Alan Brennert: Honolulu

Since I live in Hawaii, I thought it would be interesting to review a book that deals with Hawaiian culture.  The books of Alan Brennert are some of the most famous novels that bring Hawaiian lifestyle to the majority of Americans: they are Moloka’i and Honolulu.  His stories are not modern, but that just means that the clash of cultures within are even more obvious.

The book I’ve chosen to review this week is Honolulu.

Just like last time, to give my review some historical context, I’m going to start by doing a brief summary of the author then give you the outline of the plot before going on to my discussion of international conflicts.  Unlike last time, I’m also going to give you a little description of Hawaii’s history as well, just so readers who are from a culturally homogenous area can understand just what a strange melting pot Hawaii was and is!

Author Summary:

Alan Brennert doesn’t quite have the same illustrious history as Pearl S. Buck, but he has been a writer for television, film, and the stage.  Since completing graduate work in screenwriting at UCLA, he has been a writer for a large variety of television shows.  From Wonder Woman to Buck Rogers, and The New Twilight Zone to Star Trek: Enterprise, his writing career has spanned a variety of genres and styles.  Concurrently with his endeavors in TV, he has also penned numerous short stories. 

It was only when he published Moloka’i in 2003—after a miniseries on the same subject was turned down for production—that he came to national recognition.  Received with mostly favorable reviews, the book won a Bookies Award, and was named a BookSense Reading Group Pick as well.  His research on the period of the Hawaiian leper colonies then enabled him to write Honolulu, which was published in 2009…again to favorable reviews.

Hawaii:

A book’s setting often plays a very important role, even to the point of becoming a character in its own right.  This is certainly the case with Hawaii.  At the time in which Honolulu is set (early 1900s), Hawaii was going through some particularly interesting times.  In the process of opening up for foreign trade, Hawaii also opened itself up to different styles of farming; most particularly, plantation farming.

Plantation farming required a large labor force.  Native Hawaiians often didn’t care for plantation work; it was harder work than they were used to, and many plantations were in isolated areas around the island, which separated the workers from their families.  So many foreigners—from Korea, Portugal, China, and Japan—were imported to work on the growing sugar cane and pineapple plantations owned by foreign whites. 

The plantation lifestyle was what eventually gave Hawaii its unique multicultural flavor.  Hawaiians interacted with all these other races on the plantations, creating a unique language (what still exists as “pidgin”) and integrated food items, such as saimin, which still persist.  Working together, all these individuals had to find a system of respecting and helping each other.  Quite a bit of the story of Honolulu is set on a plantation just like the ones of old Hawaii.

The Plot:

I’ll borrow from the book’s dust jacket again to give you a summary of the story:

Honolulu is the rich, unforgettable story of a young “picture bride” who journeys to Hawai’i in 1914 in search of a better life.

Instead of the affluent young husband and chance at an education that she has been promised, she is quickly married off to a poor, embittered laborer who takes his frustrations out on his new wife.  Remaking herself Jin, she makes her own way in this strange land, finding both opportunity and prejudice.  With the help of three of her fellow picture brides, Jin prospers along with her adopted city, which is growing from a small territorial capital into the great multicultural city it is today.  But paradise has its dark side, whether it’s the daily struggle for survival in Honolulu’s tenements, or a crime that will become the most infamous in the islands’ history…

With its passionate knowledge of people and places in Hawai’i far off the tourist track, Honolulu is most of all the spellbinding tale of four women in a new world, united by dreams, disappointment, sacrifices, and friendship.

International…Agreements: Warning!  Here there be some spoilers.

As a very nice break from the last book I reviewed, Honolulu actually has more agreements than conflicts when it comes to interacting cultures.  Most of the conflicts are actually internal to Korean culture.  The book deals with male and female contrasts and relationships (especially in a traditional Korea which was a very patriarchal society), and high and low class conflicts (as where the protagonist learns how to read from a prostitute, explicitly against the wishes of her father).

However, once the protagonist comes to Hawaii, though expecting to meet opposition from the locals, she experiences almost nothing but warmth and friendliness from those she meets.  Even Koreans who have lived in Hawaii for a longer time, or those of Korean ancestry who were born in Hawaii, are more friendly and carry fewer of the rigid restrictions that traditional Koreans have.

