A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

other sensitive readers have been right to protest against an award, because their protest
was directed at a person in a speaking position who is able to make use of the racist
undercurrent of a contemporary Hawaiian society that likes to think of itself as living in a
“racial paradise” (and in extension, of course, at a mainland Asian American community
that smoothes over internal inequalities and rifts to suggest unity). Besides promoting an
increased awareness of hegemony and difference, reminding the public of ongoing ethnic
inequities, such controversies highlight the importance of our profession, literary studies:
Only those who are aware of the power of words can educate sensitive readers and
writers.
To place Yamanaka’s writings on the Local map it might be illuminating to
supplement them with R. Zamora Linmark’s Rolling the R’s. 448 This ambitious novel can
be seen as the gay Filipino version of Yamanaka’s stories of growing up the hard way. It
is a patchwork of authentic voices, poems, songs, school assignments, dialogue, and lists
like the collection of stereotypes entitled “They Like You Because You Eat Dog,” in
which Filipino culture, sexual behavior, and outward appearance are reductively
contained for easy check-off. Because Linmark speaks about his own ethnic group, his
list is more easily understood to be a criticism of outside representation than Yamanaka’s
characters are. When the kids are asked for their respective ethnicities in school, most
know which they belong to. As is often the case in Local texts, their names alone tell, but
for “Caroline Macadangdang,” who “is one-fourth Filipino, one-fourth Spanish, one-
fourth Chinese, one-eighth Hawaiian, one-sixteenth Cherokee Indian, and one-sixteenth
Portuguese-Brazilian” 449 A very fashionable array, if only her last name Macadangdang
would not indicate the Local type specimen Filipino, which is what the majority of the
class identifies as, “except for Nelson Ariola, who says he is an American although he is
as Filipino as any Filipino can be” (67). After arguing back and forth over ethnic
stereotypes and labels, Edgar, one of the protagonists, concludes: “The ground you
448 Both authors began their writing as students of Faye Kicknosway, herself a poet from Detroit who came
to Hawai’i in 1986, teaching and working in the Poets in the Schools Program. For example, what later
became Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre had started as a creative writing assignment at UH in 1988.
Rob Wilson credits Kicknosway with “a mnemonic keenness that is downright spooky in its range of voices
and tones,” adding that her “wonder boy” students Justin Chin, Yamanaka, and Linmark “lovingly credit her
with the terror and ecstasy of a pedagogy that dismantled them of habit and easy convention, hence that
dragged strange voices out into the public as writing performances” (Rob Wilson, “Tracking Voices from
‘Elsewhere’: Entering the Counter-U.S. Poetics of Faye Kicknosway,” in boundary 2 28 No. 3 (2001): 117-
23, here 118).
449 R. Zamora Linmark, Rolling the R’s, New York 1995: 67.
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