Hawai'i One Summer

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  It was her tradition to have us make a notebook entitled Gems. She did not explain what “gems” were. The only other time we used that word was in “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,” one of her favorite songs. The notebook was not about jewels, nor is “Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean.” She let us pick out our own construction paper for the cover; I chose a pink nubby oatmeal paper, and lettered “Gems” in lime green. While we were numbering the pages the way she showed us, she stuck chalk into the fingers of the wood-and-wire rakelike thing that enabled her to draw five straight lines at one stroke. She usually made musical scales with it, but for “gems,” she ran it back and forth until the blackboard looked like a sheet of binder paper. Then she wrote a “gem,” which we were to copy word for word and line for line, indenting and breaking the lines the way she did. Perhaps the “gems” were a penmanship lesson, I thought, but wasn’t that when we drew loops and zigzags? Copying the “gems” was like art period, when she drew an apple on the board with red chalk, then a brown stem with a green leaf shooting off to the right. We copied this apple as exactly as we could, and she corrected our shapes with her art pencil. She had a drawer filled with the comic books she confiscated, another drawer of water pistols and another of slingshots. If I were to use her methods today, the students would beat me up. (I once confiscated some nunchakus, a pair of night sticks on a chain, which I put in my desk drawer.)

  And yet it was in Mrs. Garner’s classroom that I discovered that I could write poems. I remember the very moment the room filled with a light that would have been white except that the warm light off the wooden desks (with the inkwell holes and the pencil grooves) suffused it with yellow—and out of the air and into my head and down my arm and out my fingers came ten, twenty verses in an a-b-b-a rhyme. The poem was about flying; I flew.

  I was supposed to have been writing the multiplication tables or making our daily copy of the map of California. We had to draw every squiggle in the coastline. How lucky the fourth graders in Colorado are, we said. Instead I wrote down the music and the voices I heard. So, as a teacher, when I see students staring at nothing, I am loathe to interrupt.

  One of my students who is now a published poet, Jody Manabe, said that she quit writing for one year because her seventh-grade teacher, a man, told her, “You write like a man.”

  The best I ever wrote in high school was when the teachers said, “Write whatever you like.” Now I can appreciate what a daring assignment that is. I would not like to be caught saying that when an administrator or department head walks in to see if I have lesson plans.

  The worst writing happened during the four years of college, which I attended when the English departments were doing the New Criticism (and the art department, Abstract Expressionism). The rule at our school was that an undergraduate could take one creative writing class, and she had to wait until junior or senior year. Poems, short stories, plays, and novels were what great masters wrote and what we students wrote about. We wrote essays.

  The school system is dominated by the essay. And for me, essays would not become poems or stories. The real writing got stalled until after homework and graduation. The only place I could be fanciful was in the title. The professors wrote, “Purple prose,” next to the few interesting phrases I could squeeze into “the body.” Looking back on it, I believe the essay form was what drove English majors into becoming the most vituperative demonstrators during the student strikes.

  My favorite method for teaching writing is to have the students write any old way. I tell them I “grade by quantity and not quality.” By writing a hundred pages per semester, they have to improve—and the writing will find its form.

  I tell the students that form—the epic, the novel, drama, the various forms of poetry—is organic to the human body. Petrarch did not invent the sonnet. Human heartbeat and language and voice and breath produce these rhythms. The teacher can look at a student’s jumble of words and say, “I see you are moving toward the short story,” or whatever. This is a good way to criticize and compliment—tell the young writer how close he or she is getting to which form.

  To begin with form would probably work, too, as long as it’s not the essay. Put a problem into a sonnet and it will help you state the problem, explore it, and solve it elegantly in a couplet. Ballads come naturally to students, who are lyric, and young like Keats and Shelley.

  In The Catcher in the Rye, Holden takes an Oral Expression class where the students have to give spontaneous speeches, and whenever a speaker digresses, the class and Mr. Vinson yell, “Digression!” Sometimes the speaker can hardly talk anymore and gets an F. Mr. Vinson doesn’t know that if you let somebody digress long enough, what he says will eventually take shape, a classical shape.

