The Happy Isles of Oceania

by Paul Theroux

  With all these divisions, you would expect trouble, but Honolulu does not have the conflicts usually associated with strict class-ridden societies. Even the ritual “Kill-a-Haole Day,” popularized at some of Honolulu’s public high schools, is merely a macabre (and toothless) prank rather than a piece of racial vindictiveness meant to inspire terror in whites. In the sense that many races work harmoniously together, with only the softest undertones – the murmurs of racial memory – and that the races also habitually intermarry, producing startlingly good-looking offspring, Honolulu may be the most successful multiracial culture in the world. At least, I have not seen another to rival it. One of the proofs of its success is that people in Honolulu are contemptuous rather than envious and resentful about the clubs (the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Pacific Club) which until recently did not admit orientals, or the banks that discriminated against certain races in giving loans.

  And oddly, in a city of so many races, there are seldom racial jokes in circulation. The few I heard were almost incomprehensible. They were never about orientals or Hawaiians, or even islanders; nearly always the joke-victim was a Portuguese or Filipino.

  Q. How can you tell when a Portugee girl is having her period?

  A. She is only wearing one sock.

  Filipino jokes are almost entirely concerned with the Filipino reputation for eating dogs.

  Q. What did the Flip say when he was shown his first American hot-dog?

  A. “That’s the one part of the dog we don’t eat.”

  There is a certain slang idiom, loosely based on Hawaiian Pidgin, which conveys a heavy humor and is almost exclusively concerned with eating, drinking beer, being fat, being lazy, being slow-witted, surfing, playing loud music, taunting tourists and owning a four-wheel-drive vehicle. This is purely local and almost untranslatable. It is a manner of speaking, not joking, but joshing, and only mokes engage in it. Like English cockneys, who in temperament and lingo they greatly resemble, mokes are at the bottom of the social ladder, but have such a well-defined place in society that they are proud of it. Some are islanders, some are Hawaiians, some are a complex racial mix, but they are all dark and chubby, and they are ambiguously regarded as both cuddly and lethal. Mokes constitute a fraternity and even greet each other “Brah” (brother). They are self-mocking, and they ham it up in their baseball caps and T-shirts, crowding the beaches like the Tons-of-fun, but anyone foolish enough to laugh at them, or even to make sustained eye contact, is quickly in danger.

  The so-called mokes, when gainfully employed, work as mechanics or manual laborers, but no matter what the job there is a race in Honolulu which has monopolized it. Tongans are tree-cutters and yard workers, though the more detailed landscaping is done by Filipinos, who are also field workers – accounting for most of the pineapple-pickers. Agriculture was formerly an occupation of rural Japanese. Samoans wash cars. Doctors and lawyers are Chinese and Japanese. A surprising number of haoles are engaged in real estate. Yet class distinctions, unlike job descriptions, are not strictly racial but rather economic and, in Honolulu, always geographic.

  “We were involved in product transitions,” someone told me at a party, explaining why business was bad. “We descoped the high end of our line.”

  It seemed to me that people in Honolulu talked business most of the time. Business or golf. They rose early – though no matter how early they got up they never managed to beat the freeway traffic, which was dense even at six in the morning; they worked hard, they hustled; they went home and hid – privacy being something that is greatly desired in Honolulu.

  Each class has its own turf, from the low-income areas of Kalihi, and Makaha in Waianae, and the middle-and upper-class serenity of Manoa and Nu’uanu, to the superrich in Waialae-Kahala. All of Hawaii’s beaches are public, yet each class sticks pretty much to its own shoreline. Some of the most beautiful beaches in the islands are found on the Waianae stretch of coast, but they tend to be avoided because of the intense territoriality of the locals. Haoles are cheerfully tormented and sometimes attacked in Waianae. And each class sticks to its own sports, ranging from surfing to golf, and to its own depravities – the poor using “ice,” crystal methamphetamine (pohaku in make slang), the middle-class youth smoking pot (pakalolo, “crazy smoke”), the wealthy snorting cocaine. There is no crack and, indeed, no perceived drug problem. Gambling is illegal, and so naturally is very common in a clandestine way, but the preferred games also have class associations – cards for Chinese, cockfights for Filipinos, dice for Japanese, trips to Las Vegas for those who can afford it, and so forth.

