A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Then he going drag you to his house,
tie you to the vinyl chair,
the one he sit on outside all day,
and smile at you with his yellow teeth
and cut off your bi-lot with the cane knife.
He going fry um in Crisco for dinner.
That’s what Kala told me. […]
No clip your toenails at night
And no wear tight jeans or
Felix going follow you home with his blue Valiant […]
Kala said he rape our classmate Abby already
and our classmate Nancy. 430
Throughout the book, barely adolescent girls’ voices speak of sexuality, power, fear, and
shame in a graphic language. They are classic unreliable narrators, full of insecurity,
caught up in power games, oppressed because of their gender, age, class, and ethnicity.
Kala’s advice can be dissected as a mélange of folkloristic superstition, old wives’ tales,
horror stories, and fear of the physical changes brought about by adolescence. 431 Hence,
the above portrayal of the Filipino stalkers, perverts and rapists needs to be evaluated in
its fictional context. The author herself said in reaction to the initial criticism, “The evil
Filipino man with the yellow teeth never materializes in the book. He is presented as a
myth, and that’s where he stays.” 432
With this bogeyman Filipino, as with her other creations in Saturday Night, she
shows how stereotypes are recycled and applied; as weapons, as shields, employed by the
insecure, handed down in much the same way as pressure is handed down, from top to
bottom. The poem must be situated in its place-specific context: Pahala is a run-down
sugar plantation town on the rural Big Island of Hawai’i, where the remnants of
430 Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre, Honolulu 1993: 15-6. Bi-lot is an Ilokano
word for vagina.
431 The intimidating portrayal of adolescence as a dangerous time and of sexuality as invasive and violent is
set off by the collection’s final part about the incipient “love” between young Lucy and the older school
dropout WillyJoe whom she teaches to read and write. The forbidden whistling in the dark is picked up
again as “whistling our secret whistle, three times, from way down the street. The way I call you out your
bedroom window at night” (Yamanaka 1993: 132). Theirs appears as a tender, but potentially destructive
relationship. Both are equal in the sense that they have never learned to love themselves. WillyJoe’s love
frees Lucy into self-confidence: “I IS. / Ain’t nobody / tell me / otherwise” (Yamanaka 1993: 140).
432 Quoted in Fujikane 2000: 169.
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