FLUX No. 21 Identity

THE IDENTITY ISSUE

HAWAI‘I’S MULTIETHNIC FAMILIES

THE PINEAPPLE: A BITTERSWEET TALE

WHOSE KAKA‘AKO?

ON BEING HAWAIIAN

42

CHECK ALL THAT APPLY

As the world catches up to what people in Hawai‘i already know makes for a rich culture, families, whose portraits were shot by John Hook, reflect on living in an increasingly diverse environment.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

50

OVERTIME AT THE PARK

With the odds stacked against Micronesians on O‘ahu, Sonny Ganaden explores how advocates turn to culture, community, and basketball to empower them.

56 WHOSE KAKA‘AKO?

Tina Grandinetti reflects on Honolulu’s changing urban identity and what will happen to those outside of Kaka‘ako’s master plans as the area’s dozens of towers are erected over the next two decades.

As Kaka‘ako faces a development boom, one writer wonders for whom are we building?

62

OUR BEAUTIFUL, HIDEOUS ELECTRONIC IDENTITY

It started as a prank. One of them had it coming. In today’s brave new electronic world, Beau Flemister ponders the impact of social media on society, wondering, are we our best selves online or in reality?

Virginia Paresa, who designs boldly printed cushion covers, pillows, and throws, shown at her Hau‘ula residence.

Art imitates life at Wing Ice Cream.

Artist Robert Reed peels off another persona.

#SIGNSOFHAWAII

Graphic designer Matthew Tapia, featured on page 30, has been cataloguing old signs and lettering in Hawai‘i on his Instagram under the hashtag “signsofhawaii.”

Check out our interview with him online about how a city’s typography affects its identity.

THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

Check out our covers that didn’t make the cut! Editor Lisa Yamada breaks down the reasons for the final cover. Says Yamada, “The impetus for putting a young child on the cover stemmed from the idea that our identities haven’t yet been shaped at that young age.”

ON THE COVER:

Shown on the cover is 13-month-old Jaya Moon, the daughter of Evan Valiere and Brittney Valverde. FLUX’s photography director, John Hook, says of his experience taking her portrait: “There’s just something about that kid’s cute little magic eyes that gets you to slow down and make you want to be an innocent kid again. It’s rewarding getting some good photos out of a session where you’re breaking your old-man back following a kid around that just learned to walk, all the while shooting photos without looking because you’re busy making funny faces to get her to look in your general direction. I thought the shots came out perfect, in the sense that the photos really are an authentic representation of her in that moment.”

EDITOR’S LETTER

Have you ever seen sand crabs in a bucket? If you’ve spent time camping at any of Hawai‘i’s beaches, you know what this looks like: crabs of all sizes—some the size of the tip of your pinky finger, some as large as your fist—scratching against the plastic 5-gallon bucket, clawing over each other to get to the top. If they were smart enough, they’d work together to form some kind of complex ladder system, then reach back down, claw-in-claw, to pull the last remaining crab from the bucket. But they’re just crabs after all, and as such, they mostly just pull each other down and ensure their collective demise.

At the inception of this issue, we came to the realization that we had somehow gotten ourselves caught in the bucket. We were, perhaps, looking too hard at what everyone else around us was doing. Social media certainly does not help this, where it is all too easy to become bogged down by the noisiness that surrounds—the constant scratching against plastic. In trying to top what everyone else was doing, we, perhaps, lost sight of ourselves, got away from who we first sought to be, which was a medium a bit irreverent, a bit stubborn, a medium that did things its own way—perhaps not unlike the child on this issue’s cover.

In a place as tight-knit as Hawai‘i, it’s only too easy to find yourself in the bucket, just another crab. It’s perhaps the best and worst thing about the islands, this small town mentality, where people sometimes can’t stand to see others succeed, and where complimentary words, or kisses on cheeks, are followed almost immediately by words of aggression (behind backs, of course). But it also means our city is growing. People talking, even if about each other, means people are doing. It is, no doubt, an exciting time to be in Hawai‘i. Every week, something new seems to happen. Publications launch, restaurants open, designers produce, musicians play—Hawai‘i hums with energy.

The thing about some Hawaiian crabs is that they can be especially strong. This issue features those types. They’re the kind of people who look inward rather than out to define their identities, the kind of people we can all take cues from. The kind that manage to escape, climb up out of the bucket, and scuttle into your campsite, causing panic and screaming because, well, crabs, the cockroaches of the sea, are disgusting little creatures. So perhaps you will close this issue in disgust, perhaps you will be inspired by it. Either way, we hope you will be motivated to go on and do your own thing, define your own identity, and live your life as you damn well please.

With aloha,

Lisa Yamada Editor lisa@nellamediagroup.com

PUBLISHER

Jason Cutinella

EDITOR

Lisa Yamada

CREATIVE DIRECTOR

Ara Feducia

MANAGING EDITOR

Anna Harmon

PHOTOGRAPHY DIRECTOR

John Hook

PHOTO EDITOR

Samantha Hook

FASHION EDITOR

Aly Ishikuni

EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Sonny Ganaden

IMAGES

Noa Emberson

Mark Ghee Lord Galacgac

Sarah Forbes Keough

Jonas Maon

Ricardo Moreno

MASTHEAD

IDENTITY

CONTRIBUTORS

Kaleo Alau

James Charisma

Matthew Dekneef

Beau Flemister

Tina Grandinetti

Kelli Gratz

Travis Hancock

Mitchell Kuga

Jon Letman

Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence

Sarah Ruppenthal

WEB DEVELOPER

Matthew McVickar

ADVERTISING

Mike Wiley GROUP PUBLISHER mike@nellamediagroup.com

Keely Bruns

MARKETING & ADVERTISING DIRECTOR keely@nellamediagroup.com

Carrie Shuler

MARKETING & CREATIVE COORDINATOR

OPERATIONS

Joe V. Bock

CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

joe@nellamediagroup.com

Gary Payne VP ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE gpayne@nellamediagroup.com

Jill Miyashiro OPERATIONS DIRECTOR jill@nellamediagroup.com

Matt Honda CREATIVE & INNOVATION DIRECTOR

Michelle Ganeku JUNIOR DESIGNER

INTERN

Rachel Halemanu

General Inquiries: contact@fluxhawaii.com

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©2009-2015 by Nella Media Group, LLC. Contents of FLUX Hawaii are protected by copyright and may not be reproduced without the expressed written consent of the publisher. FLUX Hawaii accepts no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts and/or photographs and assumes no liability for products or services advertised herein. FLUX Hawaii reserves the right to edit, rewrite, refuse or reuse material, is not responsible for errors and omissions and may feature same on fluxhawaii.com, as well as other mediums for any and all purposes.

FLUX Hawaii is a quarterly lifestyle publication.

CONTRIBUTORS

NOA EMBERSON

“I wanted to mix in elements of pixilation, ambiguity, and nods to fishing,” Noa Emberson says regarding his illustration for “Our Beautiful, Hideous Electronic Identity,” on page 62. “I’m always trying to slowly build up symbolism through the elements I use.”

