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You could call it , "Sex, race and videotape." California videomaker
Kip Fulbeck's short, "Some Questions for 28 Kisses," jams two of American's
favorite forbidden subjects into nine of the most provocative, irritating
minutes you're likely to spend at the Hawaii International Film Festival.
"How many times have you seen an Asian man kiss someone on TV?"
is one
of those questions that goes scooting along the bottom of the screen.
"Do you rent pornos featuring 'Oriental girls?'"
Fulbeck started getting threats and discouraging phone calls even before
he finished making his controversial video. He's an assistant professor
at UC-Santa Barbara and a performance artist.
"People saying I'm slammin' white men. people saying I am slammin' Asian
women. People saying I am slammin' Asian men." he raps on the video,
which looks fast and hard at interracial relationships and Hollywood's
portrayal of Asians in films and television.
"Do you believe Bruce Lee was killed by White America?," the video asks.
"how about Brandon Lee?"
The film is challenging in asking questions like these using California
race slang- "rice chaser," "yellow cab," rice queen"- that is far, far
from PC-politically correct. (Quick glossary: a rice chaser is a Caucasian
man interested in Asian women; yellow cab is a very derogatory term
for Asian women who date Caucasians, rice queen is an Asian homosexual
male.)
Of coarse, one thing that makes the film so fascinating is how it reminds
us of similarities and contrasts between the Mainland and our local
scene. Hawaii with so many mixed couples and so many hapa children,
is still working to make reality of the melting pot myth, creating the
"golden people" that James Michener idolized in his novel "Hawaii."
Which is why Fulbeck, whose performance art monologues deal with many
of the same tough questions as his videos, spends some of his time in
Hawaii each year. "Asian men in Hawaii do not have such a problem,"
he observes. "they are on TV all the time. They have role models, like
the politicians, newscasters. That's one reason I feel comfortable in
Hawaii.
Still, even here, it's more likely to be a Caucasian male Asian female
couple featured in advertisements. Designed to set the viewers teeth
on edge, " Some Questions" squeezes 35 minutes worth of sounds and sights
into it's nine-minute format. All this is happening at the same time:
-Intimate scenes between Caucasian men and Asian women from a dozen
well-known films: "Dr No," "Mr.(Tom Selleck) Baseball," "Rambo First
Blood Part II," "Shogun," "Playboy's Secrets of Oriental Massage," "Wayne's
World"(with Hawaii's own Tia Carrere).
-Those questions that dance along the bottom of the frame.
-Different, overlapping voices fighting for attention, reading from
the "personal ads" ("single white male seeks...") or discourses on inter-racial
dating from ethnic magazines.
Why are so many
newscasting teams, white/man/Asian
woman?" the video asks. "Why does 'People' list 50 beautiful people
with Asian women and no Asian men?" This seems perfect fare for the
Hawaii International Film Festival. Its theme for 14 years running has
been "When strangers Meet." it focus has been Asia and America. Its
unspoken purpose has been to morph film viewing from passive entertainment
into a challenge for thought and discussion.
Still it's hard to imagine a film this outspoken irreverent and potentially
offensive, in the olden days when the festival was nestled firmly under
the wing of the stodgy East-West Center.
"Is the only difference between an Asian man and a Caucasian
man the
'cauc?;" the video asks. "Is exotic a compliment or an insult?"
Some heated post-film discussion is sure to follow between viewers and
the videomaker - Fulbeck will be "in residence" at the festival - and
among many couples for hours afterward. Fulbeck's video ponders a key
question many minorities ask about the often-distorted images they see
of themselves on American TV and in the movies.
"How many times do you see something before it becomes real?" he asks,
that is, before the fantasy images begin to create our perceptions of
reality and not the other way around.
Fulbeck 29 sees all this from a rather unique perspective. "My dad's
white, my mom's Asian," he explains. "What am I supposed to think about
these images? What do I say when an Asian man tells me, "Hey, inter-racial
dating is BS.' What do I say when an Asian woman tells me she doesn't
date Asians? Does that include me? When a white man tells me he just
loves Oriental women?"
In California, Fulbeck notes, the ratio of Caucasian male/Asian female
marriages is as high as 8:1 over the other way around.
"Do Asian women date white men to 'move up'? Do they do it out of self-hate?
Is an Asian woman less threating to you?"
Fulbeck calls them "Joy Luck" couples, after the Amy Tan novel/movie.
"Caucasian men married to Asian American princesses," he explains The
split of mixed couples is certainly more even here (the state Data Book
discreetly does not mention the statistic).
In Hawaii, though interracial relationships may be a source of emotional
heat for individuals and their families, the social stigma is nil. In
fact, the mixed-race couple is a icon of local advertising.
"America is in a full-on Asian fetish right now,"Fulbeck notes. "We
are the culture of the decade."
But the Untied States is still a country where, he says, "part-colored
is colored." Period.
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