Words
The way we were, the way we are
Whether it’s Through Poetry, Prose or Pidgin, local writers have plenty to say.
Holiday in Honolulu (after a photograph)
By Garrett Hongo
Billie in a yellow bikini and without the gardenia in her hair,
But instead a dark hibiscus, plump as her curls.
Next to her, Armstrong in Bermudas and a flat English driver’s cap,
The famous grin spreading wide as the beach behind them.
And Trummy Young, that marooned trombonist from Gibson’s Bar,
Dressed in a hotel robe and swim trunks, flanks her other side.
She looks shy, perhaps off the drugs or only lightly dosed,
Not quite sad, as the sun makes a light gleam off their skins.
I’d never thought of them here, American jazz greats,
cavorting on the beach,
The big pink hotel looming just off Armstrong’s right shoulder,
Celebrities among the tourists, bringing their brand of music
To mix in among the ukuleles, steel guitars, and falsetto tenors
of the hotels.
But Pahinui must have, his singing a short breath
behind the beat sometimes,
Playing that slappy catch-up, tailgating to the rhythm
Like Satchmo, who showed Holiday how to do the same,
All hip to the bluesy, hesitation style–a kind of tease.
And didn’t Gabby sound like Charlie Christian sometimes,
Strumming that guitar to a hula measure,
A half-beat off the One and swinging the pace
So the music had that feel of a five o’clock jump?
I don’t know for sure, but musicologists tell me
Hawaii was forever a crossroads, seaborne chants
From Polynesia circulating up via Tahitian canoe
And bouncing back from Rapa-Nui,
Where only the big tikis survive now.
And then the missionary hymns crept in,
The falsetto yodel of Argentine vaqueros.
After that, Mississippi and Louisiana delta blues,
Swamp songs from the steamships through the Panama Canal,
Their deckhands exchanging licks with the local guitar-pickers,
Bottlenecks sliding like spit on Hotel Street.
Pretty soon, a paniolo puts the dull edge of his knife
On the open-tuned strings of a Dobro, and we get the lap steel
And hapa-haole songs of mixed Hawaiian and English,
Chang-a-lang from the Portuguese, kachi-kachi
And son montuno from Puerto Rican cane and pineapple workers.
What’s ‘original’ anyway? Indigenous and essentially anything?
I’ll take Holiday in Honolulu, plucking a red hibiscus
From a green hotel bush as she saunters from the lobby
Across the breezy lanai with the tiki torches aflame and smoking,
The scent of gingerflowers from awapuhi hotel soap on her skin,
Cocking her head to one side and pulling back the lush hair,
Placing the stem and pea-green corolla back behind an unjeweled ear,
Giving Armstrong and Trummy Young that bluesy wink of hers
As she adjusts the small bell of the bloom so it opens
Like a pliant, red trumpet in the sweetened airs of Waikiki.
Garrett Hongo was born in Volcano, Hawai’i, and raised in Kahuku on the island of O’ahu. He grew up there and in Los Angeles, graduating from Pomona College in 1973. He is Distinguished Professor of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Oregon, where he teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing. His next book of poems, The North Shore, is forthcoming next spring. ‘Holiday in Honolulu’ is copyright 2006 by Garrett Hongo.
Kalo and da Kala
by Lee A. Tonouchi
Li’lo boy, wotchoo name again? Hod name dey make. Allatime me, no can remembah. Come! Go come outsai, sit by Grandpa. Why da TV allatime mo’ interesting? All you show, allatime chop chop chop. Everyting all move fass, make da head come dizzy. Dis important. Come. Come by Grandpa.
Li’lo boy, why you always no can sit still? Allatime you look o’dea, look o’dea. Grandpa like you listen and look o’hea. No, Grandpa not going geev speech. Why, Grandpa always tell da same story?
