A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Fuckin’ Kahaluu used to be mean. Had pig all ova da place. Had taro. Kaneohe
Bay had all kine fish swimming close to shore. You could trow net from da beach.
But da best, and I know you not goin’ believe, but da best is you could drink da
wata from da streams coming down da mountains. […] Da beach in front Kahaluu
neva used to have shit-brown wata. […] My great-great-grandfadda used to be da
chief (54).
After having spent high school with drugs, cockfights, and dealing, Ken wants to get
away to college, leave the windward side where people stick together for better or worse.
Bored with undergraduate studies, however, he ends up as a strip bar bouncer on
Honolulu’s Ke’eaumoku Street, enjoying women, alcohol and money in his early
twenties, drug dealing, gripped by greed. Falling in love with Claudia, the Korean-haole
daughter of his employer Mama-san, makes him want to change his life again. Ken
receives yet another lesson in history when Claudia talks about her mother, who had been
a G.I. girl, the daughter of a comfort woman: “‘What were the last two major wars the
U.S. fought in?’ ‘Korea and Vietnam?’ ‘The natives were trained. These were the
businesses they ran for the soldiers during the war. So some of them, when they came
here afterwards, knew it was a money-maker and just continued doing it’” (130). Mama-
san shows her teeth when her daughter is pregnant, sending hitmen which Ken shoots in
anger and self-defense.
While Claudia proposes an escape to the mainland, he wants to return to the
windward side to make some money first. “We were going over the mountains, going to
my territory. Mama-san could not reach me there, not with her lackeys, not even with her
town cops. If she tried, her soldiers would get stomped. Her kingdom ended at the foot of
the mountains, and beyond this she had no jurisdiction” (151-2). His language becomes
feudal, filled with a hubris that will give way to exasperation and despair when his past
and his father envelop him again. Ken knows full well that “when you’re running in
Hawai’i, there’s no border you can cross, no life-line of safety. You’re on an island, and
you end up running in circles, surrounded by the largest ocean in the world” (162). In the
end, an abusive Koa has killed his wife who had left him and then himself, and Ken has
killed his father after a fight in which the old man had hit the 7-months pregnant Claudia.
In prison, Ken muses, “I can say race, but it’s not that simple, especially in Hawaii. […] I
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