To Paradise (37 page)

But if I could date the beginning of his different self, it was
probably in December 1970, about a year after we listened to Bethesda in that house in Nu
‘
uanu. Even then, my mother was largely unaware that Edward had reentered my life—he still dropped me off at the bottom of the hill; he had still never come to the house. Before I got out of the car, I’d ask him if he wanted to come in, and every time, he’d say no, and I’d be relieved. But one night, I asked and he said, “Sure, why not?,” as if accepting were a regular occurrence, based on nothing more than his mood.

“Oh,” I replied. I couldn’t pretend he was kidding—as I’ve said, he didn’t kid. And so I got out of the car and he, after a second, followed.

As we walked up the hill, I grew more and more anxious, and when we reached the house, I mumbled something about needing to check on you—on the days I brought you with me, I’d sit in the back seat and hold you in my arms—and sprinted upstairs to look at you, asleep in your bed. We’d recently moved you into a little bed of your own, low to the ground and surrounded by cushions, because you were an active, squirmy sleeper and sometimes rolled off the futon and onto the floor. “Kawika,” I remember whispering to you, “what should I do?” But you didn’t answer, of course—you were asleep, and you were only two.

By the time I returned downstairs, my mother and Edward had already encountered each other and were waiting for me at the dinner table. “Edward tells me that you’ve reacquainted yourselves,” she said, after we’d served ourselves, and I nodded. “Don’t nod, speak,” she said, and I cleared my throat and made myself speak.

“Yes,” I said.

She turned to Edward. “What are you doing this Christmas?” she asked, as if she saw Edward every month, as if she knew enough about how he normally spent Christmas to understand whether this year’s celebrations would be typical or unusual.

“Nothing,” he said, and then, after a pause, “I see you have a tree.”

He spoke neutrally enough, but my mother, already suspicious of him, and therefore alert, straightened. “Yes,” she replied, also neutrally.

“That’s not very Hawaiian, is it?” he asked.

We all looked at the tree in the corner of the sunroom. We had a tree because we always had a tree. Every year, a limited number were imported from the mainland and made available to buy at great expense. There was nothing special about it except its sweet, uriney scent, which for many years I associated with the entire mainland. The mainland was asphalt and snow and highways and the fragrance of pine trees, the country trapped in perpetual winter. We took no particular pains in decorating it—indeed, it was Jane who did most of the ornamentation—but this year it seemed more interesting than before, because now you were here, and old enough to pull on its branches and laugh when you were scolded for doing so.

“It’s not a matter of being Hawaiian or not Hawaiian,” my mother said, “it’s tradition.”

“Yes, but whose tradition?” Edward asked.

“Why, everyone’s,” she said.

“Not mine,” Edward said.

“I should think it is,” my mother said, and then, to me, “Please pass me the rice, Wika.”

“Well, it’s not mine,” Edward repeated.

She didn’t respond. It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to appreciate my mother’s equanimity that night. There was nothing obviously argumentative in Edward’s tone, but she had known anyway, known long before I had—I hadn’t grown up with anyone challenging who I was or what I deserved, but she had. Her right to her name and her birth had always been questioned. She knew when someone was trying to provoke her.

“It’s a Christian tradition,” he finally said into her silence. “Not ours.”

She allowed herself a small smile, looking up from her plate to do so. “So there aren’t such things as Christian Hawaiians, then?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Not if you’re a real Hawaiian.”

Her smile grew wider, tenser. “I see,” she said. “My grandfather would be surprised to hear that—he was a Christian, you know; he served in the king’s court.”

He shrugged again. “I’m not saying there
aren’t
such things as Christian Hawaiians,” he said, “just that the two are in opposition to each other.” (Later, he would repeat the same thing to me, extending the point past what he knew firsthand: “It’s like how people always talk about the black Christian experience. But don’t the blacks know that they’re celebrating the tools of their oppressor? They were encouraged to be Christian so they would think something better awaited them in the afterlife, after years of being abused. Christianity was a form of mind control, and it still is. All that moralizing, all that talk of sin—they swallowed it, and now they’re kept imprisoned by it.”) When she still said nothing, he kept talking. “It was Christians who took away our dance, our language, our religion, our land—even our queen. Which you should know.” She looked up then, startled, as did I—no one had ever before confronted my mother like that—and he stared back at her. “So it just seems bizarre that any true Hawaiian could believe in an ideology whose practitioners robbed them of everything.”