So I’m going to talk about two major sections where agreement, and not conflict between cultures, makes the most impression on the protagonist.  First, she goes with her husband to the plantation where he works, and finds herself having to learn the rules of her new life from other plantation wives.  Then, I’ll talk about the roles that various Hawaiians play when it comes to helping her and her family settle into their lives in Honolulu itself.

Plantation Life

As mentioned above, plantation life forced people of many different cultures into interacting—sharing food, stories, and hardships—so I would like to quote a great passage in this section from the book.

Jin, the protagonist, has come to Hawaii and is living on a plantation as the picture bride of her abusive and often drunk husband.  After her husband goes on a bender that leaves him unable to work, she takes it upon herself to join some of the other plantation wives in the field to earn her living.  A woman from a high-ranking Korean family, she has never done such back-breaking work and does not know the rules of the plantation, nor the tricks that enable her to bear such a life.

And then, the other women on the plantation help her:

At 11:00 AM the whistle blew and we were given thirty minutes for kaukau—mealtime—gathering in groups to eat and talk.  I ate my rice in the Korean manner, with a spoon, and my kimchi with chopsticks, and I was startled to see that the Japanese women used only chopsticks for all foods but soup, which struck me as somewhat vulgar.  But I was frankly appalled as I watched the Portuguese women scoop fish or beef out of tins with their fingers, as Hawaiians did with fish or this taro paste called poi—in Korea it was strictly forbidden to eat food with one’s hands, and I did my best to conceal my horror.

I must have been staring too long at one of the Portuguese women, who misinterpreted it and asked me cheerfully, “You like try?”  She broke off a piece of some sort of pastry and held it out to me.  I couldn’t gracefully decline, so I smiled a little nervously and used my chopsticks to pluck the offering from her hand (which seemed to amuse her).  But my dismay at her table manners quickly paled next to the sweetness of the pastry.  “This is delicious,” I told her.

“Ono,” she said.

“It’s called ono?”

She laughed.  “No, no, this malassada—what the haoles call a ‘doughnut’.  ‘Ono’ means delicious.”

“It is very ono, then,” I said.  “Thank you.”

As shot as it was, mealtime was the high point of a day in the fields.  In those that followed I would discover such delights as Portuguese bread, Okinawan potato manju, Hawaiian haupia pudding, and a sweet Japanese confection called mochi.  In return I would share the mandu dumplings, honey rice, and kimchi I prepared for my own lunch.  We also exchanged recipes, and now for supper I would occasionally make Chinese eggplant in hot garlic sauce or Spanish paella as a complement to traditional Korean fare. (Brennert, p. 77-78)

Food brings all kinds of people together!  All the foods mentioned above have survived and thrived out here in Hawaii; you can find them anywhere today.  Convenience stores sell dumplings, bakeries have malasadas, and mochi is available at the grocery store.

Hawaiian Hospitality

One of the most touching scenes in the book, I find, happens after Jin has escaped from her abusive husband and managed to establish herself with another family—a loving husband, and several children.  She and her new husband work hard managing a restaurant that features international cuisine…oddly, the two had tried to do a simple Korean restaurant and found that having only one type of food available would not work in international Hawaii! 

They work hard, but their life does allow for some fun.  One day, they go to the beach, and meet some surfers…but one of the surfers is far from your average beach boy.  Jin’s daughter, Grace, is afraid of the ocean and will not go in.  One of the surfers takes it upon himself to make sure she is no longer afraid:

He started her searching on the dry sand and just when she was starting to get bored, I saw him slip a coin out of his pocket and bury it into the sand.  When Grace found it a few minutes later, she cried out, “Look!  A dime!”

“Well, that’s swell,” Duke said with feigned frustration, “but I know there’s a quarter a little further out.”