Grandpa jus like know why, why da ony time you talk to Grandpa, why you always, ‘Grandpa BUY ME PokÈmon. Grandpa BUY ME Dragonball. Grandpa BUY ME new cellular phone.’ Grandpa living on fix income you know.
You know why Grandpa always gotta take care you? No, not cuz Grandpa like for see all your new PokÈmon card. Grandpa gotta allatime take care you, cuz you Momma and Poppa work. You Poppa work chree job. And you Momma work two job and overtime planny, so all da one you like, dey can buy for you, y’know. Befo’ time we work hard too, but nowday, I dunno, diff’rent. Mo’ hard I tink so.
Make Grandpa sad dat you Momma, Poppa no mo’ time spend vacation wit you. Sometime me tink da one, da Playstation is mo’ you Poppa than you Poppa. Me dunno why dey buy fo’ you all dat kine video game computer. Wot you learn dat one? Ony learn how drive fass and kill da human being. Dey should take you down da beach or up da mountain like you Grandpa time. You Grandpa faddah, he teach you Grandpa how work in da lo’i small boy time, he show you Grandpa about da kalo, da taro, and how da kanaka all come from Haloa. He show you Grandpa how fo’ take care da land so da land take care you. Dey no teach dat kine in you school nowday. Dey no teach you about da kalo–dey ony teach you aboutÖda monkey.
Nowday you Momma, Poppa folks no care about da land. Da only land dey knowÖis Foodland. Dey no wondah o’wot, how all da food come o’dea? Dey no tink of da kalo–all dey can tink is da kala, da money. Soon as dey buy house, wot dey do? Dey concrete da bes part, da yard. How can plant anyting now? You Momma ’specially, she no like work in da yard. She say going make her nail come dirty, her manicure going come poho. And I tell mo’ bettah go plant lychee tree o’someting, but she tell if da fruit tree grow, bumbye give you da allergy. Befo’ time, no mo’ allergy. Me, no can understand.
You Grandpa time, we grow our own vegetable, y’know. Chicken we raise, pig we raise. We go up da field, down da gulch, pick guava, pick mountain apple, banana, mango, all diff’rent one. We go down da beach go pick pipipi, go trow da net, catch da fish. You Momma, Poppa I tink forget how wuz. You Poppa, small time he cry cuz he like da toy. So all kine toy I make for him. I make him slingshot. I make spear. I wuz going make for you special toy, but no can. You Momma say too much GERMS. Befo’ time, we no trow way nahting. Befo’ time, I used to hemo da organ everyting from eensai da pig. Den I get da papaya leaf, dat one, da stem hollow. Wit dat one I blow air eensai da pig bladdah. One week wait, wait ’till come hard, den can play. You Poppa smile up. He take ‘em, all his friend go show. Dey all trow, trow da basketball. Good fun dey have. And special hundred dollah shoes, no need wuz.
Befo’ time way, had planny fo’ teach. Everyting had meaning you know. You look da star in da sky, you know wea fo’ go. You no need map wuz. Befo’, if you listen, da ocean talk to you. Da wind talk to you. You Momma and Poppa no believe so dey no can teach you. Dey tell dat Grandpa way cannot pay for da mortgage, da car loan, da savings for all you college tuition. Grandpa way old. Grandpa old.
I know, you tinking everytime Grandpa story no interesting. Grandpa always telling how wuz befo’ time, befo’ time. Maybe one day you understand. Grandpa wish he can take you go all around, show you, teach you. But Grandpa makule already. But befo’ me ma-ke, I like you promise. I like you promise you going remembah all everyting what Grandpa tell to you. You promise, hah? HAH?! Li’lo boy, you listening? You listening to Grandpa? Eh, Li’lo boy, hakum you no stay?! Wea you went?!!
‘Da Pidgin Guerrilla’Lee A. Tonouchi is the author of da Pidgin short story collection Da Word (Bamboo Ridge, 2001) and da Pidgin essay collection Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture (Tinfish, 2002), an’den he’s da compiler of Da Kine Dictionary: Da Hawai’i Community Pidgin Dictionary Projeck (Bess, 2005). Dis Fall at Hawai’i Pacific University, he going be teaching one new course called ANTH 3880 Hip-Hop Hawai’i.
