Where the Ocean Meets the Sky

The Goddess of the Sea

The salted air from the seaside city of Honolulu felt different from the entire world I had known in China. Here, there were blue skies, oceans at every shoreline, wind blowing through the plumeria and palm trees lining the streets and backyards of old houses. It was mango season and we would go around to the backs of homes and hiking trails to collect mango that had fallen on the ground. The grocery had fresh milk and cereal that you can have cold, and you could walk bare feet inside the apartment.

In the early days of emigrating from Tianjin, China to Honolulu, Hawaii, the city felt like magic around every corner. I had never seen the sunlight so close to the earth, and it felt how one would feel being displaced from an urban jungle to an island in the sun with new beginnings and nobody who knew my name.

The tropics were a beautiful place. There was mana, a Hawaiian word for spirit, here, in the koi ponds at the seaside mall, glittering sunsets on Magic Island Beach Park, the Christmas parades and the rogue will of the tides carrying both blessings and curses to the shores of this community.

There was a Goddess who lived here and called this island home. Her name was Pelé, the Goddess of the volcano, who brought life, prosperity and harmony to the people, the banyan trees, the golden plovers, and the ocean waves. Sometimes you can find her hiding in the thickets of the well worn hiking trails around the city. Other times, you could hear her spirit calling from the beaches, in a melodic song that brought the sunset into the deep blue sea. You can feel it in the music playing on the convenience store radio, the May Day hula dancers, the matcha and shaved ice, and in the sunlight passing through the shade of trees.

Her name rang from the corners of the island, bringing together the multiethnic community of Hawaiians, Japanese, Hakkas, Portuguese and other indigenous or local people. Many had first arrived here as workers on the sugarcane and pineapple plantations started by entrepreneurs from the west. Others were native to Hawaii, or had moved here for work or school. It felt like a place of diversity and color. It had become a culture of its own that included many traditions and festivals and food that melded into a local identity around the stories and legends native to Hawaii.

The Makaha Sugarcane Farm

When I was in elementary school, we had once gone on a field trip to a sugarcane plantation from the early era of colonial settlers in the rural countryside of westward Oahu. Currently, it exists as a tour offered to students and tourists, though a small number of plantation workers continue to use it for farming green onions, sugar cane and rice.

Many of today’s Hawaii locals had arrived in Hawaii in this way. There were a large number of workers, predominantly from Asia, who had emigrated to Hawaii to work for white settlers who bought and claimed the fertile land and tropical climate that we have here in the islands. Many were Hawaiian, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese and Portuguese. It is one reason Hawaii is such a blend of races and multicultural communities that continue the thrive even after the era of modernity.

I recall that on the field trip we passed through the cramped living quarters with bunk beds and thin mattresses. There were communal bath houses and photos of picture brides that brought women and eventually families from the east to Hawaii. There were women wearing traditional kimonos, tours of the early factories that were established during the Victorian Era, the arduous and winding sugarcane fields, and even the small rice ponds and vegetable gardens where the workers grew food to supplement their diet.

I like to think of it as a triumph of multiculturalism, because ultimately the plantations brought people together, overcame prejudices, and began some of the values that Hawaii continues to adopt such as equal opportunity for all ethnic backgrounds, feminism and strong women, and opportunities to work hard yet remain humble. What began as oppression had become something more.

I recall after the tour, my friends and I were given paper bags of musubi and milk and we sat under the shade of a banyan tree eating our lunch. The tour guide brought green onions he was growing to share with us. The mountain edge could be seen in the background with the hardy shrubbery and trees that lived on the drier side of the island.

It was my first time visiting a town as far away as Makaha. But it made me feel that there was something about farmers and residents who live on this part of the island who continue to keep some of these values alive. Many of them are people for whom local living is all they have ever known, and it was a poorer part of the island without fancy schools or homes. It was a symbol of changing times and a changing world, and the traditional values that continue to embattle our state.

