A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

or girls with hair like long moss in the river. […]
I cannot wake until I bring
the fish and the girl home (42).
Thus, becoming oneself is learning to cast one’s line, knowing what to fish for, catching
it, and finally using instead of wasting what one caught. The ‘catch’ can be thoughts,
words, and stories, and fishing is an act of beauty and skill, an act of building one’s life,
yet what is caught is fixed and thus killed in the act of putting it down on paper. “Poem
for My Father” also echoes the predicament of the Asian American author between
‘necessity’ and ‘extravagance’ as elaborated by Wong. 360 In a similar vein, Sumida
elaborates on the difficulty of the decision to become a Local writer:
A youth in a Hawai’i community would be torn between becoming like the
visiting writer without a local community, on the one hand, and conforming with
community and family standards of propriety, on the other. What is worse, the
writer by definition is outspoken, a dealer in words. But to the contrary, the
community ethos strongly emphasizes the ‘virtue’ of silence, a continuing legacy
of cane field rules against talking while working, condemnations of the
vernacular, Pearl Harbor, World War II, blackouts, and the arrests of those issei
and nisei who had voices in the pre-war Japanese American community. 361
The third part of Chock’s book deals with the passage of time, the wistful realization that
change is inevitable. If “The Meaning of Fishing” is about experiences that shape a
person, form her personality, then “Last Days Here” handles the losses on the way, the
deaths, the endings. In “Papio,” the Hawaiian term for a local fish, he pays homage to an
uncle – and to a love that did not die with him:
You wanted your ashes out at sea
but Aunty kept half on the hill.
She can’t be swimming the waves at her age
and she wants you still (57).
360 See chapter 3.3. The female Black scholar bell hooks has paraphrased the same concern in her short
essay “Talking Back:” “Writing a poem (when one’s time could be ‘better’ spent sweeping, ironing,
learning to cook) was luxurious activity, indulged in at the expense of others” (in Ferguson et al. 1990: 337-
40, here 338).
361 Sumida 1991: 245.
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