Yonsei

Starfruit is a 3-6 inch in length, yellow, near-to-cylinder-shaped body, and when looking up from the ground into the branches at the Wailuku Heights tree it hangs from, yes, it does look like a star. It’s a bit bitter, tart-sweet, and juicy, light weight, almost pear texture – that lightly-crisp-sounding-break in the skin. It was abundant at my grandparent’s house growing up in the early 90’s; the tree died with my grandma in 2012. Before then however, she’d pick the fruit every morning, cut into 1-inch sections, have it ready in a bowl for us at the wooden table for breakfast fairly often, along with the figs, noni, papaya and tangelo that Grandpa had grafted all those years he spent in the yard. He was a farmer by birth and his personality maintained that even though he went into judiciary – he was rightfully stubborn to humans but yielding to earth, sun, and nature’s way.

 Grandpa was one of nine children born of the third wife of his father and raised in Kona coffee farms during the American depression. While Hawaii was not yet a state, it was still under the economic influence of Western powers at the time and for immigrants, there was no guaranteed of anything in Hawaii’s Monarchy. Japanese, like the Chinese and Portuguese before them had come in waves with promises of work and housing in a place called paradise. Yet, many found themselves “indentured servants” or contracted to a labor law of harsher, poorer conditions than expected. Some were happy but many from backgrounds like that of my grandparent’s found the plantation life a dead end. And so, my grandpa found a way to get himself a law degree from Ohio and came back to take an offer in Maui, after my grandma pursued him for marriage, moving into his mother-in-law’s house after the Korean war.

 I remember him up every dawn, watering the plants, setting up the fruit fly traps (homemade Pepsi liter bottles with bait and a string), in nothing but boxers. He whistled and scolded whoever else was still sleeping. His intense energy and appetite were complained about from his sisters, wife and my own mom and her siblings, until a few years ago, before his passing. His teachings were harsh – slipper to the butt kine. Soap-in-da-mouth scrub-out-kine if you like talk smack. No food fo you if you like be sassy kine. But my most valued lesson was the way he spent his money. Never on new furniture or even new pants after his all had holes in them. Never for the sports car, never on new floor tiles. Instead, he paid for family meals every Friday night – that standing invite. He paid for all my piano lesson since age 6 and the extra Kumon I’d need to catch up when behind in spelling at Doris Todd. He spent money on golf with his best guy friends every Wednesday till they could not hold a club any longer, and he made sure all his four children finished college without any financial setbacks, of course.

Don’t get me wrong – he was an ass to deal with. Mean with words, hard to fool – I mean anyone with a law background is but especially a judge… I’ve heard a few stories about him – some of how he would be understanding and silently kind, others of how he was terrifying to present a case to, and of course, my own uncles and aunt’s stories of how his strictness echoed through their lives even after his death.

 He used to chuckle when I’d try to read all those damn legal case scenario textbooks he had on the shelves of the living room. I loved it. I liked to understand how people thought and why we became here and now, yet he’d play a questioning game with me, never putting me down on my theory but provoking my mind enough to have to defend my feelings, reason and thinking process. He never talked about work, so I did not really understand what he dealt with until I heard about him from others.

“Play again,” Grandpa Richard used to usher me to the pianos keys anytime my passion would start to get the best of me. He didn’t seem to judge me on my fierce conclusions but instead would encourage an artist channeling, “Put the feelings there.” He’d say from the leather lounge chair in the corner, next to the lacquer painted cabinets holding framed photos and hanafura card sets, while he’d read the paper or finish off the scotch. I didn’t read music notes well – still don’t. But I had an ear and so he paid a special teacher to help me follow it instead of forcing me to learn to read notes like most.

 Iodine. That harsh red liquid sting. He’d pinch a dropper of that on all my open wounds, scratches – soon making me shut up about any pain I felt. And that echinacea flower – he’d pluck the live flower out of the plants potted on the broken-brick lanai off the kitchen and pop it into my mouth as a toddler, no rinse or second check, nothin. The pollen was what makes the tingle sensation in the throat – lemon verbena like yet warming, like pepper. Sour, bitter and PRICKLING is all I can say for it. It cured the cough, sore throat, sore tummy, or chills in a few minutes though. The kind of simple medicine that stayed with me for life. I won’t take a Tylenol still to this day.

