Hawai'i One Summer

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  Although dishwashing is lonely work, I do not welcome assistance. With somebody else in the kitchen, I hurry to get at the worst messes to spare her or him. Alone, I wash two plates, and take a break. Helpers think that dishwashing includes unloading the dishwasher, sweeping and mopping the floor, defrosting the refrigerator, and de-crusting the oven, cleaning the kitchen, and cleaning the dining room.

  In Living Poor With Style, Ernest Callenbach says that it is unsanitary to wipe dry because the dish cloth spreads the germs evenly over everything. Air drying is better, he says, meaning letting everything sit in the drainer. (He also recommends washing the cooking implements as you finish each step of cooking. Impossible. I did that once in a temporary state of grace, which was spoiled by having to wash dishes.)

  Paper plates are no solution. There are no paper pots and pans and spatulas and mixing bowls. The plates are the easiest part of dishwashing.

  I prop books and magazines behind the faucet handles. Some people have television sets in their kitchens. Books with small print are best; you don’t turn the pages so often and dislodge the book into the water.

  I do enjoy washing other people’s dishes. I like the different dishes, different sink, different view out the window. Perhaps neighbors could move over one house each night and do one another’s dishes. You usually do other folks’ dishes at a holiday or a party.

  I like using a new sponge or dishcloth or soap or gloves, but the next time, they’re not new.

  In Hawai‘i Over the Rainbow, Kazuo Miyamoto says that in the World War II relocation camps for Americans of Japanese Ancestry, the women had the holiday of their lives—no cooking, no dishwashing. They felt more at leisure than back home because of the communal dining halls and camp kitchens. I can believe it.

  Compared to dishes, scrubbing the toilets is not bad, a fast job. Also you can neglect toilets one more week, and you only have one or two of them.

  I typed a zen koan on an index card, which I have glued to the wall beside the sink. You may cut this out and use it if you like:

  “I have just entered the monastery. Please teach me.”

  “Have you eaten your rice?”

  “I have.”

  “Then you had better wash your bowl.”

  At that moment, the new monk found enlightenment.

  This koan hasn’t helped yet with the dishwashing; that is, no one in the family has picked up on it. It would probably be more enlightening to post Miyamoto or Callenbach’s words. But I have a glimmering that if I solve this koan, I can solve dishwashing too. If I can solve dishwashing, I can solve life and suicide. I haven’t solved it but have a few clues.

  The koan does not say that the monk was enlightened after he washed the bowl. “At that moment” seems to be at the instant when he heard the advice.

  I hope the koan doesn’t mean that one has to pay consequences for pleasure; you eat, therefore you wash bowl. Dismal. Dismal.

  It could mean something about reaching enlightenment through the quotidian, which is dishwashing.

  The monk did not gain his enlightenment after washing the dishes day after day, meal after meal. Just that one bowl. Just hearing about that one bowl.

  I have come up with a revolutionary meaning: Each monk in that monastery washed his own bowl. The koan suggests a system for the division of labor. Each member of the family takes his or her dishes to the sink and does them. Pots and pans negotiable. Cat dishes negotiable too.

  The koan shows that dishwashing is important. A life-and-death matter, to be dealt with three times a day.

  July

  Chinaman’s Hat

  Living on an island, I miss driving, setting out at dawn, and ending up five or six hundred miles away—Mexico—at nightfall. Instead, we spin around and around a perimeter like on a race track.

  Satellite photos of the Hawaiian Islands show swirls, currents, winds, movement, movements of clouds and water. I have to have them pointed out to me and to look closely before I descry three or four of the islands, in a clearing, chips of rock, miniatures in the very shapes you find on maps. The islands, each one the tip of a volcano connected to the ocean floor, look like the crests of waves.

  Logs and glass balls have creatures living on them too. Life gathers and clings to whatever bit of solidity—land. Whales and porpoises and sharks become land for colonies of smaller animals. And the junked cars, like sunken ships, turn into living reefs.