  This exclusivity is also the case with the military, who exist in their tens of thousands in and around Honolulu, on bases and in married quarters. Soldiers are known to locals as “jar-heads.” They constitute a sub-class and they keep to themselves. They don’t want trouble. They know they are lucky to have been posted here. They swim at their own beaches, shop at the PX, attend their own churches and schools. Unlike other cities which have bases nearby, there is little casual fighting between soldiers and locals. The military is known only by its violent crimes – a rape, stabbing, a shooting: typically a young jar-head from Schofield Barracks or Fort Shafter committing an offense against a local woman.

  Violent crime is always reported in detail in the daily paper, because in this basically humane and gentle society it is still considered extraordinary. Handguns are outlawed on the islands. Not many rifles are privately owned. There is no capital punishment. The population’s predominantly oriental cast means that it is not a confrontational society. It is not a horn-honking society, either – anyone leaning on a horn is immediately seen as an ignorant newcomer or a tourist. Drivers are polite. It is essentially Christian, and not a litigious society. In a patient way, scores are settled over the long term. Revenge is a dish best eaten cold, might be a Honolulu motto. The Chinese who were blackballed at the Outrigger Canoe Club started their own golf club, Waialae, and now haoles are lining up to join this exclusive club.

  Once in a great while there is a meaningful murder or suicide in Honolulu: everyone seems to understand. Oh, he had gambling debts, someone will say, or She was involved in a really hot scandal. Anyway, these are islands. People are intensely visible and nothing is forgotten. The person you are rude to today might be your golf partner tomorrow. In the absence of satirical magazines or good newspapers or investigative reporting, there is the island standby of gossip, and in Honolulu rumors travel with great rapidity.

  Middle-class Honolulu society is law-abiding, church going, and rather sanctimonious – in fact everything but racialistic. A family that has married completely within its own race is the exception, not the rule. Anyway, the Honolulu bourgeoisie is not a racial group but an economic entity, and in spite of its ethnic sentiments, it is Christian and has much in common with the aspirations of mainstream America. There is a strong sense of family, and an even stronger sense of the extended family. Within the bourgeoisie, old Japanese are bumpkins (but friendly), new Japanese are jovially regarded as uptight (and shrewd), Chinese as niggardly (and independent), Koreans as tough (and cruel), Hawaiians as indolent (and mellow), Filipinos as self-serving (but hard-working), Portuguese as excitable (but buffoons). But in Honolulu race is not an indication of class.

  The clearest and most concise indicator of your class in Honolulu is your high school, because until very recently this was the highest educational level you were likely to have attained.

  “You find out who someone is in Honolulu by asking them where they went to school,” a local woman told me.

  And it’s true. It is the key question in any introduction.

  “Never mind college,” she went on. “Once you know their high school you know everything. Where they live. How much they make. Their politics. Their outlook, their expectations. If they went to Farrington they’re makes. If they went to St Louis they’re bourgeois Catholics. If they went to Radford they’re probably military or new haole. If they went to Roosevelt, they�
��re mainstream. And at the top is Punahou.”

  Punahou students are seen as Hawaii’s achievers. The school is highly regarded academically and, founded in 1841, was the first high school to be established west of the Mississippi. It produces community leaders, but it also produces obnoxious prep-school pushies, smug and preening and forever gloatingly recalling their schooldays. Like many of Honolulu’s institutions, Punahou has its roots in the Protestant missions. There is something pervasively old-world in Honolulu, which Punahou – with its colors of buff and blue and its tribalism and its cultivated silliness – seems to epitomize.