Though Emberson was born and raised in Hawai‘i, he lived in places like Ecuador and the Philippines as a result of his dad being a shrimp farmer. He became interested in art at an early age (his mom was an art teacher), and so Emberson decided to give his childhood interest a go, studying design at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Today, he is the art director at Surfing Magazine and the co-founder of Onward Creative on O‘ahu.

MARK GHEE LORD GALACGAC

Mark Ghee Lord Galacgac, illustrator and artist of few words, had this to say of the illustration he created for our profile on the pineapple on page 18: “It took so long, but it was worth it.” The University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa studio art major drew his way through various iterations of the drawing but finally settled on an Art Deco style with a travel poster feel. Galacgac’s relationship to the pineapple is personal: He moved to Hawai‘i from the Philippines in 1999 with his mother and siblings to be reunited with his father who was already working in Hawai‘i in the pineapple fields for Del Monte.

BEAU FLEMISTER

For Beau Flemister, the best part about writing “Our Beautiful, Hideous Electronic Identity,” on page 62, “was listening to both cringe-worthy testimonies concerning a real-live ‘catfish.’ I would’ve put money on the two stories sounding completely different from one another, but it was hilarious how similar they were. It was the most impressive slow-play I’ve ever heard of in my life.”

Currently based in Los Angeles, Flemister is the editor-at-large Surfing Magazine. He has had works published in various magazines across the globe and has traveled to more than 60 countries. He just finished his first novel, In the Seat of a Stranger’s Car.

TINA GRANDINETTI

“Talking to people who approach Kaka‘ako from very different perspectives helped me to appreciate the complexity of urban development,” says Tina Grandinetti, who wrote “Whose Kaka‘ako?” on page 56. “Ultimately, thinking about community and urban identity made me consider what I am doing to actively mold the future of Kaka‘ako into one that is just and equitable.” Grandinetti is a graduate student pursuing her master’s degree in indigenous politics at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. She defines herself in equal measure by her love of non-fiction writing, her island community, and the great outdoors. She no longer wears bike helmets in the house.

It was nice to see exposure of the Sand Island evictions from early 1980. Vicky and Jerry were tireless video documenters of the state’s eviction and subsequent destruction of 135 structures in January of 1980. They also were active in documenting land issues on the Windward side when video production was costly but just becoming affordable for community folks.

The residents had formulated a plan for a Hawaiian fishing village where Hawaiian fishing techniques would be taught to local youth. The state was not interested. Another issue raised in the Sand Island eviction saga was and is the matter of who owned the island. Sand Island is not a natural island but came into existence during World War II when the U.S. Government dredged part of Ke‘ehi Lagoon to construct a seaplane runway. The dredged coral was deposited on the reef where Sand Island exists today. Haunani-Kay Trask pointed out at the time that the coral reef that was dredged was actually ceded land. She helped raise the issue of ceded lands and who owns them in the early 1980s.

- Ed Greevy

In a February 2, 2015 column by Civil Beat’s James Cave titled “Culture Cave: Honolulu’s Arts Media Coverage is Too Nice,” the writer bemoans the lack of critical arts coverage in today’s media marketplace, lumping just about every print publication out there (FLUX included), and even those online, into a big clump of dark matter. While we won’t delve into the writer’s generalizations and straw man approach to reporting, we feel it necessary to point out the hard work that goes into producing independent, locally owned publications and the care we put into telling stories we think matter. Instead of pointing fingers at what everyone is not doing, we can only hope Cave will point the finger back on himself, and, like the rest of us, pursue what he is passionate about. That being said, his satire is funny.

We love this picture from @ofonesea, but it seems someone loves us even more.

LOCAL MOCO | THE PINEAPPLE |

The pineapple. It’s neither a pine nor an apple. It’s prickly on the outside, golden and luscious on the inside. When it comes down to it, the pineapple is a contradiction in terms. And it’s synonymous with Hawai‘i. Whether you’re in Honolulu or Hilo, you’re bound to see pineapples plastered on T-shirts or dancing across the hoods of tour buses.

It’s a décor staple in plantation-style homes and a go-to garnish for poolside cocktails. There’s the Pineapple Express, a meteorological phenomenon characterized by subtropical moisture and heavy rains— or, depending on who you ask, the plotline of a stoner flick—universally associated with the Hawaiian Islands. And then there’s the “Hawaiian-style” pizza (but let’s not get started on that one).

It seems that the fruit has become the islands’ unofficial mascot. But when you really think about it, it’s a bit odd that the pineapple was crowned the de facto state fruit of Hawai‘i, given its contentious social and ecological history in the isles. There are plenty of other qualified candidates: the coconut, the papaya, the mango, and—if you’re a stickler for authenticity—the mountain apple, which is one of Hawai‘i’s only indigenous fruits. So what gives?

Botanists and historians say the pineapple (or Ananas comosus, if you want to get scientific) originated thousands of miles away in South America, most likely near present-day Brazil. It was a mainstay in South America long before the Europeans arrived. Then Christopher Columbus and his crew swept into the New World, stumbled across the tangy fruit, and true to

form, claimed it as their own. The Spaniards named their botanical “discovery” the piña, because it bore a striking resemblance to an oversized pinecone. They loaded it onto their ships and took it home to Spain. That’s when the pineapple went mainstream: Europe’s rich and famous developed a taste for the rare and exotic fruit and had it cultivated in hot houses. Because it was such a coveted commodity to both give and receive, the A-list fruit came to symbolize extravagant hospitality in both the Old World and the New World.

So how did the pineapple go from lounging in European hot houses to achieving celebrity status in Hawai‘i? The exact date of the pineapple’s debut in the islands is not known, but some historians say it probably arrived around 1770. By the early 1900s, pineapple barons like James Drummond Dole, who became known as “The Pineapple King,” had an ambitious goal: to see canned pineapple on shelves in every grocery store across the country. Dole’s earlier move to Hawai‘i was set into motion when his cousin, sugar tycoon Sanford B. Dole, led the coup d‘état against Queen Lili‘uokalani in 1893 and was named president of the new provincial government. Inspired, a young James Dole headed to the islands and purchased a 60-acre homestead on O‘ahu. He experimented with a number of cash crops, and after some trial and error, settled on pineapple.

Riding the tide of the industrial revolution, pineapple production in Hawai‘i quickly flourished, with spiky rows of pineapple cropping up across the state. Dole eventually ponied up for an innovative new machine that was a triple threat: It would skin, core, and then slice the fruit (previously, workers were doing this by hand). Many of his contemporaries followed suit. And just like that, the prickly fruit became a commercial crop, putting Hawai‘i back on the map as an agricultural powerhouse. By the 1930s, Hawai‘i was home to the world’s largest canneries and had established itself as the global leader in pineapple production.

According to the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, for many agricultural workers, joining the pineapple workforce was the preferable alternative to sugar. Companies like Dole enticed laborers away from the sugarcane

fields, promising higher wages and better working conditions. It may have been a slight upgrade, but it still wasn’t a walk in the park: Workers planted pineapples by hand and harvested them into lug boxes, which were then loaded onto trucks to be processed at the designated cannery. Pesticides and fertilizers were used extensively, which not only posed a health risk to plantation workers but also led to soil contamination and agricultural runoff.