  As a teacher, I have a stake in controlling that classroom, too. And the essay is orderly, easy to write and easy to grade; a computer can do it. Just check the thesis statement and make sure that each major paragraph backs up the thesis with arguments, examples, and quotes.

  I do teach the essay—the three-paragraph essay, then the five-paragraph essay, then the term paper—so that my students can survive college. I try to throw in enough other kinds of writing to put the essay in perspective. When the class is over, though, kids probably forget everything but the essay. It is a form that the brain grasps. But if I become paralyzed worrying about the kid writers I am damaging, I try to remember how tough writers are. Kwan Kung, the god of war and literature, rides before us.

  Talk Story: A Writers’ Conference

  Two weeks ago, I went to Talk Story, the first conference of Asian American and Hawai‘i writers. Never before had I listened to writers read and talk for a week straight, taking time out for eating and sleeping, but usually talking about writing while eating, too. It takes me about twenty years to see meaning in events, but here are some first impressions:

  The opening party was at Washington Place, the Governor’s mansion, where Queen Lili‘uokalani stayed under house arrest in 1895. We ladies trailed our long skirts over the lawns and through the rooms of Victorian furniture to the lanai, where the band and the food and wine were. People blessed one another with leis and kisses, and the smell and the music of Hawai‘i filled the air. The moon, full that very night, rolled out of the rushing clouds. I didn’t get to the food because I was dazzled by meeting the people whom I had only imagined from their writings.

  The writers from the mainland, not used to Hawai‘i, must have felt strange, having just come out of their solitary writing rooms.

  Listening to the keynote speakers the next morning, I was humbled when Ozzie Bushnell, author of Ka‘a‘awa, said that if “us local kids” don’t write the Hawai‘i novel, then “the outsider” will come in and do it. I guiltily identified with this “outsider.” Ozzie is such a strong speaker, talking both standard English and pidgin, that I felt scolded, a Captain Cook of literature, plundering the islands for metaphors, looting images, distorting the landscape with a mainland—a mainstream—viewpoint. I temporarily forgot my trusty superstition: the capable seer needs only a glimpse of the room or the forest or the city to describe it and its inhabitants more truly than one who has lived there always. A place gives no special writing powers to those born and raised in it.

  On the second day, during the panel, “The Plantations and the World War II Camp Experience,” Noriko Bridges read the one poem she has taken a lifetime to write. She wept in the middle of it, where the brothers are killed fighting in Europe, their families still imprisoned; many listeners cried too, some women holding hands. Writers who had not seen one another since camp days were having a reunion. They had first published in the camp newsletters.

  There was a lovely moment when Milton Murayama, author of All I Asking for Is My Body, talked about how pidgin vocabulary is changing. For example, nowadays, Hawai‘i people say, “good,” “mo’ bettah,” and “da best.” But in the old days, they said, “good,” “go-o-od,” and “go-o-o-o-od!” He said the “goods” louder and louder
and louder.

  On the third day, we Chinese Americans had a fight. Two of the panelists were Jeff Paul Chan and Shawn Wong, editors of the anthology, Aiiieeeee!, who said that publishers maintain a ghetto of female ethnic autobiographers and reject the work of male ethnic novelists. They said that the known bulk of Chinese American literature consists of nine autobiographies, seven by women. We are to draw the conclusion that the dominant society uses minority women to castrate the men. The audience was very upset. Some felt insulted at the speakers’ proud use of the word “Chinaman.” Lilah Kan from New York came bursting forth with her beautiful gray hair flying, to accuse the panelists of being part of a “Chinese American literary mafia.”

  Afterward, my feminist friends said we should have cheered for those seven women. The newspapers said the “brawl” was between the mainland Chinese Americans and the island Chinese Americans. But I think it was the men against the women—the men erecting Louis Chu, male novelist, as the father figure by knocking down the Jade Snow Wong mother figure. It was embarrassing that we were the only ethnic group that did not show a harmonious face; on the other hand, I felt good about our liveliness.

