BLOOD WORK AND OTHER STORIES

What We Carry. What We Inherit. What We Leave Behind.

On the Windward side of O‘ahu, change moves fast—developers buy up neighborhoods, locals move away, and families struggle to hold on to what’s left. But beneath the surface of each loss is something more enduring: memory, love, and the small, steady acts of resilience that carry people forward.

Through finely drawn moments and layered landscapes, both physical and emotional, Blood Work and Other Stories offers a rare look at the complexities of local life in the islands, holding space for struggle while refusing despair.

In these seventeen haunting yet hopeful stories of family and survival, Donald Carreira Ching captures a Hawai‘i shaped by love, loss, and quiet resistance.

“Blood Work and Other Stories is an unflinching portrayal of Hawai‘i’s harshest realities, but grittiness does not mean pessimism. Rather, Carreira Ching writes with tenderness. Threats are rendered in complex, often heart-breaking reality, even as Carreira Ching navigates his characters, and his reader, toward community connection and hope.“

— Kristiana Kahakauwila
author of This is Paradise and Clairboyance