A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

I find myself here, the other zone, the notquite, the fiftieth state but not really,
international but American: it’s vacation to most people but it’s home – that is
HOME, hOme, home – for the rest of us, the plantation and cannery workers; the
maka’ainana, siblings and descendants of the slop man, lei ladies, missionaries
now not so well respected but still feared; still the best to all who left for better or
worst. 577
Besides relating the inevitable memories, the relatives one has to visit, the languages that
mix and contend, the shock of Hawaiian weather – “am I kidding myself to imagine that I
could return home to think and work in this weather? I could faint in this weather. I could
sleep in this weather” (53), “It is so darn hot soo Hot so so hohTT” (57) – Lei-Lanilau
suffuses her narrative with specific references to the area she is exploring on her search
for home. One can retrace her steps through Mo’ili’ili streets, following her thoughts:
On the way to Varsity Theater, I passed my childhood. […] Now that those bushes
have been replaced with a chain-link fence, you realize that dreams and symbols
change but you can’t get too deep into this kind of thing in Hawaii, not in this
heat, not when the overt manifestations appear like tradition – especially the First
Day (54).
Even after years on the mainland, one day in Hawai’i makes it clear that this is the place
that has shaped Ono Ono Girl’s identity. Her account also neatly presents the
interconnectedness of the formative factors, namely her personal history as influenced by
the multiethnic community that shared the place she is from. In her struggle to express
her self, the narrator reveals how especially a writer quests for her home in language, or,
in the case of the Local writer, in many languages:
This is something beyond English which cannot Truly be understood in English.
[…]Ono Girl’s Song poorly, poorly translates into English. With the exception of
Hawaiian, her natural body, other languages are not sufficient (52), my mother
was yakking to somebody on the telephone. That was the perfect opportunity for
me and Mrs. Zane to speak both Hakka and guo yu. As I switched, she followed.
577 Carolyn Lei-Lanilau, “Ono Ono Girl’s Hula (aka Introduction),” in Rajini Srikanth/Esther Y. Iwanaga
(eds.), Bold Words: A Century of Asian American Writing, New Brunswick/New Jersey/London 2001: 52-8,
here 53. Ono is Hawaiian for tasty, and maka’ainana are commoners. Fellow Local writer Gary Pak has
called Ono Ono Girl’s Hula “an extraordinarily orgasmic journey into the be-coming consciousness of a
Chinese/Hawaiian/Local/Woman” (in the introduction to the fiction section of the same anthology: 133-9,
here 138). The novel was published in 1997 by the University of Wisconsin Press in Madison.
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