(Real Hawaiian, true Hawaiian—it was the first time I would hear him use those phrases, and soon I would be sick of the terms, as much because I felt accused by them as because I didn’t understand them. All I knew was that a real Hawaiian was something I was not: A real Hawaiian was angrier, poorer, more strident. He spoke the language, fluently; he danced, powerfully; he sang, soulfully. He was not only not American, he would be angry if you ever called him that. The only thing I had in common with a real Hawaiian was my skin and my blood, though later, even my family would become a deficit, proof of my accommodationist tendencies. Even my name would be deemed not Hawaiian enough, even though it had been the name of a Hawaiian king—it was the Hawaiianization of a Christian name, and therefore not Hawaiian at all.)

We might have sat there, frozen, forever had my mother not looked over to me—no doubt in anger—and gasped. “Wika!” I heard her say, and when I opened my eyes next, I was in my bed in a darkened room.

She was sitting next to me. “Careful,” she said, when I tried to sit, “you had a seizure and hit your head. The doctor said you should
stay in bed for another day. Kawika’s fine,” she continued, when I began to speak.

For a while, we were silent. Then she spoke again. “I don’t want you to see Edward anymore, do you understand me, Wika?” she asked.

I could have laughed, I could have scoffed, I could have told her that I was an adult, that she could no longer tell me who I could talk to or not. I could have told her that I found Edward alarming as well, but exciting, too, and that I was going to keep seeing him.

But I did none of those things. I simply nodded, and closed my eyes, and before I fell asleep again, I heard her say, “Good boy,” and then felt her lay her palm on my forehead, and as I lost consciousness, I had the feeling that I was a child again, and that I was being given the chance to live my life all over, and this time, I would do everything correctly.

I kept my promise. I did not see Edward. He called, but I didn’t come to the phone; he stopped by the house, but I made Jane say I wasn’t there. I stayed inside and I watched you grow. When I went out, I was anxious: Honolulu was (and is) a small town on a small island, and I was always afraid I would encounter him, but I somehow never did.

Nothing changed for me in those three years I was in hiding. But you changed: You learned to speak, first in sentences and then paragraphs; you learned to run, and to read, and to swim. Matthew taught you to climb up to the lowest branch of the mango tree; Jane taught you how to tell a juicy mango from a fibrous one. You learned a few words in Hawaiian, which my mother taught you, and a few in Tagalog, which Jane taught you, but only in secret: Your grandmother didn’t like the sound of the language, and you knew not to speak it in front of her. You learned which foods you liked—like me, you preferred salt over sugar—and you made friends, effortlessly, in a way I had never been capable of doing. You learned to call for help when I had one of my seizures, and then, when I emerged from it, to
come pat the side of my face, and I would grab your hand in mine. These were the years when you loved me the most. You could never love me more than, or even as much as, I loved and love you, but in that period, we were closest in mutual affection.

You changed, and so did the rest of the world. Every night on television there was at least one report about the day’s protests: First there were people protesting against the war in Vietnam, and then there were people protesting for blacks, and then for women, and then for homosexuals. I watched them on our little black-and-white set, those swaying, shifting masses of people in San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and New York, and Oakland, and Chicago—I always wondered if Bethesda, who had left the island directly after his speech, was in one of those crowds. The protestors were almost always young, and although I too was young, not yet thirty in 1973, I felt much older—I didn’t recognize myself in any of them; I felt no affinity for them or their struggles or their passions. It wasn’t just that I didn’t look like them; it was that I couldn’t understand their fervor. They had been born with access to and an understanding of extremes, but I had not. I wanted time to slip past me, one year indistinguishable from the next, you the only calendar I had. But they wanted to stop time—stop it, and then speed it up, making it go faster and faster until the entire world burst into flames and would have to start over.