  On the fourth afternoon, I moderated the panel, “Themes and Concerns of Writers in Hawai‘i.” Probably because of the events of the previous day, people kept interpreting this title politically, but none of the panelists wanted to or could talk that way. Phyllis Hoge Thompson, speaking from the audience, said she had set out to write a poem about Tom Gill losing the election for Governor. “But the poem turned out to be about a tree in the snow,” she said. “Holding” is about the Scandinavian Yggdrasil tree, though even the name of the tree doesn’t appear. She was mapping the strange, secret way of poetry, and I wished she were on the panel instead of me, an “outsider.”

  The most wondrous presentations were two evenings given by the Hawaiians, who each gave his or her genealogy of teachers. They chanted and danced variations of the same mele, sometimes accompanied by gourd and sometimes by knee drums, for example. They told how a new mele is written today, often first in English, then translated into Hawaiian by a teacher, who tells the poet what kind of a mele it is (an Entrance poem, a Call, etc.), and where it belongs in tradition.

  The panelists’ families and students sat in the back of the auditorium, and after the program, the children walked up to the stage and sang for their teacher, John Kaha‘i Topolinski. Some participants who had attended the two previous Asian American Writers’ Conferences (Oakland ’75 and Seattle ’76) said that the Hawaiians were contributing the only new theory and scholarship. The Hawaiians also gave a vision of the artist, not as anchorite but as builder of community.

  Voice after voice telling all manner of things, by Saturday, I found myself saying my own work inside my head to counteract certain poets. My ears and head and body rejected their beats, which I also tried to cancel by tapping out my own rhythms with a finger. I felt like Johnny-Got-His-Gun, paralyzed except for that one finger. Earll, my husband, was reciting Yeats’s poetry to himself, as antidote.

  A rhythm that is wrong for you might stop your heart, or, anyway, scramble your brain. I learned that it is not story or idea that counts. What really matters is the music. A famous writer walked out as I read my suspenseful new chapter. (“‘Nothing but disdain,’ Mimi thought, ‘could make some Chinese passionate.’”—Diana Chang in The Frontiers of Love.) I watched her high-heeled silhouette dart out of the lighted doorway. She probably prevented my rhythms from breaking up hers. Or maybe she needed sleep; it was almost midnight.

  At the last set of readings Saturday night, Ninotchka Rosca was nowhere to be found. The rumor spread among the writers that she was at work on her novel; the writing was coming to her that night, and she would not interrupt it. We enviously told one another this story of discipline, dedication, and nerve. We could have been making the story up in a fit of withdrawal symptoms, having abandoned our writing for a week.

  Hundreds of us went to the lū‘au at the Sumida Watercress Farm Sunday evening. I felt a shock to see Stephen Sumida exhume the pig—pink and long like a human being—the dirt and burlap falling away. Will there now be a cycle of pig imagery in our work? How do reality and writing connect anyway?

  I know at least six people who fell in love at first sight during the conference—all requited—levels and levels of conferring.

  Strange Sightings

  According to mystical people, spiritual forces converge at Hawai‘i, as do ocean currents and winds. Kahuna, keepers and teachers of the old religion and arts (such as song writing, the hula, navigation, taro growing), still work here. The islands attract refugee lamas from Tibet, and the Dalai Lama and the Black Hat Lama have visited them. Some kahuna say they see tree spirits fly from branch to branch; the various winds and rains are spirits, too; sharks and rocks have spirits. If ancestors and immortals travel on supernatural errands between China and the Americas, they must rest here in transit, nothing but ocean for thousands of miles around. They landed more often in the old days, before the sandalwood trees were cut down.

