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A fictional autobiography of a hapa growing up in Southern California. Richly textured with the stuff of Asian American male identity struggles. |
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GOLDSEA | ASIAN BOOKVIEW | FICTION
Paper Bullets
by Kip Fulbeck
University of Washington Press, Seattle and London, 2001, 271 pp, $18.95
EXCERPT:
f what you're hiding is valuable enough, sooner or later someone will come looking for it. That's just the way it's played. Red light, green light. Ready or not, here I come. Hidden treasures only matter if you're looking, and if you're in the right place. Sometimes it all comes down to a matter of timing and perception. You notice certain things along the roadside. Some you stop for. Some you take with you. Some you drive by.
If you take the 101 north past Montecito, you get into a semi-hometown of mine. I've never come to terms with Santa Barbara as a place to call home because I've never gotten away from its image as some kind of beach playground for rich white people who live here and sometimes-rich white people who are just visiting from L.A. to get away from all the smog and all the heat and all the guns. The air is better here, but it's actually colder than people and postcards let on. We got a few shootings here and there, and a few murders here and there, but it's not anywhere close to L.A. Then again, you can't get dim sum or decent Korean food here so there's a trade-off. Given the choice, you can order me the dim sum with guns any day.
[CONTINUED BELOW]
This semihometown north of Santa Barbara, called Goleta, basically revolves around the adjacent university where I teach. I wouldn't really call it a college town, though, since it doesn't really cater to the students, even though it depends on them to exist. I wouldn't call it an old-fashioned town either, since it's still got a few high-tech firms that every now and then talk of joining the mass industry flight out of California long enough to get their employees nervous and some letters to the editor written. Deep down, though, we all know it's a farce. I mean, who really wants to move to Arizona? You just end up here on summer vacations anyway, and it's a longer drive. Sooner or later, to much fanfare and celebration, these engineering firms announce they'll brave the odds and stick it out here, while a thousand workers pack away their pins and needles and wait for their lives to be teased again. These firms are like a pretty high-school girl -- cheerleader, ASB, the works. The type with a constant entourage of admiring lettermen, all lined up waiting for a date that will never happen. Everyone knows it but the guys in line. There's a Carrows. A Honda dealership. A hardware store that doesn't carry any lumber. I'd just call it a town.
Teaching here at the university level has always been a little tricky for me. I was lucky enough to get hired at twenty-six, which made me the youngest faculty on the campus. It also put me in the predicament of having to regularly prove I really was who I was, and I really did what I did. A lot of my students assumed I was one of their peers during my first couple years. This still happens occasionally, but not as often. I still have a baby face. I still get carded. And I still don't look like a professor, which is all fine with me. I'm not quite sure what a professor is supposed to look like, but I know I don't fit the traditional bill. My skin is dark from both my Cantonese genes and a love of the sun, and my black hair falls to the middle of my back -- though I almost always tie it back in a ponytail when teaching. Basically Axl Rose minus the bandana, hair color, skin color, leather pants, and tenor voice. For better or worse, I've spent a lifetime in athletics, and that continues here. In most ways I still do what I do. It's not uncommon for me to see my students as often in the weight room, pool, or basketball court as I do in lecture. Which means someone somewhere is spending too much time in the gym or too little time in class. Take your pick.