 Risuo (Japanese name) and my grandma did not ever kiss or hold hands or snuggle that I saw. But they did not have tension or ever not sleep in the same room as long as I remember. Marriage was not a passionate romance but a secure trust of home base between them and the family, as far as I was aware. I’ve often contemplated how their relationship shaped my character, my ability to swallow emotions for sake of security… or opposite, like maybe this example made me go against tradition for the comfort sensations of my “rebellious” gut instinct… I still don’t know. I just know this man was intimately more encouraging of my non-conforming ways despite his outside persona I hear in my adult career community. I know my grandparents come from deck of cards not in favor of the life we all live now but they showed love without words, never with ‘I love you’ but instead with food, open doors, focused time, and energy for most of my holidays, weekends and major events of childhood all revolved around the presence of my grandpa and grandma being able to be involved with us.

 “Boil the stones,” he told me once, about childhood in the depression, as an immigrant on barren land, and the life of many in Hawaii at the time. “The stone has minerals; the herbs have healing, and you grab the bird by the throat and boil him – then pluck out the feathers. That is your soup for 14 mouths to feed when there is nothing else.”

Italy - when I was sixteen was maybe the most fun, I’ve ever had with Grandpa Komo. Milan was the first time I drank with him – (he loved red table wine and lemonchillo), only time I ever caught train rides with him and my grandma, and only time I had to decipher instructions/Dollar rates and menus with him as an equal adult power. He kept the sheepskins and painted glasses that I brought back from Isreal, the drawings and Disney Jasmin life-size painting I made for him at age seven, and the young adult poetry I wrote stayed on the fridge for years all those years…

 Some people are marinated into your being. Blood or not, loved one’s silent veins run forever. But unspoken time still tells stories, soaks in, makes ripples often more important than gifts or words... money, looks, communication and status are tools. Moments of calm intimacy is the goal. Retained emotions that kindle the warmth in the chest between people over years…that is success. And food and shelter… that shows love when else can’t.

Sayounara, Ruiso and Yukiye

*Please note that this read is meant to be entertaining, not necessarily factual

Japanese in Pu'ukoli'i

Sugarcane village. That’s what it was when my mother’s grandma came from Hiroshima, Japan and settled here in West Maui. Puukolii, red dirt village of immigrant plantation workers tucked in the higher elevations above Kaanapali was what my grandma Yuki called home in her earliest years as the youngest born in Maui to Japanese born parents.

“Grandpa used to meet them at the beach, on his horse, after working the fields,” my mom recalled the stories she heard of her mother’s childhood, while we stood in the breeze, gazing out to the sea, the tall weeds and prickly dandelions floating into our thick hair.  Momʻs Grandpa was a Luna, an enforcer for labor workers in the hot fields of late 1800’s through the 1920’s. They all thought it was rather strange to have an immigrant Japanese man in that role as it was not common in that time. This unusual man ordered my great-grandma from a picture-bride book to be his wife; she happened to be his cousin, and this was a common practice. Never having met my great-grandpa before, she left a trying time in Japan for the sugarcane Luna life when her family accepted his payment and shipped her to Maui at 16 years old.

 I cannot say I know all about this woman, Shikano, my great-grandmother, so please know there are many missing pieces to this story. But what I’ve learned of her is similar to what many Hawaii-born-Japanese have learned of their own – it took much strength, tears, sweat and inner tenacity to come here, stay here, mix into the many other cultures here and then to gain respect and find the determination to make a business amidst an unclaimed identity and brutal politics of Hawaii’s fallen nation, was something brave and brilliant…something only the 3rd and 4th generations would reap the wealth from. And it has taken me my own struggles of birth, marriage and parenthood to understand the strictness my mother’s culture held for us; that without all that discipline and enforced social skills of being respectful, likeable, moral, versatile and poker faced, we would not survive the race-based segregation and wild west of Hawaii’s pre-American days.