He showed her how to use the glass box to view the sandy bottom of the shallows, pointing out frightened little puffer fish burying their heads in the sand and tiny sand crabs skittering sideways like tipsy spiders.  Grace began to brave the deeper water without even realizing she was doing it.  Duke turned her toward a school of silvery needlefish, slanting below the surface like a torrent of silver rain.  When the water grew too deep for Grace to wade in, Duke picked her up in his big hands and gently floated her on the surface.  She peered through the glass box and the schools of yellow tangs, blue-green unicorn fish, and black-and-white butterfly fish swarming around the pink coral heads.  Grace was so entranced by this colorful undersea world that it didn’t even occur to her to be afraid.  And Duke didn’t forget, as they came ashore again, to have her look for that quarter in the sand—which, of course, she triumphantly discovered.

Grace was never afraid of the ocean again, and from that day on, Duke Kahanamoku was as much royalty to me as Lili’uokalani had been.

For those who don’t recognize the name, Duke Kahanamoku was a famous athlete, an Olympic swimmer who also helped popularize the sport of surfing throughout the world.  He was called the “Ambassador of Aloha” and to this day there is a statue of him on Waikiki Beach.

This passage—among many others like it—shows the natural hospitality of the Hawaiians, and their habit of treating others, even strangers, as friends.  Sometimes it does take some time to settle into life in the islands, but once you do, you make friends for life.

Sources:

Brennert, Alan. (2009). Honolulu. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Alan Brennert. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Brennert

Pearl S. Buck: Mandala

First actual book review posting, huzzah!  This week I’d like to review Mandala, by Pearl S. Buck, a novel that I ran across in a used bookstore (the best kind) in Virginia and devoured in a single sitting.  Pearl Buck is, of course, most known for her novels of China, and I will be reviewing another of those later on—since they’re very good—but I was struck by Mandala because it’s one of her later works, not among her most famous, and about India, although China does make a significant appearance.

Because I want to give this book a bit of historical context, I’m going to start by doing a brief summary of the author then give you the outline of the plot and major characters before starting in on my review.  Now, you may not be able to find Mandala at your local bookstore or library, but it’s available for under $10 online, and even though my hardcover copy is from 1970, it’s still in very good shape and worth a purchase if you want to read.

Author Summary:

Though born in Virginia in 1892, Pearl S. Buck’s parents were missionaries, so soon enough she was bound for China at the age of three months.  She spent the majority of her time in China, in a town called Jingjiang (outside of Nanjing) and towns around it until 1934, though she did attend college in the United States.  Obviously, she was bilingual. 

Buck lived through some extremely turbulent times in Chinese history.  Modernity was approaching swiftly, and revolutions and civil wars rocked the nation.  Often she and her family were abandoned by Chinese friends and found that their Western compatriot had fled the country to avoid the conflicts.  However, she threw herself into writing, hoping to document the history of rural Chinese life, and humanitarian efforts, saving her Chinese friends from war, or helping to ease child adoption between China and America.

As far as her literary legacy is concerned, Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The Good Earth, a book still read by many American high-schoolers.  Criticized by some scholars as having a plain-spoken, workaday style, Buck is still praised by most for helping to make Chinese culture understandable to those with no experience in the country. 

(For myself, having been to the country and having studied Chinese language, culture and history, I love to read Buck’s novels, even though the situations she described then are now only to be found in rural China.  She describes the emotional state of people from all ranks of society clearly and with great sympathy.)

However, all her help to China did not make her immune to the forces of the Cultural Revolution.  She was still branded an “imperialist” and not permitted to enter the country when Nixon made his history making trip there in 1972.  She died a year later, at the age of 80.

The Plot:

I admit that the following summary is not mine.  I tend to give away a lot of plot secrets when summarizing a book, so I’ve borrowed and edited from the dust-jacket of my copy.  The full citation for the book is at the bottom of this entry, so you can find it and look it up if you want to get the missing pieces:

Mandala is one of Pearl S. Buck’s rare novels about India.  Centering her story around a modern princely family of the New India, she explores the mysticism that pervades everyday life there.  Extrasensory perception, reincarnation, and spirits are very real concerns of the Maharana Prince Jagat and his family.

Prince Jagat is the virile descendent of a warrior people…Political events strip him of his titles and most of his wealth, but not of his sense of responsibility to the local villagers.  As the novel opens, he is embarking upon a scheme to turn an opulent but ghost-ridden lake palace into a luxury hotel for foreign tourists.