  On drives along the windward side of O‘ahu, I like looking out at the ocean and seeing the pointed island offshore, not much bigger than a couple of houses—Mokoli‘i Island, but nobody calls it that. I had a shock when I heard it’s called Chinaman’s Hat. That’s what it looks like, all right, a crown and brim on the water. I had never heard “Chinaman” before except in derision when walking past racists and had had to decide whether to pretend I hadn’t heard or to fight.

  When driving south, clockwise around O‘ahu, there is an interesting optical illusion: at a certain point in the road, the sky is covered with Chinaman’s Hat, which looms huge, near. The closer you drive toward what seems like a mountain ahead, the farther it moves away until there it is, quite far off, a small island in the midst of ocean, sky, clouds.

  I did not call it Chinaman’s Hat, and no one else calls it Mokoli‘i Island, so for a long time, I didn’t call it anything. “Chinaman’s Hat,” people say to visitors, “because it looks just like a Chinaman’s hat. See?”

  And the visitor knows right away what they mean. At first I watched expressions and tones of voice for a snide reference to me. But the locals were not yelling at me or spitting at me or trying to run me down with a bike saying, “Chinaman.”

  Although I don’t swim very well, I ventured out to Chinaman’s Hat three times. The first time, we waited until low tide to walk as far as we could. The other times, we left in the early morning. Snorkeling is like flying; the moment your face enters clear water, you become a flying creature.

  Schools of fish—zebra fish, rainbow fish, red fish—curve with the currents, swim alongside and away. Balloon fish puff out their porcupine quills. How unlike a dead fish a live fish is. We swam through spangles of silver white fish. I hovered in perfect suspension over forests, flew over spring forests and winter forests. No sound but my own breathing. Sometimes we entered blind spots, darkness, where the sand churned up gray fog, the sun behind clouds. Then I had to lift my head out of the water to see and not be afraid.

  Sometimes the sun made golden rooms, which we entered from dark hallways. Specks of sand shone like gold and fell like motes, like the light in California. Sea cucumbers rocked from side to side.

  Approaching Chinaman’s Hat, there is a group of tall black stones like an underwater Stonehenge, and we flew around and between those rocks.

  Then we were walking among the palm trees and bushes that we had seen from O‘ahu. Under those bushes, large white birds nest on the ground. We hurried to the unseen side of the island, the other face of the moon.

  Though tiny, Chinaman’s Hat has its leeward and windward. The ocean side is less green but wonderful in its variety. We found a cave, a tiny pirate’s cove with a lick of ocean going in and out of it; a strip of beach made of fine yellow sand; a blowhole; brown and lavender cowry shells, not broken; black live crabs and red dead crabs; a lava rock shelf with tide pools as warm as baths. Lying in a tide pool, I saw nothing but sky and black rock; the ocean spit cold now and again. The two friends with us stood in the blowhole, and said wedding vows while the ocean sprayed rainbows around their heads.

  At day’s end, tired from the long swim at high tide, we pulled ourselves up on the land, lay with arms open holding on to O‘ahu. We were grateful to return, relieved that we had made it back alive. Relieved to be out of the water before the sun went down.

  After that first exploration, we heard from Hawaiians that the channel between Chinaman’s Hat and O‘ahu is the spawning place for sharks. This information did not stop us from swimming out there twice mor
e. We had the fatalism of city people who had lived on the San Andreas Fault. It will crack open at any moment, and California break off from North America, and sink like Atlantis. We continued to swim home with the fish we’d caught tied to our belts, and they did not attract sharks though pilot fish swam ahead of us.

  The air of Hawai‘i breathes warm on the skin; when it blows, I seem to turn into wind, too, and start to blow away. Maybe I can swim because the water is so comfortable, I melt into it and let it carry me like the fish and the frigate birds that make the currents visible. Back on O‘ahu, our friend who got married in the blowhole, often broke into hysterics, and she and her husband returned to the cool northern California woods.