As workers labored under a blazing sun, a marketing team was developing a strategic branding campaign for the export-based industry. It wasn’t long before Hawai‘i’s signature fruit graced the covers of glossy travel brochures, magazines, posters, packaging materials—just about anything related to the islands. Today, the pineapple is cemented in our collective consciousness as a symbol of Hawaiian hospitality, and like it or not, it’s here to stay—unlike the industry itself.

Hawai‘i’s pineapple glory days began to fade in the 1980s, when Dole Food Company and Del Monte closed up shop and moved overseas. The final nail in the coffin for the withering industry came in 2009, when Maui Land & Pineapple announced it would shut down its operations. Most of the once-thriving fields now lie fallow, and canneries have been converted to museums and shopping malls (a small portion of pineapple land is now occupied by seed companies, in essence trading one form of industrial agriculture for another). The state currently produces only 10 percent of the world’s pineapple, and there are just a handful of small-scale pineapple operations left. Only two of those would be classified as major pineapple operations, according to Doug MacCluer, former vice president of Maui Pineapple Company. As for a pineapple renaissance in Hawai‘i, it’s unlikely. “No operation can make it without a profit,” says MacCluer. “The tourist industry is just more profitable.”

Today, the bulk of pineapple production has slowly shifted to Asia and Central America, where the fruit is cheaper to produce. But while it may be a shadow of its former self, the pineapple lives on in the islands as the adopted symbol of perceived happiness in our tropical paradise.

I have the T-shirt to prove it.

THE COLORS OF HAWAI‘I

COMPILED BY LISA YAMADA | IMAGES COURTESY OF HAWAI‘I STATE ARCHIVES

Hawai‘i has a colorful history. In the centuries after King Kamehameha the Great’s unification of the islands, land ownership, and thus power, became increasingly centralized in the hands of small groups of people. Brown and yellow, red, white, and blue— each new era brought a different shade of diversity to the isles,

“The treasures accumulated by [Kamehameha], and the supply of that precious wood which has been so instrumental in bringing the islands into notice, have been drained to meet the expenses of ruinous purchases [of the chiefs].”— Narrativeofa voyagetothePacificandBeering’s Strait by Frederick William Beechey, 1832.

1700s

changing the very identity and way of life from one decade to the next. While it is impossible to know what the 21st century will look like, if the past is any indication, one thing is for certain: He who has the gold—or, in this case, the land—will make the rules and steer Hawai‘i into a brand new color scheme.

King Kamehameha

Hawai‘i looks: brown

Major landowners: 1

Who: Prior to King Kamehameha the Great’s unification of the Hawaiian Islands, the power of the ali‘i (chiefs) was tied to the large tracts of family-held land they ruled over. Following unification, Kamehameha broke up the ali‘i’s power by redistributing smaller parcels of land, this time according to military rank and service, as well as separated land tenure from governorship, in effect diluting the power of the ali‘i who once ruled.

Impact: With Kamehameha as the supreme ruler and his new distribution of land, the traditional ties and sense of kinship between the ali‘i and the maka‘āinana (populace) became increasingly strained. This led to the exploitation of the maka‘āinana in the form of heavy taxation and the need for laborers to haul sandalwood, which became a booming industry under Kamehameha and was pivotal in opening up the islands to the Western world.

“After the Pali, we hear the sights of the island are exhausted.

The town itself is decidedly disappointing. … Churches, chapels, homes and meetinghouses, libraries, schools and colleges galore! The town is laid in squares after the American

fashion.”—SunnyLandsandSeas:a voyageintheSS.‘Ceylon’ by Hugh Wilkinson, 1883.

1800s

The Great

Māhele

Hawai‘i looks: increasingly white

Major landowners: 3

Who: In 1850, the Great Māhele established fee-simple ownership (essentially, private property) and divvied up Hawai‘i’s more than 4 million acres amongst three: 1 million acres to the Hawaiian monarch; 1.5 million acres to the Hawaiian government; and 1.6 million acres to the konohiki (aristocratic families).

Impact: This allowed Hawaiian landowners, “who were often land-rich but cash-poor, to sell their land to foreigners, and many did,” according to Stuart Banner in Possessing the Pacific. Within a few decades of the Great Māhele, foreigners owned 80 percent of the land.

“Fully three-quarters of the population of Hawaii have no more to say about the government under which they are living than the old slaves.”— “Wonderful Hawaii: A World Experiment Station” published in The American Magazine by Ray Stannard Baker, 1911.

1900s

King Sugar

Hawai‘i looks: yellow, brown, and white

Major landowners: 5

Who: By 1900, the Big Five—Castle and Cooke, C. Brewer, American Factors, Theo H. Davies, Alexander & Baldwin— dominated Hawai‘i’s largest economy, sugar, grown across more than 250,000 acres. Together, they controlled 96 percent of Hawai‘i’s million-dollar sugar industry.

Impact: The influence of the Big Five deeply shaped Hawai‘i’s economy, stretching far and wide into banking, insurance, shipping, retail, wholesaling, even politics.

“The entire system operated along racist lines established by the plantation interests,” Noel J. Kent wrote in Hawaii: Islands Under the Influence of a culture in which whites were given the most prized jobs and paid more than immigrant workers for the same jobs through the 1940s. (A&B is still in

the rankings today, at the state’s fifth largest landowner.)

“‘The roadside was clogged with hundreds of men near Schofield,’ Chieko Ginoza wrote in her diary in 1943. ‘Rows and rows of drab tents, barracks and quonset huts stretched to the horizon.’”— “Fortress Hawaii played key role in Pacific victory” published in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin by Richard Borreca, 1999.

Mid- to late-1900s

U.S. Government

Hawai‘i looks: red, white, and blue

Major landowners: 2

Who: By 1941, as the United States prepared for World War II, military personnel doubled Hawai‘i’s population, occupied more than 210,000 acres of land, and overtook sugar for the first time as Hawai‘i’s largest industry. Following statehood in 1959, the federal government ceded 1.2 million acres of land to the newly created state, making it the largest landholder in Hawai‘i.

Impact: The military’s presence in Hawai‘i has had immense social, economical, political, and environmental impacts on the islands: overthrow, internment, land

and water contamination, the state’s largest industry behind tourism, job creation.

“What it feels like to me is this really cool 21st-century engineering project, where I get to work with the people of Lanai to create a prosperous and sustainable Eden in the Pacific.”—Larry Ellison quoted in a Wall Street Journal article, “Larry Ellison’s Fantasy Island,” 2013.

2000s Techies

Hawai‘i looks: pixilated

Major landowners: TBD

Who: The state and federal governments, along with A&B and Kamehameha Schools, take the cake, but now amid the ranks are Oracle-founder Larry Ellison and AOLfounder Steve Case, two of the top 10 largest landowners in Hawai‘i. Ellison, who purchased Lāna‘i in 2012 for an estimated $300 million, controls approximately 88,000 acres, or 98 percent of the island, and sits at no. 6. Case, who owns 36,000 acres on Kaua‘i and is the majority shareholder of Maui Land & Pineapple, which owns nearly 23,000 acres on Maui, sits at no. 10 (though if combined, he’d tie for seventh with Molokai Ranch, now a subsidiary of a Singapore-based investment company).