When news reaches him that his only son, Jai, has been killed by the Chinese in a border skirmish, his life changes even more.  Convinced that Jai’s spirit lives, Jagat’s wife, Moti, will not rest until he sets off to find their son. 

The Characters: Warning, some mild spoilers in this section.

I’ll break this part down into two sections: the Indians and the Americans.  Since there is not a single Chinese individual, they serve en masse merely to advance the plot and will not be discussed here.  For such a short book, it’s surprising how varied a cast of characters Pearl Buck uses and how she manages to give them all multifaceted, realistic personalities!

These descriptions are entirely mine.

The Indians:

Prince Jagat: Descendant of a line of Maharana, Jagat is an active, enthusiastic man who embraces modernity but maintains sensitivity towards the old Indian ways of thinking. Despite having lost his wealth and most of his property, he is an active tiger hunter, attentive to the needs (both physical and psychological) of the tenants on his property, and participates where possible in projects to improve the lives of his countrymen.

Moti: Wife of Prince Jagat, Moti, is a woman devoted to Hindu ideals of vegetarianism, nonviolence, and detachment.  She believes, after years of being taught so by her parents, that a wife is not to love her husband.  Though she could—and often considers—loving Jagat, her first feeling of love is given to Father Francis Paul (description below).  When her son dies, she refuses to believe it and insists that Jagat go search for him…and this search eventually turns into a hunt for Jai’s reincarnation.

Jai: Jagat and Moti’s son, educated abroad and well-spoken, if somewhat immature.  When China threatens the border of India, he volunteers for duty against the wishes of his parents in order to protect India’s sovereignty.

Veera: Jagat and Moti’s daughter, Veera is a woman on the cusp of New India.  Though she is somewhat educated, her mother’s emotional training has her trying to find a proper path between the romanticism sweeping from America and the West, and the calm serenity emphasized by her mother and her Eastern traditions.  Veera comes very close to having an affair with Bert Osgood (the American contractor), even though she has been promised in an arranged marriage.

The Americans:

Bert Osgood: He begins the novel as a somewhat stereotypical “Ugly American”.  Concerned with profit and modernization, he sometimes rides roughshod over Prince Jagat’s more refined sensibilities.  However, the longer he remains in India, the more aware he becomes of the history of his place and the country.  Though intrigued by the possibility of romance between himself and Veera, he eventually realizes that neither of them will be happy in a relationship.  He desires eventually to return to the same small-town American life he sprang from, and knows Veera well enough to know that she could never adapt to such a life.  He refuses to let his emotions or hers get in the way of their lives ending happily; this clarity of mind allows Veera to let him—and the possibilities he represents—go.

Brooke Westley: Though not mentioned in the plot summary, Brooke is extremely important to the novel.  A lonely, isolated child—raised by a grandmother with some eclectic thoughts on the idea of love—she is an heiress who drifts from place to place without forming any emotional connections to either places or people.  After landing in India and meeting Jagat by chance, she follows him to the lake palace/hotel-in-progress, content to wait in India to sort through her emotions and the instinctive attachment she feels to both Jagat and the country.

The attraction is mutual for Jagat.  After years of not being loved by his wife, he feels the possibility of love and understanding from Brooke and is intrigued.  The two are plainspoken in their decision to begin an affair, but their emotions are not shallow.  Brooke—ignoring the damage to her reputation—accompanies Jagat in his search for Jai, and eventually finds what everyone comes to believe is his reincarnation.

Father Francis Paul: An enthusiastic missionary working among the ethnic Bhil people, Father Francis is hungry for change and modernization.  He attached himself to Jagat and his wife upon entering the country in order to gain their support for his educational and technological endeavors, and became fascinated by Moti, who is deeply spiritual though uninterested in Christianity.  He becomes her tutor and confidante in matters of the soul, despite their differing religious backgrounds, but when she eventually confesses love for him, drifts away from the family.  He is English, but I’m putting him in with the Americans as a force of “Westernization”.  Also because I don’t want to put in a separate section for “British”.

International Conflicts: Do NOT read this if you don’t want the plot spoiled!

