A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

physically strong pure Hawaiian who surfs and fishes, reminiscent of the ancient race of
warriors that is almost extinct, he also speaks three languages, has traveled the world,
studied at the Sorbonne, has an artistic mind, and is of great beauty. While he is doomed
to vegetate at the leprosy settlement in Kalaupapa, Pono raises his daughters but drives
them away in rage when they grow up to marry non-Hawaiian men. Lyons interprets
leprosy as a metaphor, stating that “Duke’s body becomes a battlefield – a mutilated but
still potent embodiment of the Hawaiian culture’s ability to survive and retain integrity
and dignity despite the contamination introduced by outsiders.” 330
In the present, summoned by their towering grandmother Pono, four women
return to the Big Island coffee estate to inherit their family’s story and find out who they
are. The granddaughters represent “a spectrum of Hawaiian hybridity and history:” 331 The
hapa Chinese Ming is defined by her arthritic illness, lupus, and by her use of the drug
Dragon Seed (Opium?) which she smokes to keep her violent pain attacks at bay. She will
die towards the end of the novel. Vanya, hapa Filipino, works as an advocate of native
rights throughout the Pacific. She has grown up feeling inferior, colored, a “mixed-
marriage mongrel.” 332 Her rage leads her to join a hopeless bunch of would-be
revolutionaries later on, becoming a fugitive after trying to blow up a resort and killing an
FBI agent. The hapa-haole Jessamyn has lived as a veterinarian in New York, always
needing to make up for her mother’s humiliation of being rejected by her white in-laws,
looking for a cause to join and support. Rachel, hapa Japanese, has never known her
father, and has hence replaced him with a mysterious Yakuza, a member of the Japanese
mafia twenty years her senior. She has led a life of luxury, refinement, and waiting,
culminating in the short and intensely sexual visits of her gangster husband. The fragile
identities of mixed races, of an endangered race magnify the insecurity of all four women.
Learning their family’s history and taking the cured but disfigured grandfather Duke
home helps them come to terms with their lives: “They held his gaze, each one, looking
deep beyond the scars, the mutilation, looking deep within at who he was, and who they
were” (342). Transforming the blemish into a reassurance, Duke says: “You’re hybrids,
all of you. You’re what the future is” (371). In the end, the elders paddle out to sea to die,
330 Lyons 1995: 265.
331 Ibid.
332 Kiana Davenport, Shark Dialogues, New York 1995: 192.
118