  This is undiluted New England anglophilia; Yankee missionaries had a profound influence on the islands – on the class structure, the culture, even the architecture of wooden white frame and shingled houses. In Honolulu, and in Hawaii in general, anglophilia amounts at times to anglomania. The Union Jack boxed-in on the Hawaiian state flag is an ominous sign of this, and at times Hawaii seems more like the Sandwich Islands of yore than the fiftieth state. It is a fact that the upper class – old family, Republican, mainly haole – resisted statehood and saw it as a slippery slope. Nearly everyone else agrees that it was statehood that brought racial equality to the islands.

  Well-heeled Hawaii, with its garden parties and its snobberies, its cultural affectations, is deeply anglophile (and still resentful of statehood). This ought to make a new haole a sure bet for fitting in; but Hawaii’s complexities do not insure that. The word haole – which means “of another breath [or air]” – carries with it many ambiguous associations and qualities, and because of that it is an enigmatic word, describing an unknown quantity, with a suggestion of someone who is “not one of us.” I seldom heard this word without imagining it written as it is spoken, like an angry complainer: howlie.

  And there are the tourists, but they come and go, and apart from people working in the tourist industry, no one takes much notice of them.

  There are six million tourists a year, each one staying on average eight and a half days. Two million are Japanese, and many of those are in the marriage package – room, white limo, nondenominational service, champagne – at $10,000 a pop. Every so often a new bride leaps to her death from an upper floor of a luxury hotel. These arranged marriages, local people mutter, as a Shinto priest hurries upstairs to exorcize the ghosts in the room with chants and howls and incense. The room is soon reoccupied. Tourism is the largest industry and the mainstay of the entire state. But tourists, even without realizing it, are also territorial. They keep to Waikiki. Except for the beach, the hotel, the luau, the pineapple tour, they do not stray far afield. They are undemanding, they are generally smiled upon, they are seldom ridiculed, they are hardly ever mentioned, except by people who are paid to look after them. It is acknowledged that they have brought prosperity to the state. A local person who kept away from Waikiki could form the impression that tourists do not exist. In no sense do they enter the life of Honolulu, which is not a city really but a highly complex small town, Main Street running into Polynesia, America-by-the-Sea, the splash of surf at the shore, Lovely Hula Hands, the roar and monotony of traffic, and inland the eternal snapping sound of the Weedwacker.

  But tourist Honolulu and town Honolulu not only coexist; each makes the other possible – sometimes in unexpected ways.

  One night, I went to the “Don Ho & Friends Polynesian Extravaganza” at the Hilton Hawaiian Village – a profusion of leis, muumuus, fruity drinks, white shoes and sunburned noses – and Don came on singing Tiny Bubbles (in da wine) in his bored and growling way.

  He was applauded.

  Shuffling peevishly, he said, “I am so sick of that song. God, I hate that song. I gotta sing it every night!” Then he sang an encore.

  Don Ho is a permanent fixture at the hotel and has been for twenty years. But even his churlishness did not dampen the ardor of the audience. There were dancers, there were more Hawaiian songs, including Pearly Shells (in da ocean), The Hawaiian Wedding Song (the singer accompanied herself using deaf and dumb signs), and a young male singer, a local fellow, joined Don in singing I’ll Remember You (long after dis endless summer is gone).

  A week later I went to Aida, well staged by the Hawaii Opera Theater, with an imported soprano and tenor. The baritone was Les Cabalas, the man who had sung with Don Ho & Friends. And since the opera is mainly by subscription, no tourists could have known that the colorful Hawaiian local guy in the ugly shirt with Don Ho was moonlighting, with a powerful voice and a strong presence, as Amneris in a Verdi opera.

