Various immigrant groups that supplied the lion’s share of labor in the heyday of the sugar and pineapple plantations came to live alongside one another. Most residents of Hawaii would be defined, elsewhere at least, partly as Asian American, but their place in the islands is so dominant that defining them as “Asian” is almost meaningless to local academics. Instead, they tend to refer to component groups, the descendants of Filipinos, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese immigrants, mostly from long ago. There are also Native Hawaiians and Micronesians, not to mention people from Portugal and elsewhere. And, in many cases, their children grew up together, forging distinctly mixed island identities as they intermarried. Today, 23 percent of people in Hawaii consider themselves to be ethnically mixed—true of only 3 percent of Americans. And unlike on the mainland, being hapa, or mixed, has become a core part of the identity of the islands.

Especially as we move deeper into the Pacific Century, America’s remote ocean outpost embodies many elements of our nation’s diversifying citizenry and of our planet’s increasingly interconnected future: As people struggle to get by, they need to find a way to get along with their global neighbors. This is especially true of Hawaii, but in miniature. And one way Hawaiians have done this is by creating a new, inclusive identity: “local.”

When I moved to Hawaii in 2013, I quickly realized how important high school is here. When two locals meet for the first time, they often ask: What school did you graduate from? They aren’t talking about universities; they are talking about high school, which acts as a sort of proxy for home ground in a state where discussions of race, ethnicity and local identity often take place in coded language to avoid offending. Political candidates actively tout their schools to send signals about their roots, circles of influence, and how many degrees of separation there are between them and the people they speak with. High school anchors the person in a unique place and time in other locals’ minds. Given the small-town nature of Hawaii, it also allows people to visualize a school, a neighborhood, and a way of life. It ultimately signals whether someone is authentically local or not.

This is true even of politicians who graduated from top-ranked schools on the Mainland. Former Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann graduated from Harvard University, but in the islands, he can be seen as a graduate of the elite Iolani private school, a stone’s throw from Waikiki.

When I spoke to Hannemann in 2014 about why this is the case, he said that talking about high school signals something crucial in the islands—“that you’ll never forget your roots.” Speaking of Iolani, he added, “I’m still the same guy.”

In 2015, as part of a special project on race and ethnicity for the Honolulu-based media Civil Beat, I spoke with former Hawaii Gov. Ben Cayetano for a podcast on what it means to be “local” in the islands. Cayetano, who became America’s first Filipino-American state executive in the 1990s, suggested that poor immigrant communities in Honolulu didn’t, for the most part, have the space to carve out “balkanized” ethnic communities, as happened in places like Southern California with East Los Angeles, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Little Phnom Penh, Little Armenia, and so many others.

In Cayetano’s childhood, Filipinos, Japanese, Koreans, Portuguese, and even a Russian kid came of age on the same streets, attended each others’ birthday parties and religious celebrations, and even spoke the same pidgin English.

In such circumstances, he said, “You are forced to interact,” and learn about each other and yourselves. “And your racial identity sometimes gets a little murky.”

The resulting cultural mix, he said, is what a lot of people who grew up in the islands call “local.”

What constitutes “local” can provoke plenty of debate in the islands, including from Cayetano. And he acknowledged that the concept continues to evolve even now.

The former governor, now in his late 70s, says that being local is no longer just about being from a certain neighborhood, economic or social class. “It is the feeling, you feel local.”

“What’s interesting is that a lot of people come from the mainland and they … almost develop that same feeling because they buy into the local culture. And frankly some of the people who come from the mainland seem to care more about this state than the guys who are born here.”

In his telling, even new arrivals can aspire to something close to “local” status—at least these days. That’s significant given that 46 percent of people who live in the islands—which includes the large U.S. military presence—were born outside of the islands. It also helps to explain a common question directed toward non-locals: How long have you lived here?

Elsewhere, you could be forgiven for believing the questioner is simply making conversation. In Hawaii, such a query can be about something much more significant. Your answer can convey how committed you are—or aren’t—to the islands, whether you are just using Hawaii or have really taken to it, and whether you are connecting with the place. It even allows interlopers to know that they are outsiders, but feel at home in that. On some level, living in the islands for a long period of time can afford a non-local a surprising form of status; a little like the way a decade of sobriety can impress people at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

Time spent in Hawaii is, of course, an imperfect barometer of people’s acclimation. Some people live in the islands for decades and never really get the vibe. Others can rapidly develop an intuitive understanding of their adopted home and find their special place in it. My first-born son started to become local much faster than I expected. Born in Paris, he moved to Hawaii when he was 4 years old. English was his second language and it took him a couple months of living in the islands to speak it fluently, but by the time he was five he began to throw in the occasional term of pidgin and I’d sometimes overhear him playing with his superhero figurines, saying, in a singsong voice: “That’s a really good idea, brah.”

