A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

and dearest and only Japanese friend. But she is as alien to me as that part of myself
which is like her” (73).
On the other hand, hapa people may be the object of an open or repressed longing
for the ‘other.’ In a chapter of Kathleen Tyau’s novel A Little Too Much Is Enough, the
narrator describes a hapa classmate with a mixture of envy and desire:
Annabel is hapa haole – half Chinese, half Irish. It’s the Irish, the haole blood, that
makes her hapa. Her hair is thick and long, the color of koa wood, dark brown
with streaks of red. Her eyelashes curl like waves, and her eyelids fold back into
tiny venetian blinds even without the help of Scotch tape. Her skin looks like a
vanilla ice cream cone licked smooth. When she dances Tahitian at school, her
skirt rides her hips like a boat in a storm. I watch the boys as they watch her with
eyes like balloons and their mouths wide open catching flies. 453
We can assume the narrator, named Mahealani, is native Hawaiian. When she is asked
out on a dance by a white classmate, she tries “to picture what our children would look
like. Would they have kinky brown hair and smooth pale arms, or straight blond hair and
furry brown skin?” (98). When she is not allowed to go, she admits: “He’s just part of a
recipe I’m cooking. I want to be hapa haole, like Annabel. I want her hips, her hair, her
eyes” (99).
In Kiana Davenport’s biographical essay “War Doll Hotel,” a hapa identity is
pieced together from “mental snapshots,” imagining the narrator’s forebears: Her mother
is “tea-colored and beautiful, broad cheeks, full lips, hair dark, electric,” while “her full-
blooded Hawaiian mother, dark, stately,” has to be imagined. Her father, “blonde and
pale, a boy in Alabama,” is defined by a father who in her picture is “wearing a white
robe, and a funny cone-shaped hood;” 454 the insignia of the Ku Klux Klan. Her parents
went to live in Hawai’i after being rejected by the father’s family and, in extension, by the
Caucasian-dominated post-World War II mainland society. When her mother died and her
father went back to Alabama, the teenager
grew up in the islands, surrounded by my mother’s family, my ‘ohana, dark
handsome husky men, big, graceful women with a buttery cast to the whites of
their eyes. My cousins were all mixed marriage offspring: Hawaiian, Chinese,
453 Kathleen Tyau, “Hapa Haole Girl,” in Hara/Keller 1999: 97-9, here 97.
454 All quotes from Kiana Houghtailing Davenport, “War Doll Hotel,” in Hara/Keller 1999: 279-91, here
279.
176