A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Filipino, dark, tan, yellow, so many hues. I didn’t
know how happy I was, how secure, locked in the bosom of this large, rollicking,
feverish, high-strung clan (281).
Insecure about her identity, she moved to New York City. Alternately trying to pass for
white and hiding out in an YWCA filled with multiethnic residents waiting for “green
cards, a husband, a job, degrees” (282), she later admits to having “spent years ignoring
my native blood, but ignoring the Southern blood, too. It seemed I’d spent years of my
life denying all of me, trying to run my genes off, like fat” (289). Perhaps it is such
formative years of “making ourselves up as we go along” that makes the hapa person a
born storyteller, just like the migrant. In accordance with Salman Rushdie, the narrator’s
black friend from South Africa thinks so:
In my country when whites stare at me, there’s no ambiguity, it’s pure hate. I
always know who I am. You are different. Mixed blood, mixed cultures. You have
to improvise, hide, take sides. […] We’re all hybrids of the new world. […] This
is why we write, juggling our little flames. One burns through the muck to find the
core (289).
Thus, Davenport has chosen to write herself as a mixed person, an Island woman, and yet
she is claiming primarily her Hawaiian side: She recounts how she had asked her mother
once if she was “Hawaiian or Caucasian. Both, she says. What am I, first? I ask. She
doesn’t hesitate. Hawaiian. But I don’t look Hawaiian. You will, she promises. It works
its way out from the blood” (280).
Similarly, Nanea Hoffman’s biographical sketch “All-American Family” explores
the reverberations of her multiethnic heritage, recalling that she has felt a part of neither
group, and realizing that none of the ‘parts’ can contain her.
I was a mixture of Okinawan, Hawaiian, Chinese, and German. Did that mean I
was impure? […] I could have been Hawaiian. Like the infamous One-Drop rule
in the old South, which meant that anyone with even a hint of African blood was
considered black, regardless of their skin, a drop of Hawaiian blood, however
small, meant the Hawaiians would gladly claim you as one of their own. I am just
a little over a quarter of Hawaiian, 5/16ths to be exact, […] but somehow, I felt
we were too mainstream to be really Hawaiian. 455
455 Nanea Hoffman, “All-American Family,” in Hara/Keller 1999: 301-12, here 302-3.
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