Grandma and the Little Fish
By Mavis Hara
On the farm in Japan, you said,
they take a pot,
put in cold water
and a block of tofu,
soft and fresh,
get some tiny silver fish,
alive and swimming out of the stream.
They light the wood,
and when the water
begins to feel the heat
of a thousand days of sun,
they watch the little fish burrow
into the tofu
struggling to live.
But the heat does not stop,
the water gasps out its air
as silver bubbles,
and the lives of little fish explode
into the block of tofu,
leaving it mined
with delicious holes,
the color and size
of a little fish’s eyes.
It is good to taste this
tofu and fish, neatly cooked you said.
It makes you strong.
You smiled but
I refused to sit in your lap.
And for months afterward,
each piece of tofu you served me
I cut into tiny cubes,
smaller than the backbones of little fish.
Mavis Hara lives in Honolulu. She has a manuscript under consideration by Bamboo Ridge Press. She would like to congratulate Honolulu Weekly on its 15 anniversary.
Two Poems on Mothering
by Juliet Kono
I.
Everyday, I go to feed the abandoned cat.
It comes to me like one who has suffered
and rubs its filthy body against my legs.
Fur-matted, it feels as if it has tumors
all over its body and thick head.
I wait a few days.
Perhaps, its master will turn up
to claim it before
I take it to the animal shelter.
A throwaway society,
that’s what we are.
We throw everything away,
even people, So what’s a cat?
When I take it to the Humane Society,
it looks at me as if I had betrayed it.
On the drive down, I counsel it,
plead it winsome.
Show your best side or no one will adopt you!
I surrender the cat.
I enter a sleepless night.
It’s not going to make it I moan.
With its bad teeth, rat-bitten coat, no history,
it doesn’t have a chance!
It would be euthanized, no doubt.
The next morning,
I go to rescue and adopt
this no-name cat,
that has stuck its claws into me.
I don’t know its breed,
how old it is,
if male or female,
if it’s had its shots.
What have I gotten myself into?
I don’t even like cats.
I have the cat washed and groomed.
The groomer shaves off most of its coat,
so it looks like Puss ‘n Boots,
with it’s large head and furred paws.
Later, at the vet’s, I learn it’s a Persian-
a designer cat with rare copper eyes.
‘And it’s a boy,’ the vet announces.
I beam like a true parent
in this last mothering
I will do.
II.
Late afternoon, on my way to the store,
I pass a homeless young man,
like one would a penny in the gutter.
He is dressed in black.
Squatting, he strokes
his skinny beard and face
in a cat wash with one hand
and smokes in broad gestures
with the other.
His bike, tied to a railing
with frayed rope ends,
is laden with plastic bags,
hanging like mango fruit.
The man looks like you,
how you had become-
talking to yourself,
smoking like a weathered fisherman.
I confess, when I hurried past him,
I was hurrying away from you-
your mental illness,
your life on the streets,
the drugs and your death.
Away from my denial: That is not my son!
But it is a constant, this admittance-
you were my homeless son–
the same way this young man on the street
in front of the bookstore is mine.
Young men like him
are all mine because of you.
I walk out of the store into the twilight.
The homeless man is in the same spot,
dissolving into the darkness, into its thickness,
like a quiet cat.
I suddenly feel ashamed for the young
man, as I had been of you.
And while I’d like to think
I’ve gotten over this sort of thing,
I still feel bad about having chased you
up a tree and leaving you there.
But it brings back nothing,
save a mothering, irresolute.
