Garrett Hongo - Volcano: A Memoir of Hawaii

I WAS SIX , living with my parents and younger brother in an aparment house in midtown Los Angeles. There were other Japanese families from Hawaii and I had cousins around, aunts and uncles, who came mostly from plantation towns that neighbored ours on OahuWaialua, Wahiaw, Sunset Beach, Haleiwa, and Lie. King Sugar had died in Hawaii and his subjects had all dispersedsome to town in Honolulu, some to the military, some to the Mainland seeking new jobs, new ways of life. Our shacks were gone, so we found stuccoed apartment buildings in Los Angeles.

Around us, in other buildings nearby, in small houses and large houses divided up into multiplexes, there were families from Mexico, Korea, Hong Kong, and Mississippi. We were on a bus route to downtown. We were a few blocks from my school. We were under palm and eucalyptus and jacaranda trees, bracketed among crowned asphalt streets and alleyways crowded with bins of fetid trash. At night, I could hear the neighbor televisions bursting with the whistling flight of super-heroes. Grease spattered alive in a skillet on a stove in another kitchen I could hear through the screen of our kitchen door, and on our window sill, a wooden bar aflame with the light from outside shining upon it, I counted out a row of several avocado seeds germinating in a set of teacups and jelly jars. When we went to the market, we got Green Stamps. My home job was to paste them into books. My outside job was to do well in school. My mother helped me by teaching me Mainland English, the mother dialect of the Hawaiian pidgin (a creole) that I grew up speaking.

We are seated at the kitchen table by the humming refrigerator, next to the tiered coffee cart that housed a toaster, an automatic rice cooker, and a lazy Susan filled with sugar cubes, tea bags, a bramble of toothpicks, and packets of Kool-Aid. She teaches me fricatives, gives me exercises, shows me where to place my tongue against my teeth. I say there, there, there, constructing a calisthenic phalanx of enunciations. I say earth. I say with. She teaches me to flatten the melody of my speaking, taking the lilt of Portuguese from my sentences, the singsong of Canton Chinese. I extract the hard, clipped vowel-oriented syllables of Hawaiian, saying poor, not pu-a. I have to soften my tongue to shape it around the new way of saying words, to make it shape itself in my mouth more quickly so that I can make more sounds, smaller sounds, faster sounds in a sentence that has to flutter the way a mullet swims, almost surreptitiously, through lagoons of syntax rather than churning through the blunt reef of my thinking like ulua, a jack crevalle that hunts, like speaking pidgin.

Mainland English is more like auana, my mother says, like the swaying breeze-through-the-trees of wandering hula danced to a wavy melodic song. Hawaiian English is like kahiko, the ancient dance, the kanaka dance of tradition, she says, harsh moves, slaps, and full of pounding force. So, in English, I say, Im going to school now, flattening the music, softening the cadence, shallowing the explosiveness of the vowels. I would say, I go scuuul now in pidgin, I go Mainlan, I go ahhs-sighde, running out to play in the afternoon rain shower.

She was taught by a schoolmarm from Illinois who came to the plantation town where my mother grew up. The teacher was a tall, handsome woman who became principal of the plantation school, and she took on my mother, a tomboy in the fourth grade. My mother played coconut baseball, a game that combined the action of lawn bowling with the rules, competitive object, distribution of players, and playing field of the national sport. She rolled a brown coconut, stripped of its husk, by her sisters occupying the infield, by the other boys and girls scattered around the rest of the diamond, and skipped it by the sand patches around shortstop into the short grass of the outfield. She shouted I make heet! I make heet! and ran the bases, scoring ahead of the coconut, rolling back from the edge of tall canes out in left field. Her teacher found her, took her out of those games, got her books and into social clubs, took her for trips into Honolulu, taught her to enunciate