A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

plantation hierarchy are especially entrenched: 433 Social class is linked to ethnicity, and
due to their age and gender, the young girls are at the lowest level of this hierarchy.
Hence, Kala struggles to maintain the little authority she has by bullying and intimidating
her peers, using her ‘insider knowledge’ to subjugate the newcomer, while she herself is
intimidated by the uncle who takes care of her, by an older guy who poses as her
boyfriend: “and I trying for pull away / but he pull me closer to him.” 434
The whole book questions the nature and manifestations of authority, as even
Yamanaka’s fiercest critics have granted. While the sociocultural realities of Hawai’i and
its legacy of plantation colonialism can partly account for the writer’s treatment of her
topic and characters, it is these realities that also explain the anguish of Filipinos, who
have been the perpetual victims of stereotypes. Historically, Hawaii’s Filipinos started out
as a bachelor community, barred from importing their wives or picture brides like other
immigrants. The sexual predator image originated in plantation times, but like other
problems derived from that era, it still thrives and is recycled by a racist and classist
society. Logically, a Filipino man is the most menacing figure that the kids within
Yamanaka’s fictional cosmos can conceive of. In Saturday Night, the author strives to
expose this kind of menace as really handed down hierarchically from those in power:
Thus, ‘Felix in his blue Valiant’ is only spoken about, inferred as a scarecrow. In Blu’s
Hanging, however, the ‘myth’ materializes. Candace Fujikane, associate professor of
English at UH states: “Yamanaka’s representation of Uncle Paulo as a child molester and
rapist is a deliberate choice that she made as a writer after being directly confronted about
her representation of local Filipinos at her readings and interviews during the four years
preceding the publication of Blu’s Hanging.” 435 Then why did she do it? Local Filipina
poet Darlene Rodrigues ventures an answer:
There is a difference between a writer showing us how an adolescent narrator can
only perceive Filipinos from her own narrow point of view, and a writer creating
Filipino characters whose actions confirm the stereotypes. […] She was
intentionally playing on a trope that would have an impact on people. It’s a
433 For careful readers, the place is vividly evoked in lines such as “Felix going follow you home in his blue
Valiant / when you go plantation side past / the big banyan tree, past the sugar mill, / past the pile of
bagasse, down your dirt road” (Yamanaka 1993: 16).
434 Yamanaka 1993: 18.
435 Fujikane 2000: 169.
167