Juliet S. Kono has written two books of poems, Hilo Rains (1988) and Tsunami Years (1995) and a short story collection, Ho’olulu Park and the Pepsodent Smile (2004). She has also written a children’s story called The Bravest Opihi. Born and raised in Hilo, Hawai’i, she now lives in Honolulu and teaches at Leeward Community College. As co-chair for Bamboo Ridge Writer’s Institute, to be held on Oct. 13-14, she welcomes everyone to attend this year’s institute, featuring local writers in its writing workshops and panels.
Best Man
By Wendy Miyake
‘Are you going to put me in your next book?’ he asks. He is holding my hand as we cross the street, protective, as if that kind of behavior is hardwired in his genes.
‘Why? I put you in the first book and I named you after a god. What more do you want?’
‘It would be nice, wouldn’t it?’
‘I guess.’
It was no mistake that I named him after a god. In many ways, my nephew has saved me from becoming a complete snob and flaunting my adultness.
I was born an adult. For as far back as I can remember, I knew better, I was responsible and I could navigate the world of grownups like an opera-singing gondolier through the canals of Venice. I don’t think I ever learned to play, to cut loose, to let go. But in 1998, all that changed. My nephew was born and with his birth, a kind of magic disguised as chaos entered my life.
Now, it is impossible to stay zipped up in my stuffy little world where everything has its place. When my 7-year-old nephew is around, something as simple as wiping the dishes becomes a performance. He strums the plate, hopping on one foot like the best heavy metal guitarist in the world. He belts out the latest Shakira song, the one I like, the one he has learned all the words to, the one he feels he sings better than her. It’s enough really to be entertained at home but my nephew doesn’t know any better in public, which is probably why he knows more than I do.
‘It’s carp! Carp I tell you! That’s what you’re buying,’ he cheers as he watches the brown almond butter coil from the machine into the plastic container at the health food store.
I want to snap my fingers and disappear when I feel every senior citizen staring at me. At least he’s not saying crap. We didn’t want him to say crap at school so we say carp. I’m trying to will this idea to everyone by telepathy. But my nephew doesn’t run on fear. Instead, he boogies toward the bread in the freezer as if he’s under a perpetual disco ball. Old ladies pass me and smile. ‘Do you know there are 31 grams of sugar in this cereal, Aunty? Grandma wouldn’t be happy, would she?’ He giggles, happy that he can now read the label on everything.
There have been many incidents over the years where his innocence has softened the hard edges of my adult world. I have taken longer and longer glimpses from his eyes and realized that his world is much more beautiful than my own.
In his world, you can sing pop songs in the Macy’s bathroom. You see yellow shower trees on the drive to town that you often miss because your mind is somewhere else. You can eat pizza and get into laughing fits at Romano’s without worrying about calories or your reputation.
In his world, there is no interference between the question and the truth. When I ask him what women need in this world, he glances up to the sky and then looks at me, ‘Kindness. That’s what you should look for, Aunty.’ I almost cried.
No, I am not his mother or father but in small ways I feel he’s inherited a part of me. He knows he’s part of the family so he wipes the dishes and clears the table without complaints. When we pick him up from school, he says hello with a hug. He tells my father when he loses at Monopoly, ‘That is so wrong in so many ways’ which is what I often say about everything. He says what he likes best about me is that I take him to new places. I prepare him for life. I teach him how to be a good person.
But what he has taught me is far greater than anything I could teach him. My nephew has taught me to assume innocence: to love, to live, to laugh, to play in this very moment. And I hope he never grows up.
Wendy Miyake, author of Beads, Boys and the Buddha, has dated too many men in the past two years. She’s decided to stop and write her next book–a novel about her travels in France.
A hip-hop theatre debate: economic growth and tourism vs. sustainability and self-reliance
By See
See:Hawai’i takes a seat at the grand stand. A tall skinny man walks onto the stage. He looks like a preacher for a church that hasn’t been invented yet.
Narrator: Today is the day of reckoning. It is the day of deliberation, of finding the method for the matter, the land, the ‘aina, the home, the destination known as Hawai’i. This question calls, forces our being, forces to forefront our understanding of findings of our foundation. What is our priority? Us the people who live, work, who experience Hawai’i, what is our future? What do we need to survive? Money? Farms? Tourism? Homegrown energy?
Two actors enter. They are dressed in street clothes They look into their hearts, into the audience, and begin.
Player One: My first principle, living simple, making it sustainable, so it can be available beyond my generation. Causation–What’s the cause, the flaws? The finding is the footprint placed by modern-man is too much to withstand. Yet with withdrawal to within, we begin to end, to enlighten, to elicit, a realistic, a simplistic method of subsistence. This existed in the days of oldÖ
Player Two: Old is done, is gone, is spent. Time to reflect on what is present. Realize Hawai’i must reply to the times, our economy thrives, as each tourist arrives. Design an environment of economic growth, pass up your pretense–your pastime in past times, recognize reality, prioritize prosperity.
Player One: Prosperity means practical, feasible, in one word, sustainable. This island chain has been playing the played-out part of importing for too long. Time to develop our own song, our own methods, and sources of food and energy. What always happens in the story of dependency? It ends in the pain of the one who was leaning too hard falling. Like the numbers of monk seals, falling, like the amount of clean water, falling, like the last tree on land cleared for another development. What’s the point of more homes if we can’t feed people? Seventy percent of our food isn’t home grown, if a hurricane comes, if oil costs continue to riseÖ
Player Two: Lies, and fear won’t work, Mr. Clever, look at the weather. Whether or not you realize these are the days to capitalize. We import ’cause its cheap. If it made sense economically to have this island isolated, it would be.
Player One: Cash has no heart. I won’t be its disciple. The toll the tourist is taking and the roll that you are relating are the same. Grabbing not giving, thinking, all is forgiven, for the sake of the dollar.
Player Two: How about I illuminate your world? Over 20 percent of our economy comes from the tourist industry. How do you intend to bring in the 7 million we’d lose should we cut ourselves off with organic farms? Ha! Hawai’i must grow. The tourist industry must thrive; the economy must expand. Every comer, of every section of every island should be used for the benefit of our collective prosperity. Here lies the key for a successful future.
Player One: Vulture, venture to eat gold and inhale silver. Go ahead, you’d kill the earth and your body for a glossy glimmering plate of denial. Grow and grow till you’re out of controlÖThat is progress? It’s a huge beautiful, amazing house of straw. The big bad wolf is the breath of the wind, the tide, the tempest. The tame times tickÖtick. We try to break out of the real, but everyone has to deal, when the oceans rise from global warming, when the dumps are full, when we run out of water, or when it’s no longer economically feasible to bring food to the people, then what? Who? How? Why should anyone save us if we couldn’t have the foresight to foresee the simple math of our methods? Beam truth on real rays. Dig mainstays of human life. If you ain’t got food, you will starve. If the water’s polluted, then pain pauses the pleasantest of days. Respond to Mother Earth before our matter decays in an ambitious, viscous cash-centered ideology.
Player Two: The truth is we live in a world willfully wisely wished for by fathers and mothers. You want your salary paid in corn and water and feel-good hugs? Get a grip on living on land that’s made for the wealth of mankind. From the ocean to the mountains, the clear water to the sky’s horizon that opens the night with a thousand scattered colors. If you love it, share it. If you’re thirsty, drink. You’re hungry for a time that is better. Realize the times you’re in.
Player One: I realize these real lies, economic ties of rent, car. Just being alive costs money. But we must think beyond just the next bill, the next paycheck, and into the next generation, and the next generation, and the next generation.
Player Two: Yes ,we need to plan, be parents to the future, make abundance. Address, anticipate, generate a method for success in succession.
Player One: So we agree that we need, direction, the only question is selection.
Player Two: I don’t intend to destroy the planet. I only want us to take advantage of what’s on it.