Impact: As moneyed tech continues pouring in (Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Dell CEO Michael Dell, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel count themselves among Hawai‘i’s million-dollar property owners), one can only speculate about its effect on the islands, and whether or not Hawai‘i’s economy will transition from idyllic paradise to innovation hotbed, or continue to stratify the wealthy from everyone else.

“I’ve always been interested in the manipulation of clothing and how it interacts with people,” says home accessory and fashion designer Virginia Paresa.

CUSHION COUTURE

DESIGNER VIRGINIA PARESA

TEXT

BY

ANNA HARMON

IMAGES BY JONAS MAON

In Virginia Paresa’s backyard, there is an old payphone hooked up to empty air. Nearby is a trail that leads right up the mountain. Within sight of the front porch, where she and her boyfriend occasionally barbecue, one wave curls cleanly, framed by lush treetops. Two longboards rest on the grass. In Hau‘ula, Honolulu seems merely a bad dream. It’s hard to conjure a life here that isn’t full of afternoon naps and hours-long surf sessions, the smooth way time can fly by in a small island town. But in the front room with windows looking out at the view, where fuchsia Mylar balloons proclaim her recent birthday, “3-0,” Paresa spends nearly every waking hour that she’s not at her full-time job as assistant store manager at Kahala Sportswear in Hale‘iwa laboring to create a brand taken seriously not only in Hawai‘i, but beyond.

That, however, is still a dream, albeit one very much within reach. Paresa got her degree from University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in apparel product design and merchandising and shortly after moved to New York City, where she worked for KaufmanFranco as an assistant patternmaker (their couture dresses often appear on the red carpet) and Qi Cashmere as an assistant designer. Afterward, she returned to Hawai‘i and worked at Nordstrom and Saffron James. In her spare time, she launched projects like necklaces that made their way into the pages of Lucky Magazine and a T-shirt collaboration with her sister, artist Dana Paresa. But in 2014, when she formally established her self-titled company, she found it headed not to womenswear, but in the direction of what she calls “home”— cushion covers, pillows, throws.

“I started with home because I had redecorated the house a while back, and people were asking me about it,” she says. For the makeover, she had gone on a hunt for new rattan cushion covers, but, finding nothing she liked, made her own. Now, they are available in all of O‘ahu’s Don Quijote stores. (In January, she was wiping the sweat off her brow after filling an order for more than 300 pieces.) Each is made through The Cut Collective, a fashion incubator-factory hybrid company based in Mānoa, which coordinates the manufacturing locally.

“Some of the prints are safer,” Paresa says. “I try to give a traditional one and then challenge people with more of an outrageous one just to push it. I want people to understand that the brand, especially the home stuff, is about a different kind of print.” She handpicks each fabric, sourcing from India (courtesy of hours of Google searches) and the streets of New York City (analog style, with a splash of haggling).

Paresa learned to sew at the tender age of 9, when she decided she wanted to make a pair of shorts and asked her mom for help. “OK,” her mom said in response. “Teach yourself how to make some.” After what we can assume was a

bit of pouting, she confronted her mom’s sewing machine armed with its manual, some old fabric, and a few books. She made Christmas stockings, shorts, and a skirt.

By the end of this year, Paresa plans to introduce womenswear to her brand. But she’s not rushing it. “I take it very seriously, which is why I wait a really long time before I release something,” she says. “If I’m not 100 percent behind it, I’m not going to do it.” She dreams of a style involving less print and more structural design than her home creations. Beyond that simple print on a long dress, she wants to create something that can be worn just as easily in New York City as in the islands.

“I’ve always cared about fashion, even from when I was way small,” she says. “As I got older, I’ve always been interested in the manipulation of clothing and how it interacts with people. Like, what you wear, what you look like in high school, how it defines who you are possibly, who you hang out with, or how people treat you.” While she discusses this, she reclines on rattan cushion covers that are a bold red with a busy pattern, one of those prints she selected to challenge people.

“Now, because it’s my own company, it’s

just translating my point of view on clothing and [seeing] how that affects the way someone feels. … I think about those things when I’m making something. Does she see that number value in the item, is she willing to trade six hours of work for a dress?”

Across the living space, a three-cushion couch below windows looking out on the backyard is set aside for Alvin, the resident dog. Two nearby rooms are reserved for her boyfriend, Aren Souza, who along with having a yard maintenance business, glasses surfboards and records music. They seem to rarely cross paths, she says, since they are both so busy. To her, this mutual independence is empowering to them both. “I feel like your job as a person is to push yourself as far as you can go,” she says, “to really reach your full potential.”

For more information, visit virginiaparesa.com.

Violinist Aowl Owen, shown in a treehouse he and his brother built on Kaua‘i, has created a style all his own, mixing such influences as Hawaiian, classical, and rock.

AOWL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL

VIOLINIST AOWL OWEN

TEXT BY JON LETMAN

IMAGE BY JOHN HOOK

Images of rolling surf flash against a wall behind a mop-haired man plugging a cord into his violin. Resembling the surfer in the video behind him with his fluid movements, the young man draws his bow across the strings, producing a melancholy pitch. Two-dozen spectators on a dimly lit street in Hanapēpē stand transfixed as the unassuming violinist, 22-year-old Aowl (pronounced like the bird) Owen, serenades the night.

Born in the Marshall Islands, Owen was adopted by a family on Kaua‘i before they moved to Colorado. At the age of 12, Owen was entranced by the sound of a violin in a Prego spaghetti sauce TV commercial. That was all it took to steer Owen to classical music. In 5th grade, he took an introductory violin class and was soon splitting his time between soccer practice, comic books, and classical music.

The violin awakened a deep love of music in Owen, not just for the classical sort, but also for rock, jazz, hip-hop, metal, and the sounds of pop punk bands like Yellowcard and Blink-182. Describing one of his earliest influences, 19th century Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini, Owen says, “That guy was pretty nuts.”

In high school, Owen moved with his mom back to Kaua‘i, where he continued to practice. After graduating in 2010, he was accepted to South Carolina’s Bob Jones University, a school known for its music program. Instruction was rigorous, and Owen found the gates around the campus, like the school’s strict rules and prohibitions (no playing non-classical music), constricting.

“It didn’t really work for me at all. It was very conservative and I’m not,” Owen says. After one year, he returned to Kaua‘i with a strong sense of discipline and a new appreciation for freedom. For Christmas in 2012, his father gave him a Line 6 JM4 looper, a piece of equipment that allows him to sample his own music, then loop it as he layers multiple instruments like guitar, viola, cello, bass, piano, and ‘ukulele. The effect renders him into a digital one-man band.

Reluctant to claim a single genre, Owen says his music is a mix of classical, modern, and ambient, with influences of jazz, rock, and Hawaiian. He enjoys taking something he says people might find boring—“an old guy with a wig playing violin”—and doing something cool with it. With his looper,

Fender amp, and hybrid acoustic-electric violin, he plays street performances, weddings, and small concerts around Kaua‘i, including Hanapēpē’s Friday Art Nights.

Owen fondly recalls a treehouse he built with his brother in a lychee tree in 2013 that, for a while, served as a home and studio. “The sun would break through the leaves, and I’d grab my violin and play as loud as I could,” Owen recalls. “Just to say, ‘Hey world, I’m up!’” Today, Owen lives in a cottage overlooking Mt. Wai‘ale‘ale. From it, he can hike to the top of Mt. Nounou with his violin for open-air solo jams.