None of this is meant to suggest that Hawaii is, like its aloha-rich tourist propaganda, any sort of real paradise where everyone gets along. It is a complicated place with plenty of major problems, including when it comes to race, ethnicity and class. I’ve spoken with people who have recounted past harassment, bullying and worse in schoolyards, at roadside police stops and beyond, and it is sometimes linked to stereotypes about different ethnic groups.

Hawaii also has more homeless people per capita than any state, and the urban core of the capital offers a striking contrast in fate between the construction of glittering new residential towers and the ubiquitous homeless tent encampments. At its most extreme, the contrast creates a visual background reminiscent of the dystopian near-future Los Angeles in the film Blade Runner. Resentments around race, ethnicity, and wealth disparities in the most expensive state in the country sometimes result in surges of online anger and, less commonly, brawls in the real world.

Hawaii is changing too. In 2016, Honolulu continues to evolve into a new sort of global city—not a worldly megalopolis like New York or London, but a globally-influenced mid-sized city in the middle of the Pacific. Though “localism” still dominates outward identity politics, it’s worth examining where it may be used to skirt over issues of those excluded from the idyllic Hawaii.

With demographic trends suggesting that the U.S. will become a majority-minority nation in the 2040s, the country would do well to try to understand how local identities are fashioned, and how Hawaii is fashioning its own.

The post In the Aloha State, All (Identity) Politics Is Local appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“Do you remember when we left Hawaii after dad died and moved to the family home in Kyoto?” my youngest aunt would say, referring to the brusque relocation of the three sisters and their mother immediately after their father died of a massive stroke four years before the war began.

They thought they were going home, but found themselves caught between two conflicting worlds. “Japanese soldiers would harass us at every train stop,” my aunt recalled, “taking away our rations because we were American, so we discovered how good the roots of weeds and grasshoppers were when we cooked them in shoyu and oil.”

“Yes, but the soldiers didn’t last long,” my mother would correct her, “all of them were sent to war—even the old men and young boys—except for those annoying intelligence officers who kept interrogating us. Food was gone, too. That’s why mother went to the family temple in Fukui where there was rice.”

“You two were so selfish then,” my oldest aunt would tell her sisters, “but you were young. After our sad dinners, I’d be upstairs and you thought I was asleep. You’d hide a small piece of mochi or nori and you’d grill it over the charcoal that kept the house warm. You didn’t realize the smell of any food woke the rest of us up, and we would hear you trying to be so sneaky … bad girls!” This would send them into gales of laughter.

The stories would cycle again and again, I would sit with my mom and her sisters at the light green Formica dining table, surrounded by banana trees and their lilting voices and laughter, feeling privileged to be a part of their closed group, rapt at each retelling. I’d use each of these times with my aunts and mother, by then in their 40s, to color a fuller picture of the Imamura family history—of lives torn apart and torn between homes, between identities, and between the two sides of the vast Pacific. Their oldest brother, a Buddhist bishop sent to California to start a temple and an institute for Buddhist Studies, would later help communities of other internees resettle into a country that had distrusted them, imprisoned them, and allowed their businesses and farms to be taken; the second brother, a Harvard graduate, married into a wealthy Japanese family (which meant taking their name) and helped lead their kimono factories before working as an interpreter in a U.S. consulate after the war. Their youngest brother, a Keio University graduate whose dream job as a political reporter for the Mainichi News transformed into an embedded war correspondent with the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma, Thailand, and Malaysia, would later focus on U.S.-Japan relations in his reporting and would build ties between the countries through his support of professional baseball.

Author’s mom and younger aunt who identified as Hawaii-born Japanese Americans. Photo circa 1930s.

 
The three sisters, for their part, worked in the English-language section of a women’s university library, keeping their bilingual skills up so that they would be ready to act as translators and coordinators for the Occupation of Japan, accompanying rising Japanese political leaders to the U.S. to be trained in the ways of democracy. Across their different careers, the Imamura siblings were all encouraged by their father to be the Bridge People: connectors fluent in the history, language, culture, and values of both nations, whose skills and perspectives made their roles connecting Japanese and American worlds both inescapable and honorable.

Though the laughter of my mom and aunts’ after-dinner conversations fills my memory, I remember just as well when they’d go quiet.

A hush would fall as my mom recounted how, as a high school student in Kyoto, she sat in her university class listening to the school intercom announcement of the Japanese offensive on a U.S. Pacific naval base.

“When I heard they had attacked Pearl Harbor,” she’d say, “I started to cry because that was my home. Through my tears I felt all of these eyes slowly turn towards me. I was American. They all suddenly realized it.”

