Press
'Bullets' insights are right on target
Yoko Kuramoto-Eidsmoe, Seattle Times staff, The Seattle Times
Arts & Entertainment : Sunday, October 14, 2001
The thing that will make people pick up Kip Fulbeck's "Paper Bullets"
is that it's about a guy who grows up hapa (half-Asian) in America. But
that won't be what leaves the deepest impression.
What stays with you is his startling honesty and dead-on observations.
The California filmmaker and English professor's "fictional autobiography"
is pitch-perfect on what it's like to grow up in a family of Asian-American
overachievers: "No one ever talks about the suicides, the homosexuals,
the divorcées, or the B+ students."
In a viciously funny chapter, he skewers a "rice chaser" ex-girlfriend,
"one of those I-wish-I-wasn't-white kind of people who desperately
search for something ethnic in their lives. Foods. Customs. Clothing.
Lovers."
During their first bedroom encounter, she urges him to "Tell me
you want me in Chinese." At a loss for Chinese words — he knows
a grand total of about 20 — he finally blurts out, "Nay ho ma!":
"Like what?" he thinks, "I don't know what to say. 'How
are you?' is as good as anything."
The book's you-are-there tone is accompanied by a kind of pop-culture
soundtrack — dozens of quotes from songs, movies and TV shows scattered
throughout. They're not marked as quotes in the usual way and they're
not credited until the end notes; they float in, much as they'd come to
mind in real time.
As you might expect, "Paper Bullets" offers insights about
specifics such as Asian-American identity and being a young man in America.
Its true source of power, though, is the ring of truth in its everyday,
universal experiences.
While much of the writing is darkly funny, you can turn a corner in this
book and get hit right between the eyes with Fulbeck's raw evocations
of alienation and longing.
After a love affair founders, he writes, "All that's left is the
love. Still palpable between us, though we see each other only in passing.
The occasional chance meetings of our eyes caress each other now. Nothing
else."
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