  There is a rending. The soul leaks out to mix with the air, the skin an osmotic membrane. But the eyes squint against the bright green foliage in the red light. These islands fool human beings into thinking that they are safe. On our second trip to Chinaman’s Hat, a Hawaiian man and his son were camping under the ledge by the palm trees. They had a boat and meat hooks and liver for catching sharks.

  On the third trip, Earll went spear fishing off the ocean side, where I did not go because of the depth and choppiness. I was climbing as far as I could up the crown, and finding seashells there. I watched him jump vertically out of the water. He had seen a giant thing and felt it swim under him, yards and yards of brown shadow under him.

  Another time, we rowed a boat out there, our children sitting on the outrigger to weight it down on the water. A cleft in the hillside made a shelter for building a fire to get warm after swimming. At sunset, we cooked and ate the fish the men speared. We were climbing down to the boat, holding on to the face of the island in the dark, when a howling like wolves, like ghosts, came rising out of the island. “Birds,” somebody said. “The wind,” said someone else. But the air was still, and the high, clear sound wound like a ribbon around the island. It was, I know it, the island, the voice of the island singing, the sirens Odysseus heard.

  The Navy uses Kaho‘olawe for bombing practice, not recognizing it as living, sacred earth. We had all heard it, the voice of our island singing.

  A City Person Encountering Nature

  A city person encountering nature hardly recognizes it, has no patience for its cycles, and disregards animals and plants unless they roar and exfoliate in spectacular aberrations. Preferring the city myself, I can better discern natural phenomena when books point them out; I also need to verify what I think I’ve seen, even though charts of phyla and species are orderly whereas nature is wild, unruly.

  Last summer, my friend and I spent three days together at a beach cottage. She got up early every morning to see what “critters” the ocean washed up. The only remarkable things I’d seen at that beach in years were Portuguese man-o-war and a flightless bird, big like a pelican; the closer I waded toward it, the farther out to sea the bird bobbed.

  We found flecks of whitish gelatin, each about a quarter of an inch in diameter. The wet sand was otherwise clean and flat. The crabs had not yet dug their holes. We picked up the blobs on our fingertips and put them in a saucer of sea water along with seaweeds and some branches of coral.

  One of the things quivered, then it bulged, unfolded, and flipped over or inside out. It stretched and turned over like a human being getting out of bed. It opened and opened to twice its original size. Two arms and two legs flexed, and feathery wings flared, webbing the arms and legs to the body, which tapered to a graceful tail. Its ankles had tiny wings on them—like Mercury. Its back muscles were articulated like a comic book superhero’s—blue and silver metallic leotards outlined with black racing stripes. It’s a spaceman, I thought. A tiny spaceman in a spacesuit.

  I felt my mind go wild. A little spaceship had dropped a spaceman on to our planet. The other blob went through its gyrations and also metamorphosed into a spaceman. I felt as if I were having the flying dream where I watch two perfect beings wheel in the sky.

  The two critters glided about, touched the saucer’s edges. Suddenly, the first one contorted itself, turned over, made a bulge like an octopus head, then flipped back, streamlined again. A hole in its side—a porthole, a vent—opened and shut. The motions happened so fast, we were not certain we had seen them until both creatures had repeated them many times.

  I had seen similar quickenings: dry strawberry vines and dead trout revive in water. Leaves and fins unfurl; colors return.

  We went outside to catch more, and, our eyes accustomed, found a baby critter. So there were more than a pair of these in the universe. So they grew. The baby had apparently been in the sun too long, though, and did not revive.

  The next morning, bored that the critters were not performing more tricks, we blew on them to get them moving. By accident, their eyes or mouths faced, and sucked together. There was a churning. They wrapped their arms, legs, wings around one another.

  Not knowing whether they were killing each other or mating, we tried unsuccessfully to part them. Guts, like two worms, came out of the portholes. Intestines, I thought; they’re going to die. But the two excrescences braided together like DNA strands, then whipped apart, turned pale, and smokily receded into the holes. The critters parted, flipped, and floated away from each other.

