus and author of a new memoir “Double Cup Love: On the Trail of Family, Food, and Broken Hearts in China.”

Huang spent his adolescent and teenage years in Orlando, Fla., so the mass shooting on June 12 hit home for him, and his recent work may have been a harbinger of the tragedy. In May, Huang featured Orlando’s surfeit of AR-15s in an episode of his Viceland television show, “Huang’s World.”

“I know people that have guns that say I’ll give mine up if we stop selling AR-15s to people, because no one wants to see this anymore,” he told me. “Keep your .45, keep your 12-gauge, whatever — home defense — fair enough.” But Huang wants Washington to ban AR-15s.

“Everybody has hate in their hearts,” Huang said. “But in those times of hate and pain, we shouldn’t make it so easy for people to make these tragic mistakes, go buy an AR-15 and be reactive.”

Congress is not only nowhere close to banning military assault rifles (individual states have, though), but this week lawmakers also failed to agree on gun control legislation that would prevent people on the FBI’s terror watch list from purchasing firearms.

Huang’s stance on gun control is one of the few overtly political statements he makes in his new book. “Double Cup Love” is a follow-up to his bestselling memoir, “Fresh Off the Boat: A Memoir,” which has been made into a network sitcom.

“When you’re a minority in America, you’re reacting to discrimination. You’re reacting to the man’s thumb on your head,” said Huang, who is Chinese-Taiwanese American.

“Double Cup Love,” unlike his earlier writings, he says, is more “true to form,” a mostly apolitical journal of experiences he has had in romance, food and travels to China. The voice is unmistakable Eddie Huang via Eddie Murphy — raw, brash and graphic in its depictions of bedroom (and bathroom) activities — and infused with his passion for hip-hop and the NBA.

His honesty drew criticism last year when during an appearance on “Real Time with Bill Maher” he said, “Asian men have been emasculated so much we’re basically treated like black women.” During our interview, he offered an explanation, saying he was quoting an OkCupid study that showed online daters are biased against Asian men and black women.

“They are similar experiences,” Huang said. “I wasn’t comparing it to the whole of the black American female experience. That would be ridiculous.”

As much as race comes up in discussions with Huang, he says the romantic relationship with a white woman he bares his heart about in “Double Cup Love” made him realize that similarities outweigh differences and that “race is a social construct.” It is a theme throughout our interview —Huang’s aversion to manufactured divisions.

“We are very adversarial in this country,” he said. “Trump supporters don’t make much sense to me. Trump doesn’t make any sense to me, but I want to look past Trump. I want to look at his constituency and say, look … tell me why you’re made and what we can all do.”