Pensacola Street

My first home in Honolulu was on Pensacola Street in Makiki District in Honolulu. It was an urban district of apartment buildings and a park where many lower class working families resided. It wasn’t like the inner city neighborhoods that people say existed on the US mainland. Here there was Makiki Park where they held Summer Fun every year. It was a short walk to Magic Island Beach Park or the grocery store, and you could walk around at night without the fear of being approached by strangers. There were palm trees lining the nearby Church, and people sometimes rode bicycles to go pick up groceries from Chinatown.

My home was on the second floor and shared with a colleague of my father’s who both were getting their Masters degrees at the University of Hawaii in Manoa. I heard that he and many of his friends had moved to Hawaii together from the Nanjing Institute of Meteorology, and it was how I made some of my first friends and was introduced to the gossipy and flourishing world of Chinese Americanism.

While my dad was studying at the university, my mom took a part time job baby sitting for a Caucasian American family called the Wades who lived in the suburbs of Hawaii Kai. Their home was an all American kind of world with a room filled with toys, skateboards around the front door, a dog and three kids. Talking with the Wades was how my mom learned to speak broken English that was nevertheless more fluent than that of most of her friends in the Chinese – Hawaiian community. They showed me how to ride a scooter, mix candy with popcorn at the movies and paint nail polish at sleepovers. Of course, most of the people I met during my mom’s time there were rich and blonde, and I eventually dropped out of their circle around middle school.

Growing up in this kind of environment, I felt a kind of respect for the established order here in Hawaii where the jobs of most of the working class revolved around the leadership of the rich. I didn’t see myself as someone privileged like the Wades, but it increased my resolve to become a good student so that I can one day work a white collar job for a family like that, maybe as a lawyer or journalist.

In the Chinese immigrant community in Hawaii, most of my mom’s friends were also from the research background. As a result, most of my friends made it their main goal to attend an Ivy League and brand name institution. I was no different, and expected to work hard if I were to be accepted by the other children at Chinese Church and after school. Working class culture in Hawaii was a big deal and there was definitely mild pressure for immigrants from China to find a place in the Honolulu strata and do honest work for the duration of their careers in America.

The Chinese Boarding Home

In the two years after my dad graduated and left for the mainland job hunting or soul searching, my mom and I found shelter in a boarding home run by a Chinese family that mostly rented out to college students who had recently moved here from China. It was in another lower class neighborhood in the city that was around the Pali Highway and a Buddhist temple. From the backyard, you could see a small park beyond the fence where children from the Buddhist community sometimes played outdoors. Our room was a makeshift bedroom in the garage where I recall having a piano, fish tank, desk and television.

There were four other girls on the floor, three of whom continue to be friends with my mother to this day. My mom was the oldest and seen as the big sister of the group. Wendy was a Cantonese woman getting her master’s degree in accounting. She liked urban cityscapes, nature and was very mature in her heart. Our other friend was Vicky, a rich girl attending Hawaii Pacific University with the sponsorship of her parents. She liked short skirts and boba. Maria was very pretty and liked to see herself as a socialite of the University of Hawaii circle. They often looked out for me while my mom was working multiple jobs and coming home late, and always wanted to know what book I was reading. We’ve been on a lot of adventures together like hiking and Chinese Church potluck night. Both Vicky and Wendy now have families in America.

At the time, I had just been accepted at my elementary school gifted and talented class for fourth and fifth grade. Most of my earlier school years were decent and I made friends, but during those two years I dealt with isolation and even mild teasing in class. Looking back, it might’ve been partly because my dad wasn’t there, money was tight, and we lived at a boarding home. It felt like I had grown up in a time where friends turned gradually into enemies and not everyone was playing the angel card. Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading and my teacher liked me. It was the age where young kids began to form cliques and I realized that I was becoming one of the girls tv shows would call “unpopular.”

Somehow, throughout this time period, I wasn’t too lonely or unhappy, and read through dozens of fiction novels and continued to keep in touch with one or two friends from the Chinese American community. I recall going shopping with Wendy to buy mom a Mother’s Day gift and wearing some of Vicky’s old clothes. Being Chinese wasn’t necessarily a death sentence here in Hawaii, but racism was nevertheless present. It felt like there was no escape from discrimination and tensions with China only heightened isolation and rejection in the classroom.

