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'Hapa' Artist Gives Unity Speech
November 25th, 2007 by John Nhu This year’s highlight event of Unity Month featured an energy-packed performance on identity and multiculturalism by slam poet and professor Kip Fulbeck on Thursday night.
Fulbeck’s keynote speech started off with an explosive slam poetry performance and ended just as loudly with a standing ovation.
In his opening performance, Fulbeck played the dual role of an interrogator demanding the biodata of a nervous multicultural man, who answered every question except the last one where he was only allowed to pick one heritage from a list.
After stumbling with his options, Kip addressed the audience about how tired he was with seeing questions in peoples’ eyes.
“I hate it when people ask me which side I identify with,” he said. “My left?”
Fulbeck is considered one of the world’s foremost artists exploring the Hapa identity. According to the Office of Multicultural Programs and Services website, the term hapa, which means “half” in Hawaiian, was once a derogatory word extended to those of part-Asian or Hawaiian descent but has come to be a label embraced by many who identify with such heritage.
“How many times do I have to tell you?” he repeated over and over again. “I’m tired of not being able to go ‘home,’” he said, emphasizing his inability to fit in completely.
Fulbeck showed clips of scenes from “real” Asian martial arts movies like “Showdown in Little Tokyo,” and “Enter the Dragon,” and humorously mocked them.
But on a more somber note, Fulbeck played one of his short films, “Some Questions for 28 Kisses.” The movie depicts his search for “a single blockbuster film that depicted a white male-Asian female romance in a non-clichéd manner,” he said.
As different scenes from various films played, captions ran underneath that posed hard-hitting questions like, “Is an Asian woman threatening to you?” and “Is the only difference between an Asian man and a Caucasian man the ‘cauc’?”
Fulbeck described that anger can boil down to questioning and storytelling, and that this is a good thing.
“To be really angry, you have to have more than just reason,” Fulbeck said. “You need to have purpose.”
At the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he teaches art, he opens every seminar with a request that the students each share something about them that is non-transferable. He teaches his students that they must tell their own stories.
“If you don’t do it, someone else will, and they’ll do it wrong,” he said. “When I was growing up, the consistent image of African Americans was not Cosby in designer sweaters, it was always black people in the ghetto.”
He introduced the Hapa project with the notion that everyone carries a picture of themselves at all times, whether it be a driver’s license, a gym membership or a credit card.
“In this country, you have to always prove that you really are who you are,” he said.
Fulbeck ended with his famous film, “Lilo & Me,” that humorously tried to match the “Top 10 ethnically ambiguous Disney characters” that he thought he resembled, owing to the lack of real-life models in the media. The winners included Lilo, Mulan, Pocahontas and Aladdin.
Kip Fulbeck is the author of Part Asian, 100% Hapa and Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography, and the director of numerous short films.
— Contact Samyukta Mullangi.
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