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