Owen talks of going to New York City and making it big. If he were to do so, though, he says he would eventually return to Kaua‘i to help other musicians. “I don’t have much to give compared to most other people, but I want to give as much of myself as I can,” he says. “Even though we just met, I would do anything for you—I know that sounds weird, but you or anyone else.”

In the meantime, he appreciates where he is at. “I am playing music and doing what I love, and I think that’s a dream come true for sure.”

For more information, visit treehousemelodies.com.

Self-taught graphic designer Matthew Tapia has helped shape the identities of multi-million dollar companies like Nike and Ecko Unltd.

STROKE OF LUCK

GRAPHIC DESIGNER

MATTHEW TAPIA

TEXT BY KELLI GRATZ

IMAGE BY JOHN HOOK

In a minimally designed studio in downtown Honolulu, graphic designer Matthew Tapia is dressed plainly. He’s not tall, not small, and he blends in with his surroundings among worn books with titles like Dangerous Curves, The Creative Stroke, and American Wood Type. As he sits, engaged with his work, he describes nuances in design that typically go unnoticed. This attention to detail and distinct style are what make him a graphic designer sought after by multi-million dollar companies like Nike and Wired Magazine. Despite his unassuming demeanor, Tapia—who made a name for himself creating the bold graphics of Ecko Unltd. in New York City near the company’s height of popularity in 2004—comes across like a vivid palette, like a reflection of his art: smart, uncomplicated, and natural.

#SIGNSOFHAWAII

“I think I may have stepped in dog shit a couple of times,” he jokes, taking a break from sketching a snake meant to mimic Japanese stencil-dyeing on indigo fabric for the art festival Pow! Wow! Hawai‘i. “No, but I’ve been really lucky. Getting that job with Ecko was the second really lucky thing that happened to me.”

According to Tapia, his first stroke of luck was how he got into graphics in the first place. Tapia was born and raised in Hawai‘i and spent his youth bouncing around schools and from one parent to the other before ending up in the foster care system. “It was a rough time in my life,” he says. “I thought that schooling, especially for art, was unnecessary. I thought you either had what it took to be an artist or you didn’t.” Unable to stay inspired, Tapia dropped out of high school and began working at a car dealership. It wasn’t until a couple of years later, when he met Kainoa McGee, who ran a small bodyboarding company, that his life took a turn for the better. “I told him how much I’d love to draw something for his brand,” says Tapia, who offered to do some sketches for free. “A month or so later, his business partner flew down and let me use his computer for designs. I taught myself how to use the program and was eventually able to buy my own computer. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I would’ve gotten the experience to build on.”

Follow Tapia on Instagram @matthewtapia. FLUX FILES

Tapia has built a solid foundation rooted in traditional and contemporary design, inspired by Ken Barber of House Industries, the modern-day powerhouse of type design. Currently, Tapia’s work includes consulting on small branding projects and creating brand identities for companies like New York-based 5boro and Nike-owned specialty stores like House of Hoops and Nike Yardline. He’s also working on two typefaces that will most likely take him years to complete due to the work that goes into creating an entire alphabet of characters. In his downtime, he enjoys lettering the most. “Lettering is created for a single instance of use,” he explains, “whereas typeface is a system where each letter has to look good regardless of the combination.”

In the same awed tones in which he speaks about lettering, he explains that he takes enormous pride in being from Hawai‘i. He is adamant about staying put, for now. “My kids live here,” the 34-year-old says. “Seeing them once a month wasn’t enough. I see myself here at least until they graduate.” The older, wiser Tapia now recognizes that a formal education would have helped him, and he hopes one day to go back. “I think education is the most important thing, because it teaches you how to structure things in a way that’s acceptable to the industry,” he says. “I wish I could afford the time to go back, but for now, I try to push myself through reading and being involved in the community.”

Setbacks aside, Tapia continues to look forward, designing his life around his good fortunes. Whether his success is due to his drive for creating beautiful letters, his natural talent for his craft, or simply his luck remains to be seen. Either way, what’s most important for Tapia is continuing to be both a successful artist and father; one who isn’t afraid to draw the line.

Since returning home from New York City in 2009 to be closer to his two children,

“People in general, I think, are followers. … It’s easier to just accept something and not question it, and I think artists question everything,” says visual artist Robert Reed.

ALL THAT GLITTERS

PERFORMANCE ARTIST ROBERT REED

TEXT BY JAMES CHARISMA

IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK

Dressed in a skintight white spandex suit resembling a blow-up doll, performance artist Robert Reed emerged from the Honolulu Museum of Art at Spalding House pool like the goddess Venus. Surrounding him was a skirt overflowing with neon inflatable toys, decorated lawn flamingos, and beach balls; on his head he wore a massive headdress of bright plastic toys and colorful Mylar balloons. Like a Miss Chiquita Banana designed by John Waters, Reed was terrifying and magnificent, a shining spectacle who, with headdress, stood 10 feet tall.

In this guise, one of many he has created, Reed was the centerpiece of 2012’s Unnecessary Seduction, an interactive exhibition that also included an air-mattress maze, horseshoes, and kick croquet—“[people] put on water-filled inflatable shoes and kick water-filled beach balls,” he explains. It was the product of Reed’s second residency at the museum, a satirical take on Hawai‘i’s local tourism industry and false promotions of the idyllic paradise identity.

Reed is originally from Independence, Missouri, an “all-white Christian community in the Midwest that believes the second coming of Christ will happen there,” he says. He was working as a flight attendant based out of Washington D.C. and New York when he first visited Hawai‘i on vacation in 2001. He fell in love with the islands (and his future husband), and decided to stay, attending the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa to study glass and metal.

While taking a class on fiber art and materials, Reed realized that he had been making, and performing in, wearable art for years. “At theatre events or gay pride parades in New York, I would create elaborate costumes and routines,” Reed recalls. “I dressed up like Cyndi Lauper on a float next to Greg Louganis one year. Never thought of it as performance, but it was.”

After earning his bachelor’s degree in art, he continued on to the master’s program, specializing in fiber with an emphasis on performance. For his MFA thesis exhibition in 2011, Reed created Par for the Course, an interactive miniature golf course constructed from old kitchen appliances, stoves, refrigerator doors, bed springs, birdcages, and items from Reed’s childhood, a reference to his coming of age during the Cold War and American containment culture of the 1950s and 1960s.

“[Growing up in the 1960s] was quite exciting in a horrific way. Everyone was experimenting with everything, and we even landed on the moon,” Reed says. “Our neighbors were jealous because we went to McDonald’s on Friday nights and thought it was glamorous. Anything instant and plastic was the bomb. … I’m fascinated now by how it was all marketed so well to make us desire it, like a big lie that everyone followed. It was all a game that nobody could win, which is what inspired the miniature golf course. Playable yet dysfunctional.”

Reed’s work draws inspiration from his own life and challenges everything from faith to gender to propaganda. His diverse body of work includes Committed, a wedding dress/straitjacket hybrid; Kitty Poole, an inflatable pool dress with a swimfloat wig; and McGeisha, a kimono made up of fast-food wrappings.

