Hawai'i One Summer

Preface to the Paperback Edition

I wrote these essays during the middle of our seventeen-year stay in Hawai‘i. Reading them today, I see that I have changed, and Hawai‘i has changed. I am happier, and Hawai‘i is more wonderful. A black cloud had covered my home place, Northern California. But leaving the Mainland for Hawai‘i had not gotten us out from under it. The black pall that spread over the world during the long war had still not lifted. In 1978, the year of the Summer of this book, I was continuing my depression from the Vietnam War. The fallout from that war went on and on—wars in Cambodia and Laos, MIAs, agent orange, boat people.

A reader of this book surprises me. She asks, Why the many allusions to suicide? I reread these pages, and see: Mortgage meant death. The bombing of Kaho‘olawe—by ANZUS and Japan. My son haunted by the ghosts of Mānoa, and I haunted by the ghost of a lost poet. Nature’s creatures suffering and killing. Kālua pig looking like a haole human being. And homesickness—but if I do not feel at home in Paradise, where is home? My first take on Hawai‘i was, Here I am arrived at the Land of Lotus Eaters, and I’m not going to leave. I thought I was writing light-hearted essays.

This same sympathetic reader wondered, Could it be that you’d broken taboos by writing and publishing secrets? Well, it did not feel good to be a writer in a place that is not a writing culture, where written language is only a few hundred years old. The literary community in Hawai‘i argues over who owns the myths and stories, whether the local language and writings should be exported to the Mainland, whether or not so-and-so is authentic, is Hawaiian. For me, Hawai‘i was a good place for writing about California and China, and not for writing about Hawai‘i. I felt the kapu—these are not your stories to write; these myths are not your myths; the Hawaiians are not your people. You are haole. You are katonk. My great grandfathers, one on my mother’s side, one on my father’s side, and my paternal grandfather lived and worked in Hawai‘i. Even so, they were not kama‘āina, and I am not kama‘āina.

Once, on the Big Island, Pele struck me blind. She didn’t want me to look at her, nor to write about her. I could hear her say, So you call yourself Woman Warrior, do you? Take that. I feel fear even now as I write her name. And I could hear the Hawaiians: You have taken our land. Don’t take our stories.

Hawai‘i held an Asian Pacific American writers’ conference the very Summer of this book. We addressed one another with rancor and panic, though some did try for aloha. The name Asian Pacific American had barely been thought, and many people denied every term in it. We were divided between those who would give the stories, myths, ceremonies to whoever hears them, and those who would have possession be by blood. So, I decided that I would write personally, about myself and my family, about homesickness for California, and my upcoming high school reunion, about washing the dishes, teaching school, reading. I would publish these humble pieces in New York, and bypass Hawai‘i. I meant to honor kapu, not touch kapu things at all.

But though I did try to leave her out, Hawai‘i—people sing her and speak of her as Spirit—made her way into these essays. Writing about buying our first house, I worried that I was trying to own property that had been a Royal Hawaiian Land Grant. Describing Nature, the sea, the air, the lands and fish, is describing Hawai‘i. I studied Lew Welch on dialect because I was thinking about Hawai‘i’s language—how to teach standard English to students who speak pidgin without offending or harming them?

Now, a dozen years after leaving her, I realize a way free to tell a story of Hawai‘i.

In 1980, I was recognized as a Living Treasure of Hawai‘i. The enrobed monks and priests of the Honpa Hongwanji Mission at the temple on the Pali chanted Sanskrit, and passed a certificate through the incense that entitles me to all the rights, privileges, and consideration of a Living Treasure of Hawai‘i. Some of my fellow Living Treasures are Mary Kawena Pukui, Gabby Pahinui, Herb Kawainui Kane, Francis Haar, Bumpei Akaji, Satoru Abe, Auntie Irmgard Farden Aluli, Don Mitchell, Auntie Emma Farden Sharp, Tadashi Sato, Eddie Kamai, and everybody, really, only not yet formally recognized in ceremony.

As a responsible Living Treasure, I feel called upon to tell you a story that will give help and power. Once there was a prophecy that Kamehameha would conquer all the islands if he could build a great temple to his family war god,