The People of the Hale

Here in Hawaii, there are so many subgroups of popular cultures, ethnicities, education levels, wealth disparity and communities. It is impossible to define the locals here under any broad umbrella category. So, in this story, I will only tell about one group of people – those that live in the Hales like the one above Chinatown, work at night professions, reside in group homes, or go through cycles of housing or homelessness. Many of them were excluded by the “inclusive” social setting found in public schools growing up, faced discrimination in education and work, and came from a history of poverty. They are the people I met through United Self Help, the ones in Hawaii who people avoid on the bus and suffer from severe mental illness.

Everyone has their own mental health story to tell when they attend the support group. In fact, it is a subgroup that includes a mix of immigrants and locals, newcomers and old faces. Dealing with them has led me to realize that the story of Hawaii’s poor isn’t merely a sad story of hardship. It is a tragedy, one so real there was nothing left besides to cry. Families are torn apart, dignity is lost, and eventually everyone is thrown into the trash bin when they’re old. It is a genetic lottery that is tipped to exclude the very poorest in our communities, and something ordinary people often try to ignore because those feelings can be too disturbing.

My own life story has its ups and downs. For a while, as a young girl, my mom had to work as a housekeeper and we lived in a Chinese boarding house. I was teased in school. Eventually, I worked my way up the education ladder and was accepted on scholarship to the top private school in the state. There I had friends to do homework with, watch movies with, decorate with on Christmas, and found a world more vividly beautiful than the one I had previously known. It was Heaven for a while.

After I was diagnosed with schizophrenia returning home from college, it felt like I wasn’t entirely excluded the way many others at the support group were. I was down and out now. But I was still a Punahou Academy alumni, and it was something people on the island recognized. Instead of taking the pains to introduce me to the mental health world, some workers in mental health tried to hide it from me. My best friend Jackie, a Filipino Spanish girl who I had met through the support group, was determined to show me the truth.

Life sometimes isn’t a bed of roses when you’re mentally ill. I was treated very mildly in terms of stigma compared to most who told their story at the support group. Jackie took me to visit the group home of another woman named Judy, a pretty and educated Vietnamese person, who dressed in rags and lived at the beck and call of her group home staff and everyone in the mental health system designed to care for her. The home felt cold, like a place where you weren’t allowed to be happy, set your own standards, and there were dozens of rules to follow. It was the first time I wondered – why did no one talk to me about this until now?

Not everyone I met lived at a group home. Some, who were able to hustle at day jobs or do sex work, were granted tiny apartments, called “hales” that sat above the polluted river at Chinatown harbor. Hales are a Hawaiian term for homes. It was a euphemism that is meant to normalize the decrepit conditions of such apartments and give them a nice ring to the name. I heard that they had shared toilets, and it smelt of urine and drugs. For the sake of the story, it includes those of us who live in group homes or on the streets. To my surprise, more than one person I met admitted that they lived in such conditions.

Honolulu isn’t a crime ridden place compared to most other inner cities. Many of these people were good kids once, whose lives became nightmares when we fell prey to those who stigmatized our diagnosis. Most lived in fear of becoming prostitutes, group home residents, addicts or street dwellers. Yet on the local news channel, they are always talking about how social work and the mental health system were needed for the people who are a danger to themselves and had no rights to the nice lives of the working class locals. For some who have strict case managers, even visiting the beach was a forbidden luxury.

But the story doesn’t end there. You never know what it’s truly like to suffer a loss until it happens to you. Part of it is due to the traumatizing nature of the ordeal. It was only when my own mother suffered from glaucoma and my uncle got blood transfusions that I realized it was no easy matter to be at the mercy of others. Imagine being torn from the comfort of your own home, coerced into group home life, and not even being allowed to visit your family on a daily basis. Imagine a situation where the only thing you were allowed to say to others is “yes” and the comfort of a good meal was your only solace. Young women with good grades or college degrees were thrown into prostitution, and given rags to wear to normalize their reality.

I lost all my friends for a few years due to my schizophrenia. Eventually, some began returning to my life to support my writing after seeing how positive my own recovery was. As of today, I haven’t visited the psychiatric ward in over six years and I have a life, goals and projects.

Most of my private school classmates had undergone strict educational training that weeded out those who were racist, cruel or unkind. Of course, there are a fair share of backstabbers too. But it felt awkward when you tried to talk to mainlanders about Maxine Hong Kingston or Junior Diaz when the only authors they knew were Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. It definitely is a hope of mine that more of Punahou’s educational practices appear in the rest of America, and more minority young women feel proud to be themselves instead of being forced to conform or assimilate into someone other people wanted them to be, and to become society’s leaders and influencers.

It often feels like Hawaii has become a system where there is a stark contrast between haves and have-nots. The idea of equal opportunity for those at risk of homelessness is more like winning a lottery. It feels like there are many people here with fairly decent ideals, but live under the direction of predominantly old money Asian and Japanese families who do not want to change. They decide who is in and who is out, and how things are done around here.

The people of Hawaii who live in hales are evidence that even the most Democratic communities are formed on the backs of oppression, and stigma is something many people here just don’t want to end. The utopia of my childhood was eventually disillusioned by the reality of social upheaval and fake progress. And I continue to believe that one day many of the people at my support group can one day become leaders and contributors of change.