There were changes here, too. Sometimes there would be stories on TV about the Keiki k
ū
Ali
‘
i. This was a group of native Hawaiians who, depending on which member you asked and on which day, were demanding either Hawai
‘
i’s secession from the United States, or the restoration of the monarchy, or nation-within-a-nation status for native Hawaiians, or the creation of a Hawaiian state. They wanted Hawaiian language classes to be mandatory in schools, and they wanted a king or queen, and they wanted all haoles to get out. They didn’t even want to call themselves Hawaiian anymore: Now they were kanaka maoli.

Watching these reports always felt like an illicit activity, and fear that one of them might air while I was in the room with my mother made me stop watching the early-evening news altogether. I only
did so when I knew she’d be out of the house, and even then, I kept the volume low, so if she came back early I’d be able to hear her and turn off the television. I’d sit close to the set, ready to switch it off in a flash, my palms tacky with sweat.

I felt oddly protective—not of my mother but of the protestors, those wild-haired young men and women, my peers, chanting and raising their fists in an imitation of the Black Power members. I already knew what my mother thought of them—“What fools,” she’d murmured, almost sympathetically, after the end of the first segment that had aired and which we had watched together, in mesmerized silence, a year ago, “they don’t even know what they want. And how do they think they’ll get it? You can’t ask for the restoration of the monarchy
and
a new state at the same time”—and I for some reason didn’t want to hear her insult them further. I knew this was irrational, in part because I didn’t disagree with her: They
did
look ridiculous, in their T-shirts and big hair, breaking into ragged chants and song when the camera turned to them; their spokespeople could barely speak proper English, yet they stumbled in Hawaiian, too. I was embarrassed for them. They were so loud.

And yet I also envied them. Except for you, I had never felt such ardor for anything. I looked at those men and women and I knew what they wanted—their want was greater than logic or organization. I had always been told that I should try to live my life with happiness, but could happiness give you the zeal, the energy, that anger clearly could? Theirs was the kind of avidity that seemed to override any other desire—if you had it, you might never want again. At night, I’d experiment with pretending I was one of them: Could I ever be that incensed? Could I ever desire something so much? Could I ever feel that wronged?

I could not. But I began trying. As I have said, I had never before much considered what it meant to be Hawaiian. It was like considering being male, or human—they were things I was, and the fact that I was them seemed always to be enough to me. I began wondering if there was in fact another way to be, if I had been wrong this entire time, if I was somehow incapable of seeing what these other people seemed to see so clearly.

I went to the library, where I read books I had already read about the overthrow; I went to the museum, where my great-grandfather’s feather cape was displayed in a glass case, donated—the cape and the case—by my father. I tried to feel something—but all I could feel was a faint sense of amused disbelief that it was not the haoles who were doing things in my name but these activists themselves. Keiki k
ū
Ali
‘
i: the children of royalty. But I really
was
a child of royalty. When they talked of a king who would be someday restored, they meant me, by rights, and yet they didn’t know who I was; they spoke of the king returning, yet they never thought to ask the king himself if he would want to return. But I also knew that
what
I was would always be more significant than
who
I was—indeed, what I was was the only thing that made who I was significant at all. Why
would
they ever think to ask me?

They wouldn’t, but Edward would. I’ll admit that, while I was too cowardly to speak to him, I was always looking for him. I squinted at the television, scanning the gang of protestors trying to infiltrate the governor’s office, the mayor’s office, the university president’s office. But although I saw Louis—Brother Louis—once or twice, I never saw Edward. Yet I always believed that he was there anyway, just out of camera range, leaning against a wall and surveying the crowd. In my imaginings, he even became something of a leader, elusive and evasive, bestowing his rare smile like a blessing on his followers when they did something to please him. At night, I dreamed of him standing in a shadow-filled house much like Hale Kealoha, giving a speech, and when I woke, I was astonished and full of admiration for him, his eloquence and elegance, until I realized that the words I had been so captivated by were not his but Bethesda’s, now recited back to myself so many times that they had become a hymn of my subconscious, like the state anthem or the song that Jane had sung to me as a boy, and which I now sang to you:
Yellow bird, up high in banana tree / Yellow bird, you sit all alone like me…