For my 50th birthday, I bought a Toyota Corolla.1
Wait. Did this guy really pick both the BEST-SELLING and MOST-BORING model of all time as his mid-life crisis car?
Well, yes. And no.
My gift to myself was a GR Corolla. It is polar cap white with gloss black Enkei wheels. Flared wheel wells give it a muscular silhouette. There’s a black spoiler in the back and in the front, a bulged hood with two black vents that make it snort like an angry bull when I accelerate. And yes I have “modded” it, or in layman’s terms, modified the stock components and tuned the engine. This is a major allure of Japanese import car culture and something Asian Americans are taught from birth: With hard work and ingenuity, you can become better.
So far I’ve: Added rain guard visors for all the windows. Installed a JBL amplifier and subwoofer. Spaced the wheels out with H&R spacers and lowered it on RS-R springs. But the biggest modification was installing a Borla ATAK catback exhaust. Now from the rear it looks like four black bazookas are hidden below the bumper and on start-up it sounds like a fire-breathing dragon.
Needless to say, this is not your aunt’s Corolla. GR is short for GAZOO Racing, Toyota’s motorsport and racing division. My GR Corolla is a full-fledged, bona fide sports car. Its 1.6 liter, 3-cylinder turbocharged 300-horse power engine is liter-for-liter one of the most powerful in the world. When I hit the gas, the car pulls hard and the engine buzzes as if it’s powered by a hive of killer bees. The reinforced frame is as taut as a newly welded bridge. And with all-wheel drive and brakes like vice clamps, it corners like a street cat chased by a pit bull. Of course it’s a stick shift.
In car slang, my GR Corolla is a “sleeper.” Those who know cars appreciate my understated taste. I get thumbs-ups from Mustang drivers and cool head nods from Challenger owners. My favorite is when kids at red lights ask me to rev the engine like I’m F1 driver Lewis Hamilton.
Probably a lot of my drive-by admirers are fans of the movie The Fast and the Furious, which celebrates the 25th anniversary of its debut this month. Fans of modified Japanese import cars, like me, have a love-hate relationship with the $7 billion Fast and Furious franchise. On one hand, the movies helped popularize modified Japanese cars. People all over the world fell in love with them and the import car culture, sometimes just called “the scene,” they publicized.
On the other hand, the movies left out so, so much of the story.
To truly understand why I bought a Corolla, you have to rewind to Southern California in the mid 1990s and early 2000s. There are a lot of names for this era, but I’m just gonna call it Peak Human Culture and Civilization because I’m biased but also because I’m right. People lived, for the most part, phone-free. The internet was nascent—a repository for flyers and magazines—and most websites looked like Tetris. To contact people, you paged cryptic codes to say “Good night” and “I love you.”
It was a simpler time. It was the best time.
Hip-hop music was bumping and still a little scary. R&B gave us the opportunity to hook up. The fashion was baggy everything for guys and short shorts, midriffs, and little backpacks for girls. The hair was outrageous. And the cars, especially Japanese import cars, had reached the pinnacle of automotive engineering. Car posters covered our bedroom walls and filled our dreams with Supras, 300ZXs, and EVOs.
During this era, I was in college at UCLA. I saved up and bought a red 1989 Honda CRX Si. It had two doors and room for two passengers. It also had a slick 5-speed manual transmission, peppy engine, and nimble steering. The triangular shaped hatchback sloped like an Egyptian pyramid, and the trunk lid featured an ingenious see-through window for better visibility. Little did I know that I was buying one of the most iconic car designs of all time.
That car got me to work and through college, and from the mountains of California to the border of Oregon. It probably helped me get girlfriends. It consoled me through breakups. It helped me move to the San Francisco Bay Area for my first grown-up job.
And then, stupidly, I sold it, and all the precious memories it carried in its chassis.2
Now when I hit a loopy freeway interchange at night and my GR Corolla carves through the turn, it’s 1996 and I’m cruising in my CRX, getting pho in San Gabriel or rushing to a flyer party at Naga in Long Beach. My old Alpine face-off stereo plays O.D.B. rapping on Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” The Pioneer subwoofer in the trunk thumps that iconic bass like a heartbeat. Of course, the sunroof is open. I’m 21 years old again, and the whole world is still in front of me.
That’s the magic of certain cars. A regular car takes you from place to place. A special car takes you back in time.
To be completely honest, I bought the CRX to fit in.
Not only were they building race cars from scratch, 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 Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, and Vietnamese American kids having a cool-looking, fast car and going to badass parties where the awful stereotype of Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles was shredded into rubber and obliterated by exhaust blasts.
At the time, the Asian Americans we saw in the mainstream media were negligible or offensive, especially for Vietnamese Americans like me. But in import car culture, I saw, for maybe the first time, Asian guys and Asian girls in a centered and even glamorous light.
It was an “F— You, I’m Me” vibe, and it resonates in me to this day.
We didn’t care if the American V-8 Chevy and Ford muscle car crowd made fun of us “ricers” and our “rice rockets.” We made our own cars and our own car shows. We raced each other and then got fast (with turbos, superchargers, and nitrous oxide) and then raced others. And we won. We published our own magazines, built our own businesses, and for good and bad, promoted our own outlaw street racer image and our own beauty standard. In those 1990s clubs and car shows, you could see and feel that Asian Americans weren’t assimilating culture. We were creating it.
The Fast and the Furious just picked up where we left off. Based on a 1998 Vibe magazine article about street racing import cars in New York, the producers decided to transplant the film to Southern California. But they got so many details glaringly wrong. In the film, the street races looked like street raves on major, four-wide roads packed with pedestrians. The races of our scene were clandestine, underground events in industrial, under-policed areas, where cars faced off mano a mano.
But the most egregious and inexcusable Hollywood crime to me is that The Fast and the Furious whitewashed Asian Americans, the creators of this world, out of starring roles. The Korean American actor Rick Yune appears in the movie, sure—but he plays the villain, Johnny Tran (no relation), a guy who hates Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto for a crime 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, Johnny Tran dies at the end, shot by the blonde-haired, blue-eyed hero, Paul Walker’s Brian O’Conner.
A few months ago, seeking a mechanic to mod my Corolla, I was referred to an auto shop in Garden Grove aka Little Saigon, California. 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.
Back in the ’90s, this Vietnamese American mechanic from Orange County (Johnny Tran’s cinematic stomping grounds) once had the fastest Honda Civic in the world. He even made history in 1997 when his EG hatchback became the first Civic to break the Chuck Yeager-esque sub-10-second barrier.3
This is unverifiable, but I’m convinced he was the real-life inspiration for Johnny Tran. A true OG of the import car scene modified my car with his own hands. What an honor, and what a connection to the past.
This import car story ends in a full poetic justice circle. As a pioneer and legend of the real-life import car scene, my mechanic wasn’t the villain. He was the hero. He was the fastest, and his car was the most furious.4
That’s the heart of my GR Corolla journey. Asian Americans created import car culture. We all deserve to be the hero of our own story.
Ky-Phong Tran is a Vietnamese American writer from Long Beach, California, whose nonfiction has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Orange County Register, Stranger’s Guide, Alta Journal, and Poets & Writers. He is a professional artist fellow with the Arts Council for Long Beach.
Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard