Aloha, sister!"
The voice boomed out of a large open-air, wood-frame home on Molokai, a
half-block from my hotel.
After two days of feeling like an outsider on this most Hawaiian of the
Hawaiian islands, his cheerful greeting startled me.
Thad, the owner of a "rental car" company, was inside, devouring a
plate-lunch of stewed meat, macaroni salad and rice. He pulled on a tank top
and came outside, declaring he had the "perfect" car for me: a rusted-out
1984 Suzuki jeep he'd picked up at a junk yard and patched up with duct
tape. He'd "loan" it for $25 for the day, plus gas.
I stammered that I'd never driven a jeep before. He shrugged. No big deal.
"It's perfect for you, sister. It's blue. Matches your shirt."
The doors had no locks. The speedometer and odometer were broken. When I
tried to adjust the seat, the lever wouldn't budge.
"No, like this, sister," said Thad, reaching down around my legs and
wrenching the seat forward.
As I backed out of the driveway, he folded his middle three fingers into the
palm of his hand, stuck out his thumb and pinky and waved the traditional
"shaka" gesture as he yelled, "Don't forget about the gas, sister. And if
you see anyone on the road, wave. They'll know you're a friend of Thad's."
Hitting the road on a drizzly January day in early 1997, shortly after I'd
come to Honolulu to start a master's degree, I felt the moodiness that had
engulfed me begin to dissipate.
I was in my mid-30s, living without the financial security of a job for the
first time. On this sleepy island where everyone seems to know everyone, I
felt as if I stuck out as a malihini - a newcomer - like a sore thumb.
Maybe Thad sensed how I felt. Maybe he knew that driving around Molokai in
an aging jeep would momentarily cure my loneliness.
But maybe Thad was just trying to make a buck.
Was his "aloha" a genuine gesture of friendship - the "local" way of
welcoming an outsider to his island by "sharing" what he had to give? Or was
he simply motivated by the chance to wrestle a few dollars from yet another
tourist?
Economic survival
Hawaii is often described as a visitors' paradise brimming with aloha - that
caring spirit of generosity that has become a tourist selling point among
the more than 6 million people who visit the islands each year.
But an economy based on pleasing those who come to visit means that the 1.1
million people who live here often must pay a price.
Rather than share aloha, people like Thad often must sell it to survive.
Today, most of the people who live in Hawaii earn their livelihood from
tourism, the state's top industry. The cost of living has skyrocketed,
particularly since the 1980s, and with an employment base tied primarily to
these low-paying tourism jobs, many locals work two or three jobs, or have
been forced to move to the continental U.S. for better opportunities.
As Hawaii's economy slowly recovers from the effects of Asia's economic
downturn, resentment toward the state's dependence on the tourist industry
lingers. Just as Seattle fears the consequences of a Boeing slowdown or the
collapse of the dot-com economy, many residents of Hawaii question the value
of tying the islands' fortunes to a single industry.
Yet, policy makers continue to woo continental U.S. and international
tourism industry investors. So what started as questions about the
continuing role and effects of tourism sometimes turn into protests against
it.
Much as many Seattle residents have come to see places like the Pike Place
Market as tourist enclaves to be avoided in the peak summer season, a
growing number of residents in Hawaii would prefer that visitors go
elsewhere, or that if they must have the perfect vacation in paradise they
stick to resorts and tourist enclaves such as Waikiki, leaving the quieter,
more pristine parts of the islands to those who live here.
That doesn't mean you'll have a bad experience if you're traveling here. As
long as tourism remains Hawaii's top employer, most who work in the industry
probably will continue to try to give visitors what they seek.
And, economic considerations aside, true aloha does exist. It's just
sometimes difficult to detect, partly because the tourist industry has
turned it into a commodity that few island residents recognize anymore.
Many who would rather see tourists go elsewhere are indigenous Hawaiians -
people of the islands who trace their ancestry to those who lived here
before the first Westerners arrived in the late 18th century.
They now make up barely one-fifth of the total population of Hawaii, due to
American colonialism and the development of a plantation-based economy in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries that relied heavily on laborers from
China, Japan, Okinawa, Korea, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Portugal and
elsewhere.
The descendants of these imported plantation workers often are described as
"locals," a polyglot group that gives Hawaii a distinct multicultural feel.
Yet, as they have prospered, indigenous Hawaiians have become vastly
over-represented in the ranks of the illiterate, impoverished and
incarcerated.
Self-rule - or sovereignty as a growing movement is called - is seen as a
way not only to reclaim a more prosperous way of life for indigenous
Hawaiians but also to allow Hawaii's rich culture to flourish outside the
tourist economy.
The meaning of the sovereignty movement is the subject of a vigorous
community debate. Many contend that it is racist and gives special
advantages to one group. Others, such as the Hawaii governor, Ben Cayetano,
a local Filipino, fear that sovereignty will destroy Hawaii's
multiculturalism.
Indigenous Hawaiians themselves aren't of one mind as to the goals of the
sovereignty movement. Some want outright independence from the United
States. Others want a nation created that would operate autonomously within
the United States, as many tribal nations do.
Opponents of the movement point to this lack of agreement about sovereignty
as a sign of weakness. Those in the movement respond that the debate is part
of what self-determination means. For while the political movement is about
regaining control over a traditional way of life, the question of
sovereignty is also about Hawaii's future.
Will Hawaii continue to be a tourist economy, whose primary investors come
from elsewhere and make business decisions from afar?
Or will a movement that allows indigenous Hawaiians to take their futures
into their own hands change how the islands treat not only visitors but
non-Hawaiian residents as well?
Haole, go home
Some express their desire for sovereignty to tourists by saying: "Haole, go
home."
"Haole," the Hawaiian word for foreigner, usually means "white," but not
always. And the sentiment isn't only directed at tourists. Many
non-Hawaiians, like myself who came to the islands for short-term sojourns
that grow longer year by year, feel at times as if we, too, are being asked
to leave.
And we ask: Should we go home too?
For me, the idea has an even broader context, for I have no idea where home
is.
As an Asian Indian woman who has lived her entire life in the United States,
being told that I'm a foreigner who should go home is not a new experience.
Over the years, as some Americans have refused to see me as American, I,
too, have stopped seeing America as home.
Yet, I ask, where is home? Is it the village in northern India where my
father grew up, surrounded by three generations of kin? Or New Delhi, the
cosmopolitan capital where my mother spent her childhood and young adult
years?
Is it Muncie, Ind., the Midwestern college town, where I grew up?
Is it Seattle, where I lived for seven years and still own a house?
Or is it here, in Hawaii? Is it in these breathtakingly beautiful islands in
the Pacific.
A friend in Honolulu, a haole, confesses to a love-hate relationship with
Hawaii. It's easy to love this place: It's beautiful and warm; the people
are generous and caring.
Yet, if you stay here long enough, you start to realize that you don't
belong here and that "aloha" is not just a welcome but also a means of
making money for people like Thad, the man who rented me the jeep.
I don't have a love-hate relationship with Hawaii anymore. I find it
impossible to hate what I love. I love the fresh air, the ocean water, the
joy of sleeping with a blanket on the rare nights when the temperature drops
below 70. My spirits soar when I catch sight of the green hills of Manoa
that ring the University of Hawaii, where I am pursuing a doctorate in
political science.
Yet, loving and belonging are two different things.
I am among those who believe the right to call this place home rests with
Hawaiians. That right was taken away from them, officially with the
overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and unofficially with whaling and
missionary activity several decades earlier.
Their language was banned, as was hula, their dance. Their religious
practices, tied to a deep spiritual love for the earth, were ridiculed as
primitive.
When activists angrily plead, "Give us our land back," at rallies, I
understand. And in some ways I love Hawaii even more.
For, as Hawaiians revive their language, their dance and many cultural
practices as part of the sovereignty movement, I realize that what I've come
to love about Hawaii is what so many others hate: the fact that it is not my
place, that I cannot call it home.
To me, the word "local" expresses that ambivalent relationship between
loving something and accepting the idea that it is not yours.
Going 'local'
To some, "local" defines the culture of Hawaii, away from the tourist
resorts. Much is made of the islands' mixed Asia Pacific population, and the
blend of art, dance, food, plants, and creolized language (pidgin) that
comes with it.
I think local means something a bit different. But it's difficult to
explain.
Before I left Seattle, friends who grew up on Oahu invited me to dinner. One
advised me to think aboutsomething simple: Hawaii might be part of the
United States, but it is not America.
"Instead of worrying about why things in Hawaii are the way they are," he
said, "just accept that they are."
After six months, I thought that explained why catching a good surfing wave
was more important than getting to work on time. Two years later, I thought
it meant not getting impatient because the garden burger I ordered 20
minutes ago was still frozen because someone put the patty in the microwave
but forget to push "start."
After five years, that's how I understand local culture. Relax and enjoy the
moment, whatever it may be . . . for some things are as they are.
For me, this means savoring the feeling of being at Ala Moana Beach in
Honolulu at 7 a.m. in January, where about three dozen people - mostly
Asian, and all, it seems, over age 70 - swim vigorously across a 1,000-meter
channel. It's checking out the muscled men and women who stand at the
entrance to The Gym in downtown Honolulu's gritty Kakaako neighborhood at 5
a.m., waiting for the door to open.
It's enjoying the baritone bellow of a Hawaiian activist, who, one March
dawn, began singing about reclaiming stolen land as a group of us slept on
the floor of the University of Hawaii's campus center to protest a proposed
tuition increase.
But sometimes I understand local culture in a much more ethereal way.
To me, it's seeing a full moon rise over the sea from the cliffs at Makapuu
Point along the Windward coast of Oahu and allowing its golden glow to
illuminate the one-mile trail on the way down.
On a similar night in urban Honolulu, it's about walking past the Blaisdell
Center concert and exhibition center, and fragrant Tahitian gardenia bushes
that surround it, past McKinley High School, past the shops on King Street
that sell saimin (a savory broth with noodles), past the car lot and the
7-Eleven toward my apartment in Makiki, a non-touristed neighborhood that's
easily as dense as Seattle's Capitol Hill.
It's about appreciating the feel of Hawaii's never-chilly breeze caressing
the skin before sunrise. Or the hot scent of eucalyptus kissing the nostrils
at high noon as one winds up the twisting road around the rain-forest
foliage on Mount Tantalus just above Makiki.
Or seeing outrigger canoe teams dipping paddles into the ocean in late
afternoon at Ala Moana Beach.
Or relaxing amid the orchids and chardonnay in late evening at the bar at
the New Otoni Hotel's Hau Tree Lanai on the edge of Waikiki, a place that
the writer Robert Louis Stevenson made famous.
Love and leave it
A man on a Honolulu bus once told me that in Hawaii, everyone used to leave
their doors unlocked. The open door meant it was okay for strangers to walk
in and take whatever they needed - but only what they needed.
I don't know if this is true. Yet, as I look at the hospitality people
display here, I can't help feeling it's plausible.
People don't mind if you help yourself to a breadfruit or mango that's
fallen from a tree. Their generosity overflows the Hawaii Food Bank with
donations. Overeating at any get-together is mandatory. Even homeless people
in parks have offered me food.
Yet, amid this sharing spirit, the bus rider's words come back to me: only
take what you need.
That is real aloha, local style. Not just generosity that flows from one
person to the other. It's about accepting the gesture, without abusing it.
Geographers tell us that we conceptualize places that we love in romantic
terms. We give them identities and draw boundaries around them. Our own
sense of who we are becomes linked to a place. We see ourselves as
"belonging" to a place, and that place as "belonging" to us.
Do we have the right to own a place in such a way?
For too long, people have tried to own Hawaii, through whaling, through
missionary activity, through plantations and now through tourism.
Yet, even as I refuse to belong to Hawaii and to let it belong to me, I
acknowledge that it has become a part of me, like the perfectly imagined
love affair that you know, deep down, cannot be fulfilled.
If you come to Hawaii, I don't promise that you'll find real aloha.
Conversely, if you visit non-touristed areas, I don't think you'll be told
to go home.
You might find warmth; you might be ignored. Someone might break into your
rental car; someone might offer you a coconut, fresh off the tree.
If you come, I hope you fall in love with Hawaii, as I did. But don't try to
claim you know it. That's like saying you can own it, that you can belong to
it. That's not aloha.
Love Hawaii with respect. And then leave.
But how do you leave a place that you love?
If you don't think you belong to it, you can leave. I refuse to belong - to
this place or any other place.
So I will leave eventually. But when I do, I'll miss Hawaii. A lot.