  After a long time, both of them fitted their armpits between the coral branches; we assumed that they were depositing eggs.

  When we checked the clock, four hours had gone by. We’d both thought it had only been about twenty minutes.

  That afternoon, the creatures seemed less distinct, their sharp lines blurring. I rubbed my eyes; the feathers were indeed melting. The beings were disintegrating in the water. I threw the coral as far out as I could into the ocean.

  Later, back in town, we showed our biologist friend our sketches, I burbling about visitors from outer space. He said they were nudibranchs. This was our friend who as a kid had vowed that he would study Nature, but in college, he specialized in marine biology, and in graduate school, he studied shrimps. He was now doing research on one species of shrimp that he had discovered on one reef off O‘ahu.

  A new climate helps me to see nature. Here are some sights upon moving to Hawai‘i:

  Seven black ants, led by an orange one, dismembered a fly.

  I peeled sunburn off my nose, and later recognized it as the flake of something an ant was marching away with.

  A mushroom grew in a damp corner of the living room.

  Giant philodendrons tear apart the cars abandoned in the jungle. Tendrils crawl out of the hoods; they climb the shafts of the steam shovels that had dug the highway. Roofs and trunks break open, turn red, orange, brown, and sag into the dirt.

  Needing to read explanations of such strangeness, we bought an English magazine, The Countryman, which reports “The Wild Life and Tame” news.

  “STAMPED TO DEATH—A hitherto peaceful herd of about fifty cows, being fetched in from pasture, suddenly began to rush around, and bellow in a most alarming manner. The source of their interest was a crippled gull, which did its best to escape; but the cows, snorting and bellowing, trampled it to death. They then quieted down and left the field normally.—Charles Brudett, Hants.”

  Also: “BIG EYE, Spring, 1967—When I was living in the Karoo, a man brought me a five-foot cape cobra which he had just killed. It had been unusually sluggish and the tail of another snake protruded from its mouth. This proved to be a boom-slang, also poisonous but back-fanged; it was 1½ inches longer than the cobra and its head-end had been partly digested.—J. S. Taylor, Fife.”

  I took some students to the zoo after reading Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger burning bright,” Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” and Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring. They saw the monkeys catch a pigeon and tear it apart. I kept reminding them that that was extraordinary. “Watch an animal going about its regular habits,” I said, but then they saw an alligator shut its jaws on a low-flying pigeon. I remembered that I don’t see ordinary stuff either.

  I’ve watche
d ants make off with a used Band-Aid. I’ve watched a single termite bore through a book, a circle clean through. I saw a pigeon vomit milk, and didn’t know whether it was sick, or whether its babies had died and the milk sacs in its throat were engorged. I have a friend who was pregnant at the same time as her mare, and, just exactly like the Chinese superstition that only one of the babies would live, the horse gave birth to a foal in two pieces.

  When he was about four, we took our son crabbing for the “crabs with no eyes,” as he called them. They did have eyes, but they were on stalks. The crabs fingered the bait as if with hands; very delicately they touched it, turned it, swung it. One grabbed hold of the line, and we pulled it up. But our son, a Cancer, said, “Let’s name him Linda.” We put Linda back in the river and went home.

  Useful Education

  I have taught school for twelve years. I’ve taught grammar school, high school, alternative school, business school, and college; math, English, English as a second language, journalism, and creative writing. I’ve also been a writer for twenty-eight years, the writing years and the teaching years overlapping. I ought to be able to tell how to teach people to write.

  The way I don’t do it is the way Mrs. Garner taught us in fourth grade. Mrs. Garner was an organized woman, who brought out a box of decorations for each holiday and new season. Year after year, she put up the same bulletin boards and gave the same lessons; we knew exactly what the younger brother or sister was learning and what would come next. Nowadays we teachers invent new courses each semester—The American Novel in Film, Science Fiction, The Alienated Adolescent, Lovers at War, etc. We never get to establish a file of tried and true ditto sheets like Mrs. Garner’s. She pressed hers on a gelatin plate, and pulled duplicates one by one.