The Mun Lun Chinese School

On Saturdays, mom showed me how to take the bus from our boarding home to Chinatown to attend classes at the Mun Lun Chinese School with my family friend Angela. The school was located on the second and third floors above the parking lot of The Cultural Plaza across the street from the main Chinatown shops and grocers.

Mun Lun Chinese School reminded me of a place that had died a long time ago. Even with the decorated signs and posters, the lively children, songs and games, it felt like it couldn’t bring that building back to life. The peeling gray walls, floors that looked unclean even with regular janitorial services, and poorly lit hallways, all made me feel like I was in a black and white movie about Chinatown in the 40’s or 50’s, and I couldn’t explain why.

There’s something about Chinatowns both in Hawaii and other cities I visited, that could not shake off the aura of a place that existed in a world without sunlight, where life couldn’t grow, was perpetually unclean, and where nothing changed while the rest of the world modernized and evolved. Sometimes I’d like to imagine a more beautiful version of my homeland that wasn’t so alien to the rest of America.

Mun Lun Chinese school were some of the final days I remember with my childhood best friend, Angela. We were both in the intermediate Chinese language group, which taught Chinese to people with some fluency using paperback textbooks similar to the ones we used in school. There was light homework, such as memorizing a small number of words, and we could draw on the blackboard during break and express our feelings on Chinese Americanism like wanting a Chinese president. I remember the haute girls who had just got accepted into Sacred Hearts Academy, and the desire for everyone to value education, assimilation and futures where being Chinese meant something besides being poor and an immigrant.

What I liked most about Mun Lun were the celebrations they often held during Chinese New Year. Instead of books, there was a big party in the auditorium. There was free food and drinks, raffle prizes where everyone won something, and kids could play together with new toys and stickers. It was the last memory I had of Angela before she moved to California. We sang Brittney Speares’ songs, made arts and crafts and compared prizes and discussed our mutual dream of going to Ivy League.

The following year, I remember being alone at the Mun Lun celebration because Angela had left and I hadn’t made any new close friends. I collected the free prizes from a few different stations and left early to go home. That was around the time I was about to start middle school, and I decided that I no longer wanted to attend weekend classes.

Pelé on Tantalus Hill

My dad eventually did return to Hawaii after two years on the mainland. When he returned, he acted like nothing had happened and that he is the father he had always been. At times, he wasn’t the most attentive dad and it made me wonder if he really loved my family and how he felt about us, both through the good and bad ordeals we faced in our lives.

I had just begun middle school and it was a good time in my life. I realized from the get go at Kaimuki Middle School that I was turning into a straight A student, that I put more details and heart into my projects than the average, and I was regularly scoring well on exams and class rankings. This was new to me because, in the past, I never really thought of myself as that smart, much less a favorite student of many of my teachers.

One weekend, my dad decided to take me for a hike at Tantalus Hill. For some reason, I could never forget this trip, and how it made me realize the wonderment of a world untrodden by man. He and I brought backpacks and walked off the beaten path of a side trail where he said he saw mountain apples. After some searching, we found a small grove of mountain apple trees with ripe mountain apples that we filled our bags with.

I remember the ground was muddy from the Summer rain, the scents of strawberry guava and small streams permeated the air, and the forests had come to life in the quietest time of the year. The sky was a hazy blue, and it felt like the moment where I came eye to eye with Pelé, the goddess whose land on which we walked. I felt the spirit of life, birth, fertility and renewal, and the call of nature where the magic from which our islands were formed. It was in the light of the sunshine, the equator, the yearly migration of the whales and birds, and how even urban Honolulu was built on this place of fantasy and legend. There were banyan trees, conifers and native plants and flowers.

It was the moment I realized that there was magic in the lights and shadows and sound of waves, that could only be met when following your own path and heart instead of the conventions held by our society. Later, when the wind blew through the streets of the city, when the sunset hit the horizon line on an afternoon by the beach, and even in the firelight of night, I thought and wondered to myself if love and serenity were real and worldly success only a work of the imagination.

thank you for reading ^.^