The events of the plot, as well as the descriptions of the characters, should already give you a good idea of the variety of conflicts that arise over the course of the novel.  I’m going to limit my review to several of the most important: the Indian past vs. American present as exemplified by Jagat and Brooke, and the Romances (Moti and Father Francis, Veera and Bert).  Each of these conflicts integrates several different concepts and ways to look at the possibilities that two merging cultures can create.

Indian past vs. American present: Jagat and Brooke

“American” in this instance could also read as “Modern”…either way, it is an ideology that leads away from the mysticism and magic of the past, and veers away from spiritual ideas such as reincarnation…a crucial element in the story.  These two ideologies clash frequently, creating sometimes irreconcilable differences between characters, but more often, resulting in a fascinating hybrid between the two.

Jagat, for example, is a modern man.  Even married to a woman like Moti, still devoted to her Indian and Hindu past, he sacrifices the remnants of his princely past almost without regrets.  He admits that his ancestral land should return to the people who worked it, and thinks often about the harems that his father and grandfather amassed with more disgust than longing.  However, all his modernity is challenged on the book’s very last page; he comes across the boy that Brooke believes is his son’s reincarnation:

A strange look came over his face, a look half frightened but half smiling.

“Have you seen my son before, High One?” she asked.

Believing and unbelieving, he gave a great sigh.  “I do not know,” he said and, believing and unbelieving, he went his way. (Buck, p. 376)

On the opposite side of the coin, Brooke is a woman raised modern but emotionally more comfortable with the Eastern traditions.  In part, this is due to her grandmother, who lead a loving life in defiance of tradition, taking lovers both her age and younger without being married to them.  Though Brooke discovers this just before the woman’s death, it throws her into a rootless existence as she crosses the world, searching for a sense of belonging and love.  When she arrives at Jagat’s lake palace, she falls into a kind of stasis, content to wait until what she feels is going to happen (a friendship or love with Jagat, she doesn’t care which) happens.

This lack of clear purpose is far more familiar to Buddhist or Hindu traditions than Protestant Christianity, but Brooke is not uncomfortable with the clash of her traditions.  From the start, she shows more openness to the idea of reincarnation than Jagat:

“About reincarnation,” she began irrelevantly.  Indeed, she had not been thinking of that at all, and the word came out of her mouth of its own accord, so startling that she paused.

“What about reincarnation?” he asked.

“Simply that today somehow I am ready to believe in it totally.  It’s the effect that India has on me.  Here I believe anything!”  (Buck, p. 268)

The Romances:

Moti and Father Francis:

Rather than do a heavy-duty analysis of their relationship, I’d rather let this passage speak for itself.  This takes place towards the end of the novel, after Jagat has brought Brooke to the main house to share a meal with Moti and Father Francis.  The priest and the princess are left in the room alone together when Brooke and the prince go off to admire a view:

“Let me forget that you are a priest.  May I?”

He did not reply.  He looked at her half-startled, and she went on quickly, changing before his very eyes.  Her listlessness was gone, she leaned toward him, her voice urgent.

“I have never loved anyone before—no one, you understand?  Now I know I love you.  It is not my wish to love you.  It is not my wish to love anyone.  I know, from my own mother, that it is a misfortune to love anyone, but especially for a woman to love a man.”

 

He was overwhelmed with horror and pity.

“My dear soul, do you not love your husband?”

“No, and never,” she said.

“He is kind to you.”

“That is not love.”

“Does he love you?”

“How can he love me when I do not love him?”

“Is it not your fault then?”

She threw her fan on the floor in a gesture of impatience.  “Can I help it?”

“You can pray that you will be enabled to love him.”

She laughed bitterly.  “How little you know about love!”

She rose impetuously, this woman whom he had never seem impatient, and crossing the floor swiftly, she knelt at his feet and folded her hands on his knees.

“Help me!”

For the first time in his life he looked into a woman’s eyes and was made helpless by her love…He put his hands over hers, trembling as he did so.  “My dear, my dear,” he murmured.  “I wish I knew how to help you…We are what we are,” he said.  “You are the wife of a great and good man, I am a priest of God.  That is our destiny.” (Buck, p. 335-336)

Though a Westerner, Father Francis is a priest, and is not allowed to understand the passionate emotions that compromise Moti’s hard-won peace of mind.  The only retreat he has is a literal retreat; away from her and the temptations she offers.