  Whether it was because I listened to too many ghost stories or was born sensitive to presences, I spent about three years of childhood in helpless fear of the supernatural. I saw a whirling witch in the intersection by our house. She had one red cheek and one black cheek. Surrounded by a screaming, pointing crowd, she turned and turned on her broom. Maybe she was only somebody in a Hallowe’en costume when I didn’t know about Hallowe’en, but she put me into torment for years. I was afraid of cat eyes at night. Wide-eyed with insomnia, I listened in the dark to voices whispering, chains dragging and clanging, footsteps coming my way.

  At about the same kidtime, Earll saw a little witch dancing on his dresser. Hoping to help our son become a fearless down-to-earth person, we have raised Joseph secularly. We explain things to him logically.

  Joseph had already gotten through his babyhood when we came to Hawai‘i; he would seem no longer in danger of succumbing to the fear of ghosts. But Hawai‘i, new land which has recently risen out of the water, has overwhelming animism; that is, it seems more alive than cities which have been paved over for hundreds of years. Or Joseph developed his sixth sense at a later age than we did, and, person and place coming together, he started to see things.

  Even our friends with Ph.D.s see things in Hawai‘i. Our friend from Minnesota kept telling us about the row of fishermen walking in the ocean with torches at night. “They’re chanting to attract the fish,” he said. Later, he learned he was describing the march of the dead warriors. Another sensible friend tells us how he ran from block to block to dodge the nightwalkers. “I would’ve died if they crossed my path,” he said. The most unimaginative people hear the hoofbeats of the princess’s horse, and lock their doors. They wrestle with invisible foes at ceremonial grounds, see—and photograph—the face of the goddess Pele in the volcano fire, offer the old woman—Pele in disguise—water when she comes asking for it, floating on smoking feet.

  We were driving one day when I caught a sign that Joseph was not the simple little boy I had hoped for. He held his head, shaking it, and crying out, “I can’t stand it. The thoughts are moving so fast in there.” I didn’t like that; he felt his thoughts apart from himself; the very process of thinking hurt him. With my hands on the wheel, I gave inadequate comfort.

  One night I heard him walking about, and in the morning he said he had seen a light come over the top of the wall. (The wall of his room didn’t join the ceiling.) He had gotten up to shut off the light. What he saw in the living room was one window lit up and a man standing in it. The glow was coming from the man. We lived on the second floor.

  When he was about twelve, and should have been old enough to have outgrown his fancifulness, he came home early in the morning and jumped shaking into bed. He and his friends had been playing at a construction site before the workers came. Hiding from one another, he had lost his friends and was running home when he saw a Menehune, one of the little people
of Hawai‘i, standing on a lava rock fence. “It had a shiny crown on its head,” he said, “and its mouth opened and opened until there was nothing but this big hollow in its face. Its head moved like this, following me.” He tells about this laughing Menehune as factually as he tells a math problem, without self-dramatization or doubt.

  Months afterward, he wasn’t sleeping well; he kept groaning and tossing. “You know the voices calling your name before you go to sleep?” he said. “I usually like listening to them. But lately they’ve been very loud, and I don’t like their sound.” I was alarmed that he thought that everyone has voices, though pleasant ones, calling them. “The voices are coming out of the closet.”

  And I noticed that the closet door kept opening. I would shut it myself when he went to bed, and when I checked on him, I’d find it open.

  Without mentioning it, he bought five pounds of rock salt with his own money and sprinkled it all over the house; Hawaiians do that to stop hauntings.

  I remembered Chinese stories about voices calling, and the lesson would be that you mustn’t answer when you hear your name. You mustn’t follow the voices. I recalled Goethe’s poem about the Erl-king’s daughter. To find guidance, you have to use the lore that science scoffs at. If Joseph had started being afraid of bats, we would have hung garlic around his neck and around the house.

  I pulled his ears while calling his name and address the way my mother did for us after nightmares. He helped me seal the closet door with good Chinese words on red paper. We found a cross that had been part of a theatrical costume, also an ankh and scarab, replicas from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and hung them from the doorknob. We picked ti leaves and strewed his room with them.