A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

HCE became a vehicle for local group identity formation. As Lisa Linn Kanae
rightly states, this “was especially important to the plantation laborers’ children who
could neither connect ancestrally with their own native culture nor to a relatively foreign
mainstream American culture.” 468 After Hawai’i had become a territory in 1900, these
children had to attend public school, while the growing English-speaking middle class
sent their offspring to the mostly missionary-established private schools. By 1924, the
English Standard School System with its language proficiency entrance exams in effect
institutionalized ethnic and class segregation. In her short story “Fourth Grade Ukus,”
Marie Hara portayed such an entrance test from the child’s viewpoint: “‘Da bolocano,’ I
repeated politely at the cone-shaped mountain where a spiral of smoke signaled into the
crayon-shaded air. She must have drawn it. […] ‘It’s the vol-cano,’ she enunciated
clearly, forcing me to watch her mouth move aggressively.” 469 The continued isolation of
creole-speaking children in turn resulted in a strengthening and stabilizing of HCE,
defiantly called Pidgin by its speakers. Although “Pidgin was the result of a multi-ethnic
working class’s attempt at solidarity,” it soon was “perceived as an impairment to one’s
education, entering the job market, and Hawaii’s future in general:” 470 After World War
II, the military and tourism replaced sugar as the main economic resources, which drew
the working class from plantation to urban areas. A poem by Cathy Song describes the
ambivalence of a family’s move from the ubiquitous “pineapple fields” to the city:
Don’t talk like you came from the pineapple fields
meant we couldn’t talk with our mouths
full of broken sentences […]
We remained silent instead,
our tongues harnessed by the foreign shoelaces of syntax
restrictive as the new shoes Father brought home for us to wear. 471
Also, in the drive for statehood, the English Standard School System was abolished due
to the efforts of the newly empowered Democratic Party – which consisted mainly of
“reform-minded Asian-Americans […] who had not been represented in the English
468 Kanae 2002: n. p.
469 Marie Hara, “Fourth Grade Ukus,” in Chock et al. 1998: 32-42, here 32-3.
470 Kanae 2002: n. p.
471 “The Pineapple Fields,” in Song 2001: 5-6.
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