Under the Sun
When I was a kid, my siblings and I used to summer in Kakaako. My parents worked and so we'd pass school vacations at my uncle's house on Kamakee Street, where my aunt and grandmother could keep an eye on us. We'd romp with my cousins and Ricky, a neighbor kid, straddling fence posts and making believe we were cowboys riding swift horses. Homegrown values bring
out the best in HawaiiKamakee Street used to dead-end abruptly at the ironworks plant. The hulking industrial structures kept the house and its small grove of bamboo in shadows through most of the afternoon. In shielding us from the worst heat of the season, it cut short the reach of sunlight.
The ironworks is long gone. Kamakee has been made a through street, connecting Kapiolani Boulevard with Auahi Street and the brisk Ward retail-entertainment district. A two-story building sits where my uncle's house used to be.
I find myself saying "used to be" a lot lately. The changes in Hawaii through the 50-odd years of my life have been significant, almost overwhelming. And though I'm guilty of peevishly resisting the transformations, I admit that some of them have been for the better.
The grit and glooming huff of Kamakee now brims with gleaming commerce and the sharp chatter of people stepping along smooth sidewalks. Sunshine bounces from the waves at Ala Moana to the bright windows of new stores and restaurants.
The Kakaako retail scene mixes island businesses -- some more in style than substance -- with the big names in nationwide chains that we welcome with open pocketbooks. Yet it would be a mistake to submerge Hawaii in homogenized sameness of other places, because it is not.
In the American scheme, Hawaii seems hardly a blip. We are excluded in many ways, small and large. National politics dismisses our votes as inconsequential, so-called nationwide sweepstakes rule out Hawaii in the fine print, live broadcasts aren't and interactive events become clumsy with time differences. Far removed from the country to which we are tied, Hawaii is just another state, albeit an exotic one.
OK, then. Why live here, why pay more for everything from lettuce to land, why put up with the myriad problems of isolation? A lot of people don't. Some -- lured here by a romantic perception of the islands --leave, unable to pay the literal price of paradise or to find their way through a local culture that can be as closed as it is congenial. Many young people flee the islands for the mainland to find jobs and different experiences. A good many don't come back, but I wonder if they contain a yearning undiluted by long absences. I did.
I lived in Connecticut for many years. It was beautiful, too. I made good friends from diverse backgrounds, marking Seders, St. Patrick's Days and festas for Italian saints. I spent New York weekends in tony pre-war apartments on Central Park West and two-room walkups in Chinatown, donned winter coats and mittens for snowy walks through quaint New England villages, ate lobster rolls after sails on the Long Island Sound, fell from canoes into the Housatonic River, and marveled at the long days of northern summers.
I do not regret the time I spent away, but Hawaii fits me best, even as the counts of "used to be's" increase. The reason has no singular form or substance. Rather it is an aggregate, part physical, part cultural and part spiritual comfort.
I suppose a lot of people feel the same way about their home ground, and they should. If you care about something, you tend to it. Hawaii needs tending. It annoys me to hear someone justify a concept or practice by arguing "that's how it's done on the mainland." What's good there may not translate well here.
Ours is to pick what will work for the islands and its people, to use what we have to excel, not import an ideal from Los Angeles or Houston to refashion awkwardly. Change ought to be cast in a framework of our own with that intangible value of our difference wired tightly throughout -- all the while considering anything under the sun.
Cynthia Oi has been on the staff of the Star-Bulletin for 25 years.
She can be reached at: coi@starbulletin.com.