The sisters’ cadence would also slow as they spoke of their eldest brother, Kanmo, painting the picture of a scholarly, quiet, and handsome man—the 18th generation member of our family to become a Buddhist bishop. His life, they would reflect, was the hardest from the beginning. Kanmo was born in Hawaii, but sent back to Japan when he was four years old to be raised as a bishop. His childhood was a lonely life at the temple without the family: tutored by priests and a step-grandmother who was distant and cold. He would tell me, years later, how he would walk alone between the temple and the house in the winter, the Sea of Japan’s cold air blowing through his priestly robes, wondering why he couldn’t be in Hawaii with his family. He would return to Hawaii to be the priest at the largest plantation temple in Wahiawa, and would realize his father’s dream of growing a temple and study center in California to support the Japanese community there.

Just as Kanmo started to expand the temple programs, the war began. Soon he found himself supporting Japanese-American families in the internment camps, helping those forced away from their homes over unfounded allegations of conflicting allegiances (especially ironic for those who had sons proving their loyalty with blood and body in 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe, a battalion where young Japanese-Americans prominently served). Three of my uncle’s children would be born in the sand-filled winds of the Gila River internment camp. At the end of the war, he saw his mission as providing shelter, food, dignity, and spiritual support to those released from the camps, often with nothing more than a train ticket and $30 in their pocket, to reclaim the businesses and farms taken from them. He would spend the rest of his life building interfaith study centers and programs for the disenfranchised, and returned to his birthplace to become the Bishop of the Headquarters of the Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temples of Hawaii.

Author’s oldest uncle with his wife and first child at the Gila River Internment Camp.

 
The sisters spoke with reverence for their middle brother, Shinshi, too. The hard-working Harvard graduate, had dreams of working for the American government. His hopes were dashed—as fate would have it, he was the only of the siblings not born in Hawaii, and his Japanese birth disqualified him from service. His ambition took him elsewhere though— Shinshi would become the head of General Motors in Japan, another form of bridge-building.

The youngest brother, Tokushi, a basketball prodigy in his school days in Hawaii, had an improbable gig straight out of college: he was an American reporter embedded with the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma and Shanghai. Tokushi would go on to become the political editor for the Tokyo-based Mainichi Shimbun, one of the top newspapers in the country. But he didn’t forget his American roots, and spent his free time doing such things as recruiting Japanese-American baseball stars like Wally Yonamine for Japanese teams or coordinating a trip for Helen Keller, the first U.S. Goodwill Ambassador sent to Japan after the war. The bilingual jokester also managed to stay friends with his McKinley High School pals in Hawaii, and somehow remained the quintessential “local boy” among them, despite the miles that separated them. I still remember the bright energy that would fill the room whenever my aunts and mother spoke of him.

I knew the night was winding down when the sisters would turn to talk of their mother, a Buddhist bishop’s wife who herself came from a long line of bishops and abbots, poets and publishers, and military rulers from a Shogunate that rose in the 14th century and waned by the 17th.

“Do you remember her practicing for the citizenship test when we were growing up in Hawaii, memorizing the entire Emancipation Proclamation?” my oldest aunt would start, “It was so funny to hear her pronounce ‘Emancipation Proclamation’ and to hear her recite ‘…all persons held as slaves within said designated States, and parts of States, are, and henceforward shall be free.’”

“Her favorite movie scene was in Gone With The Wind,” my oldest aunt would recount, “and Scarlett’s defiance when she says, “As God as my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

In Japan at the end of the war but desperate to return to Hawaii with her children, grandmother Kiyo Imamura made her way back to Hawaii—“the birthplace of the ‘Bridge People,’” as she called it—to end her journey.

My family is not alone, of course. All second-generation Americans reconcile the norms and values of their family’s culture and of American culture, to the enhancement of each one. Such bridge-building replenishes and enriches our national fabric, reminding us of the universal relevance of our core values and adding texture to the American story. In Hawaii, where the host culture of Native Hawaiians accepted waves of immigrants through interracial marriage and linguistic and religious tolerance, cultural bridge-building is practically the state’s mission statement. Hawaii may seem far away from the mainland, but it couldn’t be closer to the American understanding of how diversity creates strength and unity.

The post In Hawaii, an Immigrant Family that Bridged Japanese and American Worlds appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Halfway through the connecting flight from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur, I was handed a landing card from the flight attendant and began filling out my passport details. Under nationality, I wrote Korean and Irish. After all, anytime someone at college in Santa Barbara, California, (or on the street, or in a retail store, or at a bar) would ask me the dreaded “What are you?” question, I knew that was the answer they were after. My mother was raised in Dublin and my father was of Korean descent, though he grew up in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo. When people in the U.S. ask you about your origin story, they usually don’t want to hear that you’re from Newport Beach.

