Without a Handle

Without a Handle speaks to the difficulty of controlling's one's own sense of identity in the face of popular assumptions of race, economic class, and government bureaucracy. In a reverse of the American immigrant novel, Without a Handle follows Bucky, a Korean American high school senior whose real name no one can pronounce. Never knowing his mother and abandoned by his father, Bucky grows up in a rural Washington trailer park dreaming of playing college football. However, his football dreams are snuffed out as the U.S. government deports him and the South Korean government conscripts him. With this, Bucky is confronted with the fact that how he sees himself is not how others see him.