In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Looking at memoirs focusing on boyhood entails teasing out the intertwined stories of the boy and the man looking back on the boy. No boyhood essence can be distilled from memory; rather, boyhood becomes a photo album of moments, reminiscences, impressions, and emotions that can become the wellspring of the man’s account of his own past for a specific purpose in the present. When looking at videomaker Kip Fulbeck’s oeuvre (Fulbeck 2002), it is imperative to note that Fulbeck, the young man, working on his bachelor’s and M.F.A. degrees, gradually metamorphoses into the more mature artist, the new faculty member, and, eventually , the tenured associate professor. Fulbeck, the boy, born in California in 1965, the obsessive object of the artist’s gaze, changes as well. Distance makes some aspects of boyhood seem less significant and others move more sharply into focus. The preoccupations with sexual prowess and vulnerability of an early piece like Vicki in 3:30 (1990) give way to a more subtle rendering of similar issues just a year later in Banana Split (1991) or a move beyond the personal into the greater body politic in videos like Some Questions for 28 Kisses (1994), Asian Studs Nightmare (1994), Sweet or Spicy? (2000), and Sex, Love, and Kung Fu (2000), where the boy’s perspective on Bruce Lee, Shang-Chi, interracial romance, and other aspects of popular culture becomes the man’s analysis of the depiction of race in Hollywood film and television. Although Fulbeck’s ruminations on himself and his family seem to be quite separate from his videos on 279 15 pursuits of hapa-ness Kip Fulbeck’s Boyhood among Ghosts Gina Marchetti Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood , to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother who marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies? Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior gina marchetti 280 popular culture, the personal always intrudes. At the conclusion of Some Questions for 28 Kisses, for example, he says his critique of the depiction of interracial romance in Hollywood was precipitated by his desire to just get a video at a Blockbuster in Los Angeles. However, the broader question of cultural representation swings back to Fulbeck’s own identity as a biracial man trying to situate his own desire within the context of a culture in which the politics of ethnicity and race cannot be separated from dating patterns and marriage preferences. Primarily focusing on Banana Split, Fulbeck’s most developed autobiographical video to date, this examination of the depiction of boyhood from the perspective of a young man coming to grips with his own identity with respect to race, ethnicity, language, religion, class, and social status will highlight the ways in which Fulbeck explores this “split” perspective as a narrative of maturation and metamorphosis. Within this autobiographical narrative, key issues come to the fore, including a developing sense of a racialized self within a racist America, the relationship between ethnic identity and the loss of Chinese culture within the American “melting pot,” the interconnections among race, ethnicity, and an evolving heterosexual masculinity, the generational differences that mark his Anglo-American and Chinese American family relationships, and the institutions that frame this emerging sense of self from the nuclear to the extended family, from public schools to popular culture and American politics. As Fulbeck presents his maturation process, the key fact of his biracial identity underscores the contradictory nature of self in the last three decades of twentieth-century American society, and Fulbeck does not shy away from the implications of these contradictions as he struggles against his own participation in the racial hierarchy. Fulbeck generally uses the term “hapa” as the preferred way to refer to his biracial identity. Coming from the Hawaiian phrase “hapa haole,” which usually translates as “half outsider” or “half non-Hawaiian,” the term has been used to refer to people who are of mixed European and Polynesian descent or Eurasians, although, in recent years, the phrase has been used to refer to Amerasians more generally. The term has crept into the vernacular within Asian American communities across the country, but particularly on the West Coast, where Fulbeck grew up. The implications of the term “hapa” as “half,” and not wholly of any specific race, become a prominent feature of Fulbeck’s sense of himself as not...

Share