  Eventually I unpacked my boat and paddled out from Kailua on the windward side of Oahu. Kailua, over the volcanic ridge from Honolulu, is famous for being residential, middle-class and military, mainly haole. It is a safe haven of one-storey bungalows, and it is filled with loitering US army kids – brats on bikes. It has one of Hawaii’s most pleasant beaches and, in addition, several picturesque islands a few miles offshore, but is part of the great sweep of coast, which takes in three bays and is contained by two magnificent headlands. Even when the tradewinds are strong the surf is tolerable for a small craft, and I happily paddled out from Kailua, past Lanikai, to the Mokuluas (“Two Islands”).

  They are a pair of rocky peaks standing in the lagoon, near the reef, on a ledge of coral. I saw an endangered green sea turtle as soon as I was half a mile offshore, and of course it was brown – the “green” crept into their name when they were still being eaten, because their fat was green. The windward sides of the Mokuluas were being beaten by surf, but on the lee shore, waves were breaking more gently on a small sandy beach.

  I saw other kayakers for the first time in the whole of my trip through Oceania. They were surfing their boats through the waves behind the Mokuluas, they were skidding down the swell between the two islands, they were fighting the chop nearer the reef. I had never felt safer.

  I waited for the lull between waves and landed on the small beach of the north island. Signs at the edge of the sand explained that this was a sanctuary for seabirds, ground-nesting shearwaters, and that it was forbidden to venture up the slope of the hill. The reason was obvious – the birds had dug nesting holes all over the slope and were compactly occupying them. Because it was such a small island, visitors and birds coexisted uneasily. There were a few picnickers – one from a kayak, half a dozen from a motor-boat. Every so often a startled shearwater would take off, mutter ka-kuk, and fly swiftly away.

  This island was a microcosm of Hawaii. It was lovely, it was lush, it was heavily visited, it was threatened, it seemed doomed. Everything had been fine until recently, but then great numbers of people began going to the Mokuluas on weekends. I paddled here half a dozen times, and I noticed that on weekdays there were birds sitting quietly all over the island; on Saturdays and Sundays there were no birds, and there was sometimes litter and the remains of fires – although both were expressly forbidden. Camping is also forbidden. But because the island is so pretty – just like Oahu, you might say – people tend to break the rules.

  “Lanikai residents say they frequently see people camping overnight there in tents,” the Honolulu Advertiser reported recently, “walking beyond the no-trespassing signs and into the bird-nesting areas and climbing to the summit of each island.

  “The worst intrusion … was two rock concerts … held on the small beach,” the article went on, and it described the illegal crowds, the loud music, the beer-drinkers on this fragile piece of land. There were strict rules governing the islands, but Hawaii’s Department of Land and Natural Resources did not have the manpower to enforce them, and so it seemed – at this rate – that the Mokuluas were doomed, the birds either dead or gone, the beach crammed with pleasure-boats, the hill with campers, the air filled with rock music.

  It’s seventy-eight degrees in paradise, the disc-jockeys say in Honolulu, without a trace of irony.

  It often seemed to me that calling the Hawaiian Islands paradise was not an exaggeration, though saying it out loud, advertising it, seemed to
be tempting fate. They are the most beautiful, and the most threatened, of any islands in the Pacific. Their volcanic mountains are as picturesque as those in Tahiti, their bays as lovely as the ones in Vava’u; the black cliffs of the Marquesas are no more dramatic than those on Molokai and Kauai. The climate is perfect. And they are highly developed, with great hospitals and schools and social services and stores. But modernity has its price. There is beach erosion. There is pollution. There is a constant threat of water shortage or contamination. The traffic problem seems at times overwhelming. Oahu is overbuilt and so expensive that young people leave, unable to believe that they will ever be able to afford to buy even the simplest house. Maui is overdeveloped spoiled, some people say with more hotels than it will ever need. The little island Lanai is losing its pineapple industry. Niihau is an ecological catastrophe, according to environmentalists. The Big Island is wrestling with the issue of development. There is still hope on Kauai, under an enlightened mayor who made campaign promises to limit hotel development and to put islanders’ interests first.