A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

future that is sharply contrasted by the setup of the following story, “Clear Acrylic
Enamel.”
Refusing to grow up and live with the complications of this world, three young
Locals resort to drugs and rock’n’roll instead, sneaking into concerts and hanging around
stoned when not working at a service station. Since their singer and songwriter has
disappeared into the ocean on acid, their instruments are gathering dust. Sometimes they
find the energy to bodysurf: “Somehow water lures us like nothing else, with the possible
exception of music” (33). However, mostly they seem stuck in
our pre-car adolescent sniffing days, the pre-grass phase. Then, like right now, we
reminisced on our spacing out, on our hearing the ‘Now I know I’m stoned!’ buzz,
and, unforgettably, we laughed over the time we didn’t use the usual colorless
acrylic paint and stood out at a dance-party because our silver lips glowed in the
dark. Silver lips, the more we thought of it the more we laughed. It was the
accidental yet obvious emblem of our defiance. Our own silly way of saying fuck
your world (31).
But reality catches up with them in the form of interethnic violence. The narrator muses:
“Who created these walls? Were they there all the time? […] I am pulling because of the
way walls are so strategically placed, so remarkably calculated. I pull and feel the fence
come crashing down. I see the husky guy whack Lenny with the flashlight. I jump him”
(39). The promise of a multicultural future filled with opportunity posed by the
collection’s first story gives way to a rather disillusioning picture of contemporary
Hawai’i. What has happened in the gap?
The third piece again reaches back in time, relating stations in the life of a Local
Japanese photographer. In ten-year intervals, starting with his fear of being the next to be
interned in 1942, his struggle with being ‘Oriental’ in America is exposed. At first glance,
1952 seems to be a happy enough year for Isamaru with a third daughter and a steady job.
However, “walks had become his refuge since the war days, a way of balancing darkness
and light, a way to find the proper chiaroscuro, since everything had to be filtered by
Hiroshima gray.” Moreover, it is not incidental that the movie John Wayne is making in
Hawai’i casts him as “a government agent investigating communist influence in Hawaii’s
longshoreman’s union” (43). It is the everlasting white cowboy against the ‘Yellow Peril’
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