A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

Mrs. Zane can speak several dialects of Hakka as well as many dialects of
Mandarin. As we were talking stories, I asked Mrs. Zane if she could understand
me when I spoke Hakka to her (54), Granpa married tutu and they were happy: he
never wanted no mo China. He learned to speak Hawaiian, ‘olelo o Hawai’i and
he never spoke Loong Doo again (57), Teasing, we slice each other’s breath with
kung fu daggers, flips, trips, and poetry. […] Your English must be taut and
somewhere in the realm of the obnoxious but your Hakka can be Rude,
ssssSexual, sec-ular, conTemptuous, Vain, VULgar, hiStoric, INdulgent (58).
The linguistic mosaic becomes a tapestry woven around and through her life, like a quilt
or tapa mat, a Local fabric embodying home.
Just like language, the past can also become a place that spells home. In her short
story collection Talking to the Dead, Sylvia Watanabe has gracefully combined the need
to salvage the past with a storyteller’s sensitivity for the appropriate way of presenting it:
I first began writing because I wanted to record a way of life which I loved and
which seemed in danger of dying away […] I wanted to save my parents’ and
grandparents’ stories. While this nostalgic impulse continues to color my work, I
have begun to relize that tradition is not the static thing I once imagined and that
the act of writing re-creates even as it records. 578
Her tragicomic short stories portray a family and its surrounding community in Luhi
village, Maui. Alternating between gossip and silence, between references to WWII and
the Vietnam War and flashes of magic realism, the pieces add up to an evocation of a
place anchored in the past, alive in narratives that are layered beneath the surface of many
contemporary neighborhoods in Hawai’i. In the first story, “Anchorage,” the young
narrator is torn between the opportunity to go to college in Alaska and the desire to
remain, wanting to be the anchor that moors her family. Place and community can be
apprehended as an uncanny patchwork, but also as an orderly whole, symbolized by the
huge quilt her grandmother has been making out of the neighborhood’s stolen laundry:
From where I stood, perhaps fifteen feet away, it seemed to contain every color in
the world. I moved closer, and the colors began to cohere into squares, the squares
into scenes – each scene depicting places and people in the life of the village.
There were the sugar fields sloping down to the water. […] I looked closer. There
578 Sylvia Watanabe, Talking to the Dead and Other Stories, New York 1993: 129-30.
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