That question generally is trying to get at where you are really, really from – that is, where your parents are from. In those transformative college years, when race, ethnicity, and gender were at the forefront of my class discussions, I felt as if I was always under scrutiny. I was not Asian enough to be Asian and not white enough to be white. Back then, I preferred to think of myself as a global citizen since I didn’t fit into one box.

Arriving at the modern airport in KL, as locals affectionately refer to the city, the immigration officer was quick to tell me to fill out a new landing card. My blue passport did not say “Korean” or “Irish;” it said United States of America. I was a bit mortified at my error and couldn’t blame it on the jet lag. It was as though I had forgotten that I was indeed American after a lifetime of mini-interrogations about my ethnic background.

In the backseat of the taxi, I remember being blown away by the skyline—it put Los Angeles to shame—especially the Petronas Twin Towers, which were the tallest in the world at the time. People were friendly and everyone I interacted with spoke English, making the initial transition far easier than I had anticipated. My editor Kean arranged for another student intern and I to stay with a generous host who refused to charge us rent. We knew nothing about him, only that his name was Charles and that he worked for the New Straits Times.

I loved working at the magazine, and aside from the stifling humidity (it only took a few weeks before I chopped my long hair off) and insane traffic, KL was better than I could have imagined. I ate stuffed pancakes and skewers from the hawker stalls, South Indian dishes off a banana leaf (with my hand, a first), the best stir-fried rice noodles, and even durian, the famed stinky fruit, at Charley’s encouragement. Like most people, I felt far more adventurous and independent when thousands of miles away from home.

That summer provided me with a comparative lesson in multiculturalism and diversity. Malaysia is about half Malay, 25 percent Chinese, and 8 percent Indian. Speaking of my own diverse background, I told Charley one evening that I was half-Korean. He hastened to correct me: “You are not half and half,” he said. “You are one plus one. Your whole mom and your whole dad.” After that conversation, I stopped referring to myself as half-anything, as that word didn’t describe the multitudes in my family. I liked his definition better.

Kuala Lumpur street market

Since Malaysia is an Islamic country with stricter laws (capital punishment for drug trafficking, for example), there were moments of culture shock, for sure. I became paranoid about the amount I pointed (it’s considered rude) and didn’t feel the freedom to dress exactly as I would have back in Santa Barbara (where surf culture rules sartorial choices). One weekend, we visited a nearby resort where an older man approached me saying that I looked like his fourth wife. As I tried to picture a sequence of four marriages, he made it clear that he actually had four current wives (plural marriage was not in my guidebook).

Even though I could probably pass as a local if I didn’t speak, the differing cultural traditions reminded me of my American-ness, a character trait I had never quite felt before. At five-foot-four, I felt tall and sometimes loud, even though no one at home would describe me as so. But what I noticed most was that Malaysians didn’t seem especially interested in my ethnic background. Instead, we talked about regular 20-year-old things like college life, boyfriends, and travel. On any given night, I could be out with my Chinese-Malaysian editor who was educated in Australia, my Indian-Malaysian friends who lived in London, but came back to KL for the summers, or a Muslim Malay colleague and her Dutch boyfriend. Everyone and everything—from colorful street markets to the local cuisine—was so multicultural that I no longer felt exotic, different, or all that interesting. I realized that in the U.S., the so-called melting pot was more of an illusion. I was still only able to “check one box” on most government forms (though that has changed since). Even in California, for all its diversity, ethnic groups tended to live and socialize in a segregated manner, whereas in KL, multiculturalism was visibly apparent, whether on television or at a local dinner party.

The author (second from the right) with co-workers in Kuala Lumpur.

As I met more Malaysians, I learned about their country’s colonial history, intolerant politics, and pervasive gender and sexual orientation discrimination, particularly outside of the capital. I started seeing a more complex country, realizing that it was far from perfect, just like my own homeland. Most notably, I was disturbed by the way LGBT people were discriminated against in Malaysia. Even though I had gay friends back home who weren’t fully embraced by all family members after coming out, their human rights still mattered and their identity was not considered a crime by our government.

My diary from the end of that summer says, “I feel very safe and happy, but as much as I love it, I can’t wait to go home. I realize now that being born in America makes me one of the luckiest people on Earth.” While America does not always offer “liberty and justice for all,” I certainly enjoy far more privileges as an American woman than I ever would have if I were born in Malaysia. I can dress however I like, say anything I want, and was raised by two feminist parents.

It’s funny, but my appreciation for America from afar made me embrace some of our shared culture in KL in ways that I rarely did back home, by listening to Rick Dees’ Weekly Top 40 countdown, watching blockbusters like Nicolas Cage’s Face/Off and smiling at the familiarity of a Mobil gas station.

On the long flight back to LAX, anxious for Mexican food from my favorite taqueria and dying to sleep in my own bed, I correctly identified my nationality on all forms, without needing a redo.

The post How Living Abroad Brought Me Closer to Home appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.