Shikano’s diaries were fascinating. In preschool, I spent what felt like hours in my great-grandma’s room of my grandma’s house in Wailuku Heights trying to decipher the shapes and elegant curves of the pen marks that looked like boxes, triangle-topped double-lines and scratched with apostrophes – in the paper notebooks kept by her old bed. Her small shrine sat across the bed, on a built-into-wall drawer set. Incense burning from the ceramic dish, a floral rice-paper-like-art-piece framed to stand behind the vessel of ash and a black and white photograph of her in a kimono, black hair sleek but puffed over-top of the head, pulled into that low bun with a large wooden clip in the back of the neck, no smile, children in picture also wearing kimono. I don’t remember all that Grandma told me of her diaries; I just remember Grandma said she was upset or feeling worried about money or a child sick or mad at her husband and sometimes missing Japan…she took my Grandma to live in Japan a year when my grandma was a child, but not the others. I don’t know what happened to make a mother of many take only one child back to her homeland for a whole year but I found the handwritten records of their names to and from the boats back in 1930s… ancestory.com did connect me with old documents and pictures for a lot of my family history, on that side, my grandpa’s side and my dad’s side as well… I wish I could say I can read a few of the hiragana and katakana characters of her diary but no, my teachings of calligraphy and phrases only lasted those preschool-after-school-afternoons with grandma Yuki and she has since passed... For my mother’s time was the generation raised after WW2, when to be anything but American was a traitor, weaker – and so was to speak anything but English.

The life in sugarcane villages was hard. The harshness is what fueled Shikano to find other ways of living – a way out. My grandma remembered Shikano crying when the red dirt would blow through all the wet, hanging laundry on the line outside, again to ruin her day’s work. She still has Shikano’s steel shears – for Shikano was a hairdresser for the village, men who had no wives often paid for laundry and hair-cuts. I was so angry when my mom would have my grandma cut my hair with great-grandma Shikano’s old scissors instead of the mall shop hairdresser. My bangs would be thick and sit straight above my eyebrows like the Kokeishi wooden dolls that sat on counters all over the house and I would always feel so far away from the fashion barbie dolls and cute, curly-haired Shirley Temple we watched on Friday nights.

Grandma Yuki told me how her mom would argue often with my grandpa, Yuki’s husband. They were the same she said – stubborn, smart, sharp minds, influential and proud and therefore, both dominating and could not back down from their opinions even though Shikano lived in the same house with them until she died. One time, Shikano was so mad at my grandpa, she took an axe in hand and chopped down his favorite cherry tree he had grown for years in the garden. Mind you, it was HER home they all lived in – Shikano had bought one of the first homes in Wailuku Heights when there was only that old twisted road above Iao valley connecting a couple streets of neighbors to Wailuku Town. She had been the one to build a name from nothing, make decisions above her own husband, taking the risk to buy a retail shop in Kahului (across the harbor), moved her kids into a one room back house of the shop and create a dry goods store in the 40’s that would fund this house purchase. She later made a branding partnership turning her shop into a retail franchise well known today in the islands – with multiple hardware and craft shops stemming from this business that she left to her kids, now run by a few of the grandkids, my great-uncles.

“If you want a man to marry you, don’t buy your own house,” Shikano would say to one of her daughters later. “Men want a woman to depend on them. Women who don’t need a man, a man will argue with.” I wish I knew her in flesh. Her truth was bold and perhaps why I cannot keep silent and docile– some drives of our being are not taught… but instilled in DNA. If only we all truly knew the life stories of our blood, perhaps we’d be less surprised when we find ourselves in our current state. I wish we all paid more attention to the lessons already lived for us – all the work already done to save us from our own societal destruction of grand, unearned fantasies. Our tales mights not be the most exciting, but those are sometimes the most important and what helps us survive.

 *Please note that this read is meant to be entertaining and not necessarily factual