A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

of an area that was to be cleared for development leave the characters (and the reader)
with the frightening impression that “heavy-handed spirits were enforcing the jurisdiction
over the area” (84), or rather, that the land itself, infused with the bones and the mana of
its indigenous inhabitants, fights back when not treated appropriately. In “An Old
Friend,” the narrator first thinks of the possible profit when a hot spring opens up on his
property. His greed changes into fear because he is aware of living on a volcanic island,
home of Pele, the wrathful Hawaiian Volcano goddess: “I was afraid to look behind,
thinking I’d see Pele. I became afraid that the ground beneath me would suddenly explode
in a cataclysmic force, blowing me up into bits and bits of insignificant dust” (164). If the
ground underneath is threatening, stability and reciprocity have to be established between
people, as community. Thinking of his bonds to friends and to his wife, the Local Chinese
narrator registers the fragility as well as the necessity of such bonds: “She cradled me like
a child; when she felt like being cradled, I did the same for her” (160).
Similarly, the message underlying Pak’s other stories is that only the cohesion of
community and the inclusion of unlikely members will gain everyone their place, their
right to call Hawai’i home. The failure to work together and take responsibility will lead
to the loss of home, figuratively as well as in actuality, as shown in “A Toast to Rosita.”
The adult community ignores the native Hawaiian Rosita’s efforts to mobilize them
against the building of a freeway through their neighborhood, only because they cannot
accept his homosexuality. After Rosita has resigned and killed himself, it is the children
who appreciate that he had thought of their future when he had argued with their parents:
“They live on this street. They one part of the community. Dey going be dah ones to
suffah” (123). Intuitively, they understand the lesson of reciprocity. Convening at his
house to pay respect to the dead, “[a]s a token of our friendship, we lifted a beer from our
father and brought it along; wherever Rosita was, we did not want him to be thirsty”
(126). Just as indigenous conceptions of community, land base, and family are linked by
relationships of reciprocity, so Local alliances need to be. Otherwise, dissolution and
fragmentation, madness and death, sterility and futility are the outcomes that Pak’s stories
predict. “The garden of Jiro Tanaka” is another example of such convictions dressed in a
magical realist form: Faced with old age and the paradoxes of fertility, Jiro retreats into a
dream world in his garden, tending weeds and a strange plant whose fruit induces even
229