For one of Reed’s favorite performances, Immigrate, Imitate, Prophet, Profit, he dressed up as a fortune-telling parrot and distributed meaningless fortune cookies made from local postcards in Chinatown, repeating back whatever was said to him. “Most people laughed. But then at the end, a young woman was outraged,” Reed recalls. “She said really hateful things that I just repeated back. She went to get her large boyfriend to defend her, and he went off on me as well, but I kept repeating their words in my ridiculous costume. I still don’t think they got it. They were so upset over their own words.”

Reed’s often larger-than-life personalities and performances provoke an immediate reaction from those he encounters, including the occasional hateful response. The nature of his work jars audiences out of complacency. “People in general, I think, are followers—monkey see, monkey do,” Reed says. “It’s easier to just accept something and not question it, and I think artists question everything. … We need to question the way things are in every aspect of our lives, art or otherwise. This is how new ideas and identities are formed; how change happens.”

For more information, visit fabulousrobertreed.com.

Ice cream lovers scream for Miller Wing Royer’s eccentric brand of sweets at Wing Ice Cream.

THE ICE CREAM MAN

COMETH

MILLER WING ROYER’S WING ICE CREAM SHOP

TEXT BY TRAVIS HANCOCK

IMAGE BY JONAS MAON

Unless you frequent the road less traveled in Honolulu’s Chinatown, chances are you’ve never been to Wing Ice Cream. The little flavor lab hides in plain sight between a lei shop and herbal medicine supplier near the corner of Pauahi and Maunakea streets. When people walk in, the most common facial expression is one that seems to say, “So it’s true! There is an ice cream shop here.” More surprise follows as they turn to the blackboard menu listing the wildly inventive flavor combinations concocted by owner and operator Miller Wing Royer. Unexpected ingredients leap off the board: lemongrass, garlic, rose, pandan, chrysanthemum, matcha. You’ll want to sample these, but fair warning, he won’t always let you: He prefers guests to commit full heartedly to his labor-intensive creations.

Royer’s flavor combinations heighten the intrigue. For example, “Pretz-ident” seems a simple enough name for a combo featuring pretzels. But no: It used to be called “Pretzident Bush,” in remembrance of the 2002 incident when President Bush nearly choked to death on a pretzel in front of his do-nothing dogs. Having forgotten this story, Wing’s patrons mistakenly took Royer for a bleeding-heart conservative, so he eventually dropped the “Bush.” This creative humor pervades Wing’s menu and complements its other main feature: a warm sense of local nostalgia. When flavors hit the mark, Royer sometimes hears customers say, “Oh, my grandma used to make homemade ice cream just like this.” He awakens that nostalgia with local favorites like ube, coconut, or even his plain vanilla.

For Royer, opening shop in Chinatown wasn’t a boutique business venture but a familial return. Unlike many transplants and newcomers to the Chinatown District, Royer both grew up in the area and is actually Chinese. His mother helped him get the space and his look-alike brother worked the shop in its early days (Wing reached its two-year anniversary in February). In one of his freezers, he keeps a stock of li hing ice cakes, the kind he remembers buying from a Chinatown corner store every day for 50 cents as a kid. “That sort of died out and you couldn’t find it anywhere, so I brought it back,” he says. Its price is still the same as in his childhood days.

In the course of Royer’s 28 years, ice cream savant is only his most recent role. His range of occupations and passions spans from the depths of punk rock mosh pits to theatre projection booths to kung fu classes. In his early 20s, having gained experience in kitchen settings, he found himself working far from home, helping run a branch of Soul de Cuba in New Haven, Connecticut. More recently, Royer has been performing as Brainplane, a one-man band. He plays a self-built double-neck guitar hooked up to a multi-track looping machine, often while wearing a galaxy-print leotard. The band, which takes lyrical trips to the lands of “jelly-people” and “love-zombies,” has broken up and reunited at least three times.

For the past two years, Royer has been channeling his lifelong eclecticism (or eccentricity) into the divine medium of ice cream. Thankfully for us, he plans to stay in this character for the foreseeable future. Tuesday through Sunday, you can find him in his bright red ice-cream-man apron and bowtie churning out flavors made with fruits, vegetables, and herbs often sourced from nearby farms and customers or foraged on hikes. He plays vinyl records all day and keeps the lights on late into the night. There’s a homemade waffle cone and comfy leather couch waiting for you just steps off the sidewalk. Enter with an open mind, and you will leave with a smile.

Wing Ice Cream is located at 1145 Maunakea St. (Entrance is on Pauahi Street). Keep up with Royer on Instagram @wingicecream.

“We’re building for revolution in the United States, but you know, it’s a general bookstore,” says Carolyn Hadfield, the general manager of Revolution Books.

FLUX FILES | BOOKS |

READING A REVOLT

CAROLYN HADFIELD, GENERAL MANAGER OF REVOLUTION BOOKS

TEXT BY ANNA HARMON

IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK

Outside, in Honolulu, the day is gray and muggy. Wai‘alae Avenue, right before it splits into King and Beretania, flows with traffic. On the corner, a college-aged man is dressed like the Statue of Liberty and dances without thought, his slippered feet shuffling, a large sign draped around his neck that proclaims, “GET CA$H NOW.” Less than a block away, inside a second-story bookstore behind a 7-Eleven, Carolyn Hadfield dreams of a revolution that would render all need for money obsolete, a world in which all people would truly be equal. In her early 70s, she has the soft curves and quick smile that are trademarks of all the best grandmothers, and the zest of a young dissenter. We are seated at a round table within Revolution Books. The room is wide and long, with paperbacks and hardbacks propped up and stacked on tables and lining the walls. Red stars hang from the ceiling and in the front window. It is what you would call a politically oriented bookstore, promoting materials from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP), but Hadfield explains that while she, the general manager, is a member of the party, there is no clear association between it and the store. Founded by a group of people in 1976, Revolution Books stands more for the idea that “knowledge is power” and the importance of dissent, regardless of the party in charge. Books you might find here include Round House by Louise Erdrich, the focus of the upcoming fiction book club; This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein; BAsics, a book explaining the stances of the RCP by founder Bob Avakian (a poster of its cover also hangs on the wall). The shop’s website “about” page declares the store “alive with defiant spirit.”

While Hadfield worked as a teacher and principle of an alternative school in the ’70s and ’80s, and held other odd jobs thereafter, she also volunteered at the bookstore. Now that she’s retired, she’s taken one of four regular volunteer staff roles. As I ask her something along the lines of, “So, communism, huh? Why?” Jon Lennon’s “Imagine” starts playing over the speakers. It’s from Hadfield’s personal playlist. “The thing that spoke to me is actually a vision. That’s ironic that you have ‘Imagine’ coming on,” she says before pausing, and I can’t tell if she’s going to choke up. “Because that’s pretty much it: a vision of the world where there actually aren’t divisions between people or countries, and people can actually relate in a liberating way.”

Revolution Books, she says, acts as a sort of center for customers that span all walks of life, from academics to military members to book nerds to those who want to connect with like-minded people. “We’re building for revolution in the United States,” she says of the shop. “But you know, it’s a general bookstore. The books we choose are books that help people understand the world.” There are poetry readings, book openings, movie nights. One volunteer, who is an elder at a church, arranged a reading by local poet Brenda Kwan.

