Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography

by Kip Fulbeck

Award-winning videomaker, performance artist, and pop-culture provocateur Kip Fulbeck has captivated audiences worldwide with his mixture of high comedy and personal narrative. In Paper Bullets, his first novel, Fulbeck taps into his Cantonese, English, Irish, and Welsh heritage, weaving a fictional autobiography from 27 closely linked stories, essays, and confessions. By turns sensitive and forceful, passionate and callous, Fulbeck confronts the politics of race, sex, and Asian American masculinity head-on without apology, constantly questioning where Hapas fit in a country that ignores multiracial identity.

Raised in southern California by a Chinese-born mother and a Caucasian father, Fulbeck pushes the conventions of literary form as he simultaneously draws from, recreates, and fabricates his own life history. His range of experiences--from college professor to youth outreach volunteer, blues player to surfer and lifeguard--informs his witty and humane writing. Like himself, his protagonist is a young man shaped by the conflicting mores, stigmas, desires, and codes of male conduct in America. He searches for and mismanages love and independence, continually experimenting with sex along the way. Sometimes hilarious, always heartfelt, surfing the trivia of pop culture and sound bits, his inner voice shifts continually among the real, the perceived, and the imagined.

Genres: Memoir, Race

282 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fulbeck provides an unusual perspective on the world-even for a mixed race person. I appreciated a lot of what he had to say because it was so different from anything else I had read. Of course, I always like books that make you question your own assumptions about race or anything else for that matter. However sometimes the book got a little too ethereal and non linear even for my taste. It didn't have much of an ending either.

[Rachel Matsuoka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Paper Bullets was one piece of writing that changed my life. What's different about it is that it's written from the perspective of a biracial Asian-American--a refreshing change. I could relate to Kip Fulbeck's character a lot, and the narrative was completely engaging and well-written. This novel makes you rethink your relationship to your cultural identity. Revolutionary.

[T.J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I could relate to the shifting identities of the multiracial experience written in this novel, but overall I was annoyed by the rambling, confused disjointed and entirely self-indulgent style of this book. Kip Fullbeck is a talented, engaging author and speaker; this book isn't his best example.

[Shin Yu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a cross between "I Love Yous are for White People" and Dave Yoo's "The Choke Artist" with some undertones of David Sedaris (his essays on going to art school/being a performance artist). Very good depiction of suburban SoCal in the 1980s.

[Jen Chau · Rating 2 out of 5]

not a huge fan.

[Mitsuko · Rating 5 out of 5]

biracial lit section