Veera and Bert:

This plot arc gave me the most cause for concern, because it could have turned out to be quite a cliché.  You have a young, beautiful Indian princess, “stifled” by her mother’s restrictive ideas on the concept of love, and the young, hearty American, free and restricted by no one’s ideas save his own.  These two could have messed up the story and had the book end in such tragedy, but…thankfully, they didn’t.

This in no way means that their arc is boring.  No.  In fact, theirs is one of the places where a sensible midway point is reached between the divergent ideas of India and America.

Veera provides most of the confusion.  Hanging on the cusp of an arranged marriage with a man she hardly knows, she is tantalized by the forces of modernity that hover around her; from her father’s relationship with an American woman, to the transformation and repurposing of her ancestral home.  She flirts with the idea of a relationship with Bert, who is completely captivated by her beauty, she is the one who digs her heels in and refuses to let him go when the two are seen dancing and kissing on a moonlit verandah. 

But Bert is a practical American.  When confronted by Veera’s husband-to-be, he thinks:

Obviously it was all going to be too difficult.  He’d better go home as soon as possible, his commonsense told him, and yet there was something about this beautiful Indian girl that he would never forget.  Whomever he married, and however long he might be married, he’d know romance was here in this palace.  (Buck, p. 342)

But a day later, he carries out his resolution and asks Jagat to release him from his contract:

“…I see it would be very wrong of me to interfere with his life, for that would be to interfere with your daughter’s life.  The time has not yet come when—certain barriers—can be removed.  She would not be happy in my country, and I would not be entirely happy to remain here.  Ours would be a floating sort of existence and I am a man who likes my roots.  I can make them for myself but I couldn’t make them for her…” (Buck, p. 343-344)

The nuance in this conflict is interesting, and enduring.  To make a cross-cultural love successful, the participants in it need to have a good knowledge of themselves and their partners.  Without knowing both weaknesses and strengths—as Bert did—the relationship will crumble and leave unhappiness on both sides, echoing down to the members of the family who let the romance flourish.

Sources:

Buck, Pearl S. (1970). Mandala. New York: The John Day Company.

Pearl S. Buck. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_s_buck

Introduction

Hello and welcome to my brand-new book review blog!  It's called "Crossing Borders" for a very good reason, since rather than reviewing everything I read, I'm going to focus on those books that deal with the interplay of cultures.

First, a little background:

When I was thirteen, my sister brought home a bunch of poor-quality VHS tapes, all full of a new kind of cartoon straight from Japan.  Though the Internet didn't really have a lot of information available on the subject--this was a while ago!--I soon learned that this was called anime, and that it was hugely popular in Japan.  I was absolutely hooked.  Sailor Moon, Fushigi Yugi, Dragonball Z...they were all fascinating, and I spent hours watching them and trying to decipher bits and pieces of the Japanese language.

The language was unintelligible at first, but very soon I started to pick up a word here, and a phrase there, and I knew that I wanted to study Japanese, more than anything.  Four years later, I signed up for Japanese 101.  I also took Chinese 101...for no real reason but that it seemed interesting.  That began my love affair with Asia.

Anyway, I studied the language, history, and culture of both these East Asian nations, but they were so strange and alien to me (a pretty isolated American kid from Connecticut) that I had a hard time understanding why people in Japan and China did what they did.  Then I started reading the literature.

From Japan, I read Natsume Soseki, Tanizaki Junichiro, Oe Kenzaburo, and Yukio Mishima.

From China, I read Li Bai, The Analects, plays, and opera from the wide range of history.

And many, many more.

I really believe that literature can help open our eyes to what we're missing or misunderstanding about the actions of others.  If more people read multicultural books, we might not have the problems we have in the world today.  I want to use this blog to study books that involve a clash of cultures as a major feature in the story.  By reading these works and analyzing the clashes through the different theories of culture, I can see how authors treat these differences and whether they are sensitive to the cultural qualities that drive conflict between individuals.