A little after 11 a.m. (the store officially opens at noon) the phone rings. Hadfield breaks from explaining how she moved to Hawai‘i from California (to attend University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa in the early 1960s, earning a bachelor’s in educational foundations)

and came to side with communist theory (the Vietnam War, women’s oppression, the finger pointing at imperialism and capitalism) to answer it. “Revolution Books,” she says. After a brief discussion, it turns out they don’t have the title. “You’re best bet is Amazon,” she tells the person on the other end of the line. “But I hate to say it.” She returns to her seat next to me.

“In the ’60s, there were about six parties calling themselves communist in Hawai‘i,” she says. “With various ebbs in the struggle, floundering around theory, a lot of them left. It’s hard to be a revolutionary in Hawai‘i.” Part of the problem was the lack of a perceived critical mass. What kept Hadfield here, she says, is theory, and the people she had come to

know. “Theory helped me understand that there’s really no quick fix, that reform isn’t going to do it,” she says. “That the problem is very systemic, and it’s in capitalism itself.”

These days, she takes part in weekly discussions about the Revolutionary Communist Party’s newspaper. She reads. She attends protests. She applies theory to the news. She gardens. “I just have a regular life. I have kids, I have a family, I have all of that. I try to eat fairly well,” she says. “I think always I’ve been very integrated into the community. I go to the same movies, you know. Sometimes my kids have had to say, ‘Oh, I don’t want to hear your analysis.’ They’re very supportive of me, but they do things their own way.”

Revolution Books is located at 2626 S. King St. #201. For more information, visit revolutionbookshonolulu.org.

CHECK ALL THAT APPLY

IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK

In 2000, the first time individuals were allowed to identify as more than one race for the U.S. Census, 6.8 million people checked multiple boxes. Ten years later, that number grew by 32 percent to 9 million, the multiracial category increasing by a larger percentage than those reporting a single race. But this is nothing new in Hawai‘i, the most ethnically diverse state in the nation, where 18.5 percent of the population claims two or more races. Most likely, you know someone you immediately refer to as “hapa.” As the rest of the world catches up to what those in Hawai‘i already know makes for a rich culture, and thus a more interesting experience, people here reflect on raising families in an ever-increasingly diverse environment.

James Unabia & Jamie Michelle

Kahaonapuaweheikamalie Gruenwald

ETHNICITY OF MOM : Hawaiian, Portuguese, English, German, Irish

ETHNICITY OF DAD : Filipino, English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Jewish, German, Native American CHILDREN : Naia (2 years and 4 months), and one on the way

JAMIE : “Our varied ethnic backgrounds make our lives interesting and rich. We are blessed to have personal exposure to a diverse set of cultural practices, traditions, foods, and the arts. It enables us to create our own unique family culture, while having something in common with a lot of other individuals. We are part of present Hawaiian culture, which is such a great blend of ethnicities. One of the most important values we want to pass on to our children is malama ‘āina (to care for the land). Our ancestors’ knowledge of plants, farming, fishing, and medicine is a gift.”

ETHNICITY OF MOM :

Filipino, Costa Rican

ETHNICITY OF DAD :

Italian, Irish, German, French, English, Sioux Indian

CHILD : Jaya Moon (13 months)

BRITTNEY : “Thinking about lineage is fascinating. We are all a collaboration of a deep history manifested in each of us. We’ve become pretty Americanized and unfortunately don’t have any specific traditions to carry on, but creating new ones and digging into our lineage for ideas will be fun.”

Brittney Valverde & Evan Valiere

Tania Leyva & Jason Washington

ETHNICITY OF MOM :

El Salvadoran, Nicaraguan

ETHNICITY OF DAD : Black

CHILDREN : Sonia (14), Jada (12), Chasity (11), Mariah (6), Kellen (18 months)

TANIA : “Sometimes, as parents, our foundations for teaching our children are the same, however, we may not understand one another’s methods. As we teach our children, we have to learn how to

communicate with and to one another, and that’s not always easy. The thing I enjoy most is the variety of food! I especially love it when my husband cooks his Southern meals, and he loves when I cook my Hispanic dishes—the kids just enjoy it all! Most importantly though, we know our children will learn different walks of life that will help prepare them to be successful in a multicultural world that awaits them outside our home.”

Mark & Linh Owen

ETHNICITY OF MOM : Vietnamese

ETHNICITY OF DAD : English, German, Irish

CHILDREN : Sophia (8), Zoe (4)

LINH : “The best part of having a multiethnic family is having the best of both worlds. We do twice the celebrations, so twice the fun! The one practice that I really impress on my kids is the importance

of revering your ancestors. On the anniversary of my dad’s passing, we always do a cúng , which is a ceremony where there is food and incense and praying. I teach them the right way to pray to be thankful for our year’s worth of blessings. It’s a spiritual connection to those that have passed on, and I would hope that one day, they would do the same for me and Mark to keep us in their thoughts.”

Brandon & Hannah Tory

ETHNICITY OF MOM : Hawaiian, Filipino, Portuguese, Swedish, German, Norwegian ETHNICITY OF DAD : Puerto Rican, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, Chamorro, Spanish

CHILDREN : Noah (14), Naya (11), Nelia (7), Nalu (19 months)

HANNAH : “I love learning to cook all the foods my husband likes that his mom cooked for him as a

kid. For my kids, I love that they live in Hawai‘i where race really isn’t an issue. We are surrounded by so many different ethnicities here that they get to learn a little bit of each of their own ethnicities. Though each of our families have different ways of living, our children know that they are loved by both sides, and that’s all that matters to us.”

Tolentino & Leah Caldeira

(Biological dad: Ha‘a Solomon)

ETHNICITY OF BIOLOGICAL AND LEGAL MOM : Hawaiian, Portuguese, Chinese

ETHNICITY OF LEGAL MOM : Hawaiian, English, French, Spanish, Filipino, Portuguese, Italian, Scottish

ETHNICITY OF BIOLOGICAL

DAD : Hawaiian, Visayan, Irish, Scottish, Choctaw

CHILD : Graham (10 months)

BLAINE : “Books, notes, conversations, memories, mele, lists, sketches, rumors—the interests we share provide a strong connection amongst us. The tone in which things like our socioeconomics, our aptitude, our sloth, our childhoods, and our aspirations are expressed can be traced to ethnicity, but what makes us similar demands the best parts of all of our different backgrounds. Though the marriage between Leah

and I forms a legal protection that any couple would desire to have for their child, Ha‘a’s willingness to expose Graham to those things about him that we so loved and valued to begin with is a situation that requires little navigation because of the trust and respect we share. We are living rather comfortably in our agreement, which we do not take for granted. It often comes to mind, though, that the Hawaiians we all share as progenitors were known to use such happenstance to create a child whose sum of excellence would be composed of three great lines instead of the classic two.”

Blaine

OVERTIME AT THE PARK

WITH THE ODDS STACKED AGAINST THEM, ADVOCATES TURN TO CULTURE, COMMUNITY, AND A BASKETBALL LEAGUE TO EMPOWER MICRONESIANS ON O‘AHU.