Player One: I don’t mind if you take, just replenish and don’t let it go to waste.
So we gotta make amends, find these common ends, to end the trends that will break down our beginning. It all began without these systems and plans, without the inventions of modern man. Now we are here, we are present to times when it all could fall apart so easily. So we search for feasible solutions of how to live in these days of dollars equal security, and prepare for times beyond bank accounts when all that will mater is clean air, clean water and enough food for everyone.
The curtain falls.
Hawai’i has fallen asleep. She is dreaming this story. She knows how it ends. We begin againÖ
See/Cristan E. Ellauri is a hip-hop theatre-maker/poet/MC member of the ‘06 Hawai’i Slam Team. He runs Ong King Arts Center and directs the Honolulu Underground Theatre Collective. [www.ongking.com]
Torrents
By Timothy Dyke
The night before Reggie checked in to rehab, we drove around the island and ate trashcan chicken at Dixie Grill on Ward Avenue. At some point during the drive–I think it was by Waimanalo Polo Fields–he told me that when he got out of treatment, he wanted to go horseback riding. I hadn’t been on a horse in years. I’m kind of afraid of them, actually, but in less than 24 hours my friend and former student would be locked in at Malama Mana in Kane’ohe, and I figured it was the least I could do to assure him that he’d have a trail ride to look forward to when he got out.
Reggie had been staying with me for three weeks, sleeping on the couch in my tiny apartment because his parents kicked him out of their home ever since the third time they caught him stealing Vicodin from their medicine cabinet. I wasn’t blind to his problems, but I was operating on the admirable, dangerous, assumption that there was no limit to the idea that a friend in need is a friend indeed. I also think I derived some sort of perceived and twisted benefit from playing the role of his savior.
When Reggie got out after two weeks of treatment, his mom dropped him back at my place, and I told him he could stay as long as he wanted. I also told him I’d scheduled a horseback ride at Kualoa Ranch the Saturday after Thanksgiving.
On the day of the ride, we drove over to Kailua to pick up Reggie’s brother, Phil, who was staying at their parents’ house while he recovered from a wrestling injury. I didn’t know Phil very well. He was the oldest of Reggie’s two younger brothers, an Iolani grad taking a semester off from UC Davis. He was kind of a pot head, but he didn’t seem predisposed to the addiction and depression problems that so plagued his brother. Besides, when it comes to pot heads, I’ve always maintained a don’t-throw-stones policy. Phil marked his age down on the Kualoa registration form, and I noticed that at 20 years old he was exactly half my age. It was rainy that day at the ranch. The Kualoa people told us we’d ride no matter the weather, so we walked toward the corral and waited for our names to be called.
Reggie seemed grateful to be there, but he was agitated. Part of my confusion when it came to understanding Reggie’s behavior was that I didn’t know what was caused by his addiction and what was caused by his depression. Was the dependence on pain pills his way of medicating his crippling feelings of hopelessness, or was the mental anguish a side effect of his unyielding lust for opium derivatives? I also wasn’t sure whether or not it was wrong to buy him beer. I know that sounds incredibly naive. Time has passed and Reggie today would be the first to tell people that addiction is a disease, and that a person can’t replace one drug with another. At the time, though, I thought maybe people kick one habit at a time, and I thought beer was a whole lot tamer than heroin. I suppose I was pretty easy to manipulate.
When our turn came, we mounted our horses and introduced ourselves to a Swedish tourist named Elke who had taken the bus to this side of the island from Waikiki. Our guide, a short, rugged Polynesian woman, gave us the basics on riding safely. Elke informed us of her own extensive equestrian experience. Back in Sweden she owned a mare. The guide gave her a tough-looking, oversized horse. I told the guide that everyone in our group was inexperienced, and she put us on horses with names like Sugar, Feather and Pal.
