A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

While Native Hawaiian nationalists demand a return of Native Hawaiian Public
Lands Trusts – 1.4 million acres of Ceded Trust Lands and 190,000 acres of
Hawaiian Homes Trust Lands – half of all land in Hawai’i that was seized during
the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893 and is currently leased by
the U.S. military and private corporations, Local cultural nationalists lay a claim
to the history of the land that balances on a fine line against claiming
illegitimately acquired land itself. 581
She also delineates how Hawaii’s Asians have been and continue to be in a different
position from continental Asian Americans: The first immigrant laborers in Hawai’i came
to an independent kingdom. Claiming an American identity in Hawai’i inevitably
involves having to answer for imperialism, land theft, and ongoing ethnic inequities, for
an American Hawai’i is “predicated upon U.S. imperial intervention.” 582 Especially the
story of the Japanese in Hawai’i, from plantation poverty through internment and
honorable military service to immense political and economic success in recent decades,
shows the assertion of identity through claiming the history of the place to be a sensitive
undertaking.
What Fujikane terms the “Local Nation” is a mix of ethnicities, a conglomerate of
heterogeneous groups with diverse histories and agendas. As with any imagined
community, to employ Benedict Anderson’s concept, 583 its manifestations are metonymic.
Thus, Gary Pak’s community that lives in the “Valley of Dead Air” is marked as
ethnically indeterminable and hybrid by its character names (e.g. Leimomi Vargas) and by
the ‘generic’ Pidgin they speak. 584 The story has the residents of Waiola Valley suffer a
terrible smell emanating from the ground and infesting the very air around them. They
believe that an old native Hawaiian man who just died has cursed the valley. Therefore,
they publicly confess all the wrongs that might have caused him to be mad at them, such
581 Candace Fujikane, “Between Nationalisms: Hawaii’s Local Nation and Its Troubled Racial Paradise,”
typescript of a paper delivered at the 11th National Conference of the AAAS, 1994, Session 6.1: And The
View from the Other Shore: Rereading ‘Local’ Literature from the ‘Mainland:’ 4. Fujikane adds that “a
romanticization of a Local constituency occurs when Local subjects minimize dissensions and differences
between themselves in order to shore up their own cultural nationalism” (ibid.: 8).
582 Fujikane 1996: 43.
583 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism,
London 1985.
584 Fujikane notes that “Pak’s emphasis on foregrounding a Local community becomes much clearer when
we juxtapose The Watcher of Waipuna with other narratives like ‘Catching a Big Ulua’ where Pak employs
a specifically Local Korean pidgin” (Fujikane 1994: 11).
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