A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

In “Tutu on da Curb,” the old lady waiting at the bus stop is immortalized in a Pidgin
poem before she “going disappear / from da curb / foreva.” 362 Here, the poet speaks about
the ‘old lady Hawai’i’ that is being overrun by the “thick stink fumes” of progress. The
final section, “Home Free,” enacts the present, exploring everyday facets of being at
home in the islands.
Similar motifs can be found in Wing Tek Lum’s 1987 collection Expounding the
Doubtful Points, which is also structured into four parts, each with a different theme. A
master of seeing the essential in the mundane, Lum’s poems appear at times deceptively
simple in their informality of tone. Like the other third-generation Asian Local poets,
Lum has a family picture to describe, the most obvious window to a temporally and
spatially faraway origin. Lum’s shows his mother as a little girl in Shanghai, 1915. Again,
the exploration of family ties seems strikingly personal. In “To My Father,” he
remembers how his grandfather and father had their Chinese queues cut the day they
decided to stay in Hawai’i/America. He has reversed this symbolical act:
Today, unbraided,
my hair has grown long
because and in spite of those haircuts
you and he took. 363
In the paradoxical “because and in spite of,” the ambiguous stance of the poet’s voice
towards America is hinted at. The alleged freedom of life in the U.S. is abated by
ubiquitous racism. Lum’s more explicitly Asian American poems are analyzed in chapter
5.2.4. While both Eric Chock and Wing Tek Lum incorporate all four aspects of Local
identity formation in their poetry, Chock’s work has a stronger focus on place, Lum’s on
ethnicity.
As the aforementioned examples have shown, the collections of Bamboo Ridge
poets can be read as puzzles of identity, with many pieces exploring family and roots as
well as a historical situatedness in Hawai’i and/or the US. In short fiction and novels,
362 Chock 1990: 63. Fujikane thinks that while this third part is about struggles against development, the
collection’s last part reveals a disillusioned escapism (Fujikane 1996: 104-8). I do not agree with either
assessment, for here she seems to apply the same political/apolitical judgement that she criticized
continental Asian Americans had tried to force on their Island colleagues at 1978’s “Talk Story
Conference” (for her account of the conference’s misunderstandings and frustrations that arose mainly due
to a lack of knowledge of specific Island situations and problems, see Fujikane 1996: 83-4, or Fujikane
1994: 5-7).
363 Lum 1987: 27.
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