"Part-Asian": The Hapa Project Online

A work-in-progress by filmmaker and new media artist Kip Fulbeck

In 2002, I began a project documenting the portraits and handwritten words of Hapa individuals (multiracials of partial Asian/Pacific Islander descent).  What started as a couple dozen people in San Francisco has now matured into a rapidly growing collection of over 500 people throughout the country, which will culminate in a book and extensive website database in 2004-5.

“Now don’t smile ...”

It’s weird I have to say this, but it’s usually how it starts.   Someone sits down for me to take their photo, and somewhere between shaking their hand and them sitting on the stool, their previously hibernating camera face awakens and turns on like Godzilla.  Lips part.  Heads slightly cock.  Eyes brighten and freeze.  Jaws stiffen.  And a smile comes on like Christmas lights.  Participants start to resemble wedding candids, public meetings-of-the-eyes, DMV mannequins, awkward cocktail party conversations …  I keep waiting for them to say, “Would you like another drink?” or, “So what do you do?”

Growing up in Southern California, I know how quick we are to smile, and I know how much or little a smile can really mean. 

Q: How do you say, “F--k you” in Los Angeles?

A: “Trust me.”

Year by year I watch an endless array of inexhaustible charm arsenals operating full tilt onscreen – Bill Clinton … Lady Di … Julia Roberts … Ricky Martin(ez).  I watch Tom Cruise smile his way through interview questions without the interviewer even noticing he never actually answers anything. It’s all smiles and hair, smiles and hair.  I witness politicians, newscasters, and soap opera stars becoming more and more indistinguishable and interchangeable, American Idol winners looking more and more like ringer microphone-hogs at the local karaoke bar (you didn’t really think they wrote their own music, did you?).  And year after year, I’ve learned to turn on my own smile when I need to, rather than when I want to.

• Most continuous retakes of an individual where I couldn’t tell the difference between one shot and the next (but apparently they could):  27

My name is Kip Fulbeck.  My mother is Chinese from Canton; my father the American born son of English and Irish immigrants. I was born in Fontana, CA on April 30th, 1965.  Trivia:  While Fontana is the birthplace of the Hell’s Angels and April 30th is the founding anniversary of the Church of Satan, I’m actually not a member of either.  More trivia: With anti-miscegenation laws still on the books until 1967, my parents’ matrimonial union in the country of my birth was technically illegal in several states.  Still more: I was 35 years old before the U.S. Census allowed me to check more than one box on my own ethnicity questionnaire.  It’s like picking your mother or your father, your left foot or your right, Sophie’s Choice …Which one is it going to be?  Change just doesn’t happen quickly I suppose.  Sometimes it’s even called patriotic to make it not happen.

• Longest distance traveled to participate, only to change their mind and go home:  330 miles (Boston, MA to Ithaca, NY)

I have answered the question “What are you?” every day of my life.  Depending on the day, the location, and my hair, I am Native American, Hawai’ian, Mexican, Middle Eastern, Asian Indian, Filipino, or African American (especially when my head is shaved).  I have listened to a black woman chastise me for denying my African heritage and a Cherokee Nation member push me to register my status.  I am greeted in Spanish, Farsi, or Hawai’ian Pidgin.  I watch interracial couples scrutinize my face, wondering what their future child may look like, and I’ve learned to smile when they do it.

Like many multiracial children, I thought I was the only one.  Certainly, interracial marriages were uncommon for my parents’ generation, even frowned upon in many communities.  Yet more than simply being uncommon, the idea of multiraciality was ignored in popular culture. Growing up in the late 70’s, my only vague media reference to multiraciality was Mr. Spock (and that was a bit of a stretch).  We didn’t have a Tiger.  Some would say we still don’t.  While my parents fostered me with a loving and supportive home, they chose not to discuss my multiraciality with me.  Perhaps they didn’t recognize the issue, or did and chose to reduce it.  Or perhaps they simply had no example, resources, or tools with which to start.

• Most unsolicited photos sent by one individual asking to be in book:  8

Officially, The Hapa Project was born out of need – a need to promote awareness and recognition of the millions of multiracials of Asian/Pacific Islander descent in the U.S; to give voice to multiracial people and previously ignored ethnic groups; to dispel myths of exoticism, hybrid vigor and racial homogeneity; to foster positive identity formation and self-image in multiracial children; and to encourage solidarity and empowerment within the multiracial/Hapa community.  Unofficially, it’s a bit more personal.  I’m making the book I wish I had access to growing up.

Through this book project and its future website, I am collating the largest multiracial identity resource of its kind.  I hope to create a resource for multiracial families, to educate mainstream America on the realities and experiences of its multiracial population, and to help foster in multiracial individuals, especially children, a sense of self, pride, and belonging.

• Saddest parent award (via email): “Yet another group that needs a voice?  Give me a break!  How many more multiracial groups besides Hapa will they come up with in the future?  What this country needs is to look at ALL citizens as AMERICANS.  Focusing on different ethnic groups by government and other public agencies will just lead to creating more division, not unity, in our great country.  I just wish that people would remember what made this country great.  We don't need to create multiple warring factions lest we want to end up like some other areas of the world.  Americans should all stand up for the common good, not the good of some chosen group or groups. (I am a sansei with two hapa adult children.)”

In every factor of life, we each see ourselves as individuals, and society sees us as something.  I designed this project on multiracial identity based on the contrast between how people look at us and how we see ourselves.  The project operates under three basic parameters:

1.        Individuals are photographed identically and straight on – bare from the collarbone upwards, without make-up, jewelry, or glasses and without expression.  In other words, we look like we really look.  Each individual has the option to see and approve his or her image.

2.        Each individual’s “official” ethnic background is listed.

3.        Beneath this, and in his or her own handwriting, is each individual’s half-page (or less) personal response to the question “What are you?”

• Longest time taken to write a half-page or less personal statement:  120 minutes

However much we want to, we can’t ignore the way society looks and groups individuals together via race and ethnicity.  But we can call it out.  The idea that “we,” the Hapa people in this project, have some kind of shared experience, some commonality of cohesion simply because we happen to share partial ancestry in a certain hemisphere of the world is as silly as this sentence actually sounds, and is proven false within the first few images and statements of The Hapa Project.  If anything, what we do share is the fact that society misjudges and mis-evaluates us constantly – we are the lucky ones, the exotics, the future of the worlds, the ambassadors to world peace … And in this way, the people in this project speak for all multiracials – and all people – in the same way any person who chooses to speak for him or herself can.  We are all individuals with separate identities and we have the right to claim these identities for ourselves.  This is the fundamental vision that informs The Hapa Project.  We smile when we want to and the way we look is the way we look.  No need to explain, no need to explain, no need to explain.   Smile.

Also of Interest

• Interview: Kip Fulbeck
  By Yayoi Lena Winfrey, AAV Contributing Editor
  From the Archives: Educator, film maker, lifeguard, author, and hapa with a mission...
• Archive: Multiracial Issues
  Features past readings on multiracial families, interracial relationships, biracial identity, transracial adoption, and other topics in our extended (H)APA communities