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7 Banana Split and Kip Fulbeck’s Boyhood among Ghosts In Pursuit of Video Hapa-ness T he Joy Luck Club (1993), Double Happiness (1994), Siao Yu (1995), and Shopping for Fangs (1997) use narrative fiction to explore the complexities of life within the Chinese diaspora as it intersects Asian America. Experimental video artist Kip Fulbeck covers much of the same ground from a different perspective by using a singularly idiosyncratic biracial voice to look at questions of gender, generation, personal history, and screen mythology in his tapes about coming of age in a racially polarized society. Distance makes some features of boyhood seem less significant and other aspects move more sharply into focus. Kip Fulbeck’s preoccupations with sexual prowess and vulnerability in an early piece like Vicki in 3:30 (1990), for example, give way to more subtle renderings of similar issues just a year later in Banana Split (1991). In later videos, Fulbeck moves beyond the personal into the greater body politic with Some Questions for 28 Kisses (1994), Asian Studs Nightmare (1994), Sweet or Spicy? (2000), and Sex, Love, & 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 popular culture, the personal always intrudes. At the conclusion of Some Questions for 28 Kisses, for example, Fulbeck says his 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: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts In Pursuit of Video Hapa-ness 173 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. In Banana Split, this “split” perspective emerges as a narrative of maturation and metamorphosis.1 Within this autobiographical narrative, central issues come to the fore, including a developing sense of a racial self within a racist America, the relationship between ethnic identity and the loss of Chinese culture within the American “melting pot,” and the generational differences that mark his Anglo-American and Chinese American family relationships. Key institutions frame this emerging sense of self from the nuclear to the extended family, public schools to popular culture and American politics. His works critically probe the interconnections among race, ethnicity, and an evolving masculinity and heterosexuality. As Fulbeck presents his maturation process, the central fact of his biracial identity underscores the contradictory nature of self in the last three decades of twentieth-century American society. Fulbeck does not shy away from the implications of these contradictions as he struggles against his own participation in that 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 expression 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 entirely Anglo-American or Chinese American, but as wholly Asian American.2 However, the community of “hapa” individuals, which the term also implies, does not figure prominently in Fulbeck’s work. Even within his own family, Fulbeck seems isolated. His father, Jack, is the son of a working-class English immigrant who was an alcoholic. Jack Fulbeck is a successful author, professor , and former soldier. He appears to have had Kip late in life, and he does not seem close to...

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