A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

In 1999, Marie Hara and Nora Okja Keller edited an anthology called Intersecting
Circles: The Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry and Prose, collecting an array of
imaginative explorations and biographical accounts of what it means to be the offspring
of more than one race. Local voices mingle with mainland ones, showing the different
outlooks on the issue, corroborated by the age of the writer: In her introduction
“Negotiating the Hyphen,” Marie Hara states that “I was born when my existence was
still stigmatized, into a long historical line of hapa people whose alliances and identity
had also been questioned. […] We were caught in an either/or-ness that marked our
generations with a specific racial intolerance.” 451 Her co-editor Keller, on the contrary,
recalls that she “had grown up in Hawai’i at a time when hapa was hip. In Honolulu
during the seventies and eighties ‘Eurasian’ was considered beautiful, cosmopolitan,
exotic. Friends, both Asian and haole, would say, ‘You’re so lucky to be hapa. Best of
both worlds’” (19). Being hapa is being hybrid. This may engender mixed feelings of
insecurity, alientation, or an anxious desire to fit into neat categories, to pass for one part
or the other. In Susan Nunes’ short story “Hybrid” the hapa narrator’s childhood friend is
pure Japanese. Her name, however, indicates the ambiguity of hybridity: “Naomi is in
fact a curious name, Western when written in English, but Japanese when written in
kanji.” 452 Significantly, “Naomi’s father raised orchids. It was both business and passion.
I now understand there are almost a thousand genera of orchidaceae, nearly twenty
thousand species, and an even greater number of hybrids, bred for their vigor and
strength, their ease of care” (71). The narrator loves the orchid greenhouse, but when
Naomi’s ancient grandmother shows them the parent plant, she is harshly reminded of her
own mixedness: “The old woman looked fondly at Naomi and spoke again. I caught the
English word ‘purebred.’ She was trying to describe, I now realize, what made the plant
special. But something in the meeting of the word and the experience alienated me. I felt
alone. Different. Not like them” (72-3). Giving no explicit reason, the narrator recalls
coming back to destroy the plant, “to crush each flower, […] and to rub away all traces of
the white roots.” She ends her childhood recollection on a wistful note: “She was my first
451 Hara/Keller 1999: 10.
452 Susan Miho Nunes, “Hybrid,” in Hara/Keller 1999: 68-73, here 69. An earlier version of the story
appeared as “The Grandmother” in Nunes’ 1982 collection A Small Obligation and Other Stories of Hilo.
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