A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

icepaper airplane he labors to build from bicycle parts and other insufficient materials.
Finally, he accidentally causes a fire that destroys his almost-completed work.
Sung Wha’s middle years are brushed aside when the narrative leaps ahead to his
last years in a rundown Honolulu Chinatown hotel. When the assortment of poor retirees
and homosexuals is threatened with eviction, his rebellious spirit leads him to join the
young protesters against urban development. He tires of this last struggle, and finally “he
is free, his covenant with the world now completed. […] Now perhaps he can fly” (227).
When Sung Wha dies in the middle of speaking about the burnt-up airplane, his nephew
has made a kite from bamboo and ricepaper, ready to release the uncle’s spirit. Gratefully,
he has told the old man: “you make me live in another world, your world. It feels good
listening to you because when I listen to you, I’m not sitting on this metal chair in this
hospital anymore, but I’m over there. […] I even have a few bruises from your fights”
(259-60). One can conclude that in Pak’s fictional cosmos, the younger generation is able
to make sense of and profit from their elders’ experience. This resonates with his reason
for taking up writing in 1980:
There were many stories to be told in Hawai’i, in my family, in the community,
and they were important stories. Looking at my son who was just born, I felt that
maybe we should write these stories down, commit them to paper, so that my son
and others would be able to read them and have that as part of their cultural
experience. 315
This historiographic impulse to contribute to Hawaii’s multi-layered culture for the sake
of the coming generations is a frequent feature of Local writers’ works.
Chris McKinney’s The Queen of Tears, by contrast, can be read as a testament to
the failure of communicating the past. Soong, a sixty-year old widow and former Korean
movie star, returns to Hawai’i to attend her son’s wedding. All of her children, two
daughters and a son, have found themselves in relationships and situations they are
uncomfortable with. The groom, who marries a tough stripper, cannot live up to his own
expectations, while the oldest daughter is stuck in a loveless marriage, concerned about
her geek seventeen-year old son, somehow afraid of life itself. The youngest has come to
a dead end studying literature, feeling that she is too removed from real life. Observing
315 Brenda Kwon, “Interview with Gary Pak,” in King-Kok Cheung (ed.), Words Matter: Conversations
with Asian American Writers, Honolulu 2000: 303-19, here 304.
108