A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Hawai’i as home. The collection’s title poem, “Last Days Here,” for example, renders the
acceptance of impending death in the figure of an old fisherman who walks home without
having caught anything, his hands “content / with memories of fish in them.” 565 Such
mementi mori also trigger the need to belong, to continue, to view hollowed traditions
with new respect: Several poems explore how much ‘Chineseness’ is left, needs to be
held on to, constitutes the third or fourth generation in Hawai’i, which for them has
always already been an American state. “Manoa Cemetery (for Moi Lum Chock, 1975)”
is such a questioning, triggered by the yearly ritual of paying respect to the dead family
members, in this case the poet’s grandmother:
I am late as usual […]
but as we all take our turns
to bow and pray before your grave,
I begin to wonder who you are. […]
So what is it gains a place
among these laborers, merchants, tailors? […]
I should have my ashes scattered
from an airplane (58-60).
The vivid recollection of a Chinese New Year celebration also belongs in this category:
“Chinese Fireworks Banned in Hawaii (for Uncle Wongie, 1987)” wistfully registers
“This is the family picture / that never gets taken,” and has the poet’s wife stuffing
her styrofoam tea cup
full of red paper from the ground.
This is going to be history, she says.
Let’s take some home (66-7).
Ironically, it is the ‘outsider,’ the French-Canadian wife, who becomes the keeper of
tradition here.
Chock congenially expresses universal as well as specific concerns in an assuredly
Local way. One can also glean from his poems that he is aware of the necessity to prove
one’s right to belong, reciting one’s genealogy in order to be able to feel “Home Free.”
The poem of the same title is another instance of the realization that Hawai’i is a special
place, one that is endangered by overuse, carelessness, and disassociation from the land:
565 Chock 1990: 72.
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