For my 50th birthday, I bought a Toyota Corolla. Wait. Is my midlife crisis car really a Corolla, the best-selling and most boring model of all time?
Well, yes. And not.
I “modified” it, or in layman's terms, I modified the stock components and tuned the engine. This is not your aunt's Corolla. When I hit the accelerator, the car pulls hard and the engine hums like it's powered by a hive of killer bees.
I get a thumbs up from Mustang drivers and Challenger owners coolly nod their heads. My favorite is when kids at red lights ask me to rev the engine like I'm F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.
Many of my fans are probably fans of the movie “Fast and Furious,” which came out 25 years ago this month. Fans of modified Japanese import cars, like myself, have a love-hate relationship with the $7 billion “Fast and Furious” franchise. On the one hand, the movies helped popularize modified Japanese cars. People from all over the world fell in love with them and the import car culture they advertised.
On the other hand, the movies left out much of the story.
In Southern California in the mid-1990s and early 2000s, people lived, for the most part, without telephones. The Internet was nascent (a repository of brochures and magazines) and most websites looked like Tetris.
The fashion was all baggy for boys and very short shorts, midriffs and small backpacks for girls. The hair was scandalous. And automobiles, especially Japanese imports, had reached the pinnacle of automotive engineering.
During this time, I was in college at UCLA. I saved up and bought a red 1989 Honda CRX Si. It also had a slick five-speed manual transmission, a peppy engine, and sharp steering. That car took me to work and college, and from the mountains of California to the Oregon border. It probably helped me get girlfriends. He comforted me during breakups. He helped me move to the San Francisco Bay Area for my first job as an adult.
And then, stupidly, I sold it, along with all the precious souvenirs it carried.
Now, when I come to a winding highway intersection at night and my GR Corolla takes the curves, it's 1996 and I'm driving my CRX, drinking pho in San Gabriel, or rushing to a traveler's party at Naga in Long Beach. That's the magic of certain cars. A normal car takes you from one place to another. A special car transports you to the past.
To be completely honest, I bought the CRX to fit in.
The '90s import car scene was as diverse as Southern California. But there's no doubt that it started with Asian Americans (specifically Japanese Americans in the South Bay city of Gardena) who were influenced by modified car culture in Japan. Soon, Asian American kids across the region took their cheap, underpowered, four-cylinder, front-drive Honda Civics (our parents preferred Japanese reliability to American power) and turned them into street rockets.
Not only were they building race cars from scratch, but they were also building one of my first experiences with a collective Asian-American identity: one that wasn't overtly about politics and activism, or immigration and assimilation. It was about Asian American joy. It was Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino and Vietnamese Americans who built fast and attractive cars. They were stereotypical nerdy kids who went to parties where the horrible stereotype of Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles” was turned to rubber and destroyed by exhaust explosions.
At the time, the Asian Americans we saw in mainstream media were either insignificant or offensive, especially to Vietnamese Americans like me. But in import car culture, I saw, perhaps for the first time, Asian boys and girls in a focused and even glamorous light.
We did our own cars and our own car shows. We raced each other and then got fast (with turbos, superchargers and nitrous oxide) and raced each other. And we win. We published our own magazines, built our own automotive businesses, and, for better and worse, promoted our own outlaw street racer image and our own standard of beauty. In those clubs and car shows of the 90s, you could see and feel that Asian Americans were not assimilating the culture. We were creating it.
“Fast and Furious” realized that. Based on a 1998 Vibe magazine article about imported car street racing in New York, the film was transplanted to Southern California. But he was wrong in many details. Their street races resembled street raves on four-wide main streets filled with pedestrians. The races in our scene were clandestine, clandestine events in industrial and lightly guarded areas, where cars faced off two by two.
But to me the most egregious and unforgivable Hollywood crime is that “Fast and Furious” whitewashed Asian Americans, the creators of this world, from their starring roles. Korean-American actor Rick Yune appears in the film, sure, but he plays the villain Johnny Tran, a guy who hates Vin Diesel's Dominic Toretto for a criminal deal gone bad (understandable) and for sleeping with his sister (ditto). Of course, in a tradition that goes back to “Madame Butterfly” and “Miss Saigon,” Tran dies at the end, gunned down by the blond, blue-eyed hero, Paul Walker's Brian O'Conner.
A few months ago, while looking for a mechanic to modify my Corolla, I was referred to an auto shop in Garden Grove, also known as Little Saigon. The guy who sent me asked me, “Do you even know who's working on your car?”
“No,” I replied.
He told me the name and I googled it.
Apparently, back in the '90s, this Vietnamese American mechanic from Orange County had one of the fastest Honda Civics in the world. A true OG of the import car scene modified my car with his own hands. What an honor and what a connection with the past.
This story of imported cars ends in a full circle of poetic justice. As a pioneer and legend of the real-life import car scene, my mechanic was not the villain. He was the hero. He was the fastest and his car was the angriest.
That's the heart of my journey with the GR Corolla. Asian Americans created imported car culture. We all deserve to be the hero of our own story.
Ky Phong Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from Long Beach. he is a fellow professional artist with the Arts Council of Long Beach. This article was prepared in collaboration with Zócalo Public Square.