The rain increased as we hit the trail. I was trying hard not to think about the time in third grade when I panicked on the back of a trotting horse at day camp and lunged at a stop sign. Ever since then I’ve been uncomfortable around horses. Elke wanted to gallop across the meadow in pouring rain. Phil was behind me cracking jokes about the sex life of his pony. Reggie was in front of me. I could only see his back. I was trying to imagine that he was having a good time.
The entire ride is kind of a torrent of tension in my memory. At some point Elke and the guide trotted toward a palm tree. At some other point Reggie lost the ability to tell his horse where to go, and they ended up on the other side of the rock used in the actual filming of the T-Rex scene in Jurassic Park. Phil went after his brother. I was trying hard to keep my horse on the straight and narrow path. Eventually Reggie jumped off his mount. The guide was furious, but not at Reggie really, more at the rain and the circumstance. She asked Elke to help her, then walkie-talkied a tourist van and caught up with Reggie and Phil. When the guide returned, she and Elke wrangled the horses and tethered them all in a line. The guide knew what she was doing, and she gave Reggie a supportive wink in the rain.
Phil was going to walk the mile and a half back to the stables. Reggie was cold and even though I didn’t want to wait around for a ride, I told him I’d join him on the tram, so he didn’t have to ride alone. Eventually we all reached the corral. Elke didn’t have a ride back to Waikiki. She was soaked, as we all were, and accepted my offer to drive her back to the hostel on Kalakaua Avenue next to that one gay bar that’s not Hula’s. Everyone said goodbye to the guide, and I went to get the car.
Phil and Reggie climbed in back and Elke took shotgun. She had never seen a Honda Element before and asked if it was a rental. I said, ‘No, I own it,’ and she asked me why I would buy such a boxy car. I thought this was a rude question, especially considering that she was from Sweden, land of the Volvo. I didn’t say anything though. She was in a car with three strange, wet men who, by this point, had all taken their shirts off. I didn’t want to make the ride any more uncomfortable for her.
Reggie asked me to stop for a 40 Ounce. I’m ashamed to admit that I bought him one. He did seem to relax as he nursed his beer. I dropped Phil off at their parents’ house in Lanikai. Elke said it was a beautiful house and asked Reggie why he didn’t live there. He paused for an awkward second and said, ‘My parents threw me out because I have a drug problem.’
I drove the long way by Sandy Beach and Hanauma Bay because Elke wanted to see some sights. Even in torrential rain that part of the island is beautiful. I asked Elke if she liked Hawai’i, and she said without hesitation that she did, but that there were too many Chinese people here.
My eyes blinked, and I asked her what she just said. She explained that if she wanted to see Chinese people, she would have gone to China. ‘It was like when I was in Los Angeles,’ she added in her pleasant Swedish dialect. ‘There were too many Mexicans in California. If I wanted to see Mexicans, I would have gone to Mexico.’
Reggie asked from the back seat if she was a racist. She said she wasn’t, but that if he went to Sweden, he would only see Swedish people. ‘Other people go there,’ she explained, ‘but then they leave.’ This seemed like a moment to remember for my Ethnic Studies class, but I didn’t really want to encourage the conversation.
‘What’s Sweden like?’ I asked.
‘It’s nice. He’d like it,’ she said, pointing back at Reggie. ‘Everyone in Sweden makes their own vodka.’
When we said our goodbyes in Waikiki, she told us that tomorrow she was going shark diving on the Makaha side and that she hoped it wouldn’t still be raining. Reggie got out of the car to get in the front seat, and as he passed her, I was surprised to see that they gave each other light, back-tapping hugs.
I backed the car away and headed back to Manoa. A reggae song played on KTUH. Reggie punched off the radio and hit me on the forearm. ‘Thanks for taking me horseback riding, man.’
I laughed and told him it was no problem. I turned the radio back on.
‘I want you to know,’ he said, ‘I really appreciate it.’
Timothy Dyke is a teacher and writer who works at Punahou School. A regular contributor to Honolulu Weekly, he is currently working on a novel.
