My Fully Modded Corolla, Import Car Culture, and Fast & Furious

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Writer Ky-Phong Tran and his GR Corolla at the Asian Garden Mall in the heart of Little Saigon, the turf of Johnny Tran, the villain in The Fast and the Furious. Credit: Daniel Arteaga-Rodriguez

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...