TEXT BY SONNY GANADEN | IMAGES BY JOHN HOOK

On a school day morning, Innocenta Sound-Kikku sorts plastic chairs and follows up on paperwork in a two room apartment converted into a vibrant community center at the back of Hawai‘i’s largest public housing complex, Kuhio Park Terrace. “Auntie Inno,” as the kids call her, was the first female police officer in Saipan, an investigator, and the head of the island’s D.A.R.E. program before moving to Hawai‘i in 2007.

The day I’m visiting, she’s far out of uniform, in a hand-sewn dress that could be described as neon orange. As vice chair of the Micronesian Health Advisory Council, one of many advocacy groups within the diverse Micronesian community in Hawai‘i, she serves a variety of functions: educator, translator, anti-violence advocate, community organizer. She uses her phone and laptop to show me a video from the weekend, of children performing nomwisefe, the Chuukese moon dance. Each of them takes a turn standing and performing, having a ball.

“When I moved here, I knew that if I was having a tough time navigating the system, the victims I was trying to help and their kids were in really bad shape,” Sound-Kikku remembers. “I also knew that I needed to work from within the system to make change, that not by turning away but by going back into the culture we could solve issues.”

“Women stop battles,” SoundKikku tells me flatly. Micronesia, being as patriarchal as the rest of the Pacific, was historically gender biased during war. She’s in the process of working with students on a play about Lein Apinamw, a woman who, according to Sound-Kikku’s version, was influential in a battle between the chiefs of Lukunor and Ettal. In her retelling, on the beach of Lukunor, a fierce battle was underway between the warriors of rival islands, the endpoint of years of tribal conflict. During the melee, Apinamw stormed through the battlefield, disarming men and ending bloodshed due to the patriarchal necessity of peace in the presence of women. She confronted the chief of Ettal: If you want the island, you can have it, she said. Killing must stop. So they took the island, Sound-Kikku says with a smile. “She took the chief as her husband, and the people from both islands lived in peace. Of course there’s another version of the story, but it doesn’t serve my purposes.”

The recent success of keeping the diaspora of Micronesian communities healthy and in receipt of basic services is attributed to the diligent work done by Micronesians themselves, repurposing their surroundings and their stories for a new home.

The Micronesian experience in Hawai‘i can be traced to the hubris of war. Modern historians say the Cold War led to the dispersal and relocation of humanity as vast as that of World War II. In the proxy wars in Asia and the Middle East during the latter half of the 20th century, millions were killed or displaced. In the Pacific, where allied powers tested nuclear devices in a fear-induced era that shaped a generation, the effects are still being accounted for. According to the Nuclear Claims Tribunal, a bilateral agreement between the Marshall Islands and the United States, the United States conducted 67 nuclear weapons tests in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958. These tests included the “Castle Bravo” detonation of a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll in 1954, the largest the United States has ever conducted. This discussion is far from over. Last year, the Marshall Islands filed suit against the United

States for these grievances in The Hague.

With their islands now radioactive centers, many Micronesians boarded planes headed for the United States. Most found themselves in Hawai‘i, brought by cultural ties to the sea. This move overseas has also been largely spurred by the Compact of Free Association (COFA), signed in 1986 by the United States and two newly independent Pacific Island nations: the Federated States of Micronesia, which includes Chuuk, Kosrae, Pohnpei, and Yap; and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. As a result of the COFA, citizens of these nations are able to travel to and live in the United States as non-citizens, but legal residents. This includes the ability to work and receive medical benefits. In exchange, they are required to pay local, state, and federal taxes with all the ordinary rights and duties of citizens. A similar compact was signed in 1994 with the Republic of Palau. It is estimated that more than 20 percent of the populations of these nations have emigrated over the last two decades.

With this migration, Micronesian kids found themselves in the parks and basketball courts of urban Honolulu, and at Kuhio Park Terrace, KPT for short, with unfortunate timing. Built in the mid-1960s, with more than 700 units, KPT remains the largest public housing project in the Pacific. For non-residents of the neighborhood during the 1990s, KPT was a forbidden zone, an ominous set of towers in the heart of Kalihi, an area known for stabbings, drug usage, graffiti that was definitely not “urban art,” and the setting off of fire and car alarms (as if anyone wanted to re-steal a busted Saturn). It was the butt of local poverty jokes that do not bear repeating. For residents, the place was the site of abandonment. The Hawai‘i Housing Authority tried to defer management to the military. Kalihi Stream was off-limits for sensible residents. We can blame the media for exacerbating the issue. From the 1970s through the early 2000s, the nightly news often replayed stories of intersecting poverty and violence; advocates awaited the assailant’s mug shot while thinking, please don’t be a Pacific Islander brother in a Bob Marley shirt. The B building was especially notorious. Its main entrance guided people to permanently malfunctioning elevators

and was often cluttered with human debris. Shopping carts, trash, and the smell of decades of ripe humanity welcomed thousands to their homes.

Public housing such as Kuhio Park Terrace is not unique to Hawai‘i, but an American way of dealing with poverty. It started with high hopes in the President Lyndon B. Johnson-era war on poverty, with the soaring rhetoric of LBJ’s political aide Sargent Shriver discussing American need and how to make life easier for the poorest among us (when it was still politically feasible to call people poor). Decades later, the war on poverty was

largely abandoned. In its place, poor people across the nation fought actual wars abroad; battled trickle-down economics and lasting segregation at home; and were left with indelible scars across the United States. By the mid-1990s, KPT had much in common with the housing projects of Jordan Downs in Los Angeles or Queensbridge Houses in Long Island. One can almost reminisce of the era: Queensbridge, the largest housing project in America, became famous through the lyrics of 1994 album Illmatic by the up-and-coming hip-hop artist Nas. Golden-age hip-hop could have been

transposed to the Pacific if only slightly altered with local vernacular: the ravages of urban poverty, the gang rivalries, the drugs. A methamphetamine crisis was all over the news, and law enforcement was cracking down hard. All this at the time when Hawai‘i’s land value was skyrocketing due to foreign investment and middle-class families were spreading into the repurposed sugar fields of central O‘ahu.

Then, in 1996, welfare reform in Congress cut funding to a wide range of healthcare programs for non-citizens, including Medicaid benefits for all but pregnant women and children. Hawai‘i chose to continue providing state-funded Medicaid to those below federal poverty level on its own dime (it is usually jointly funded between state and federal governments) to suddenly unqualified COFA migrants, which meant that Hawai‘i assumed the burden of most of the atonement for the Cold War in the Pacific. According to some estimates, by 2007, over $90 million was spent annually in uncompensated social, education, heath care, and legal costs. In 2009, the Micronesian community was singled out by the administration of then-Governor Linda Lingle for further cuts in health care, which resulted in a new, minimal plan called Basic Health Hawaii in 2010 that essentially barred an unhealthy population from preventative care with a possible cascade of terrible consequences. (After a lawsuit against the shift, COFA residents were provided access to state-funded Medicaid again at the beginning of 2011.) “But there was no communication to the community,” Sound-Kikku remembers. “There were basically no interpreter services, and we had to get organized.” The Micronesian diaspora, spurred by nuclear fallout and lack of opportunity, landed on the shores of widening economic inequality.

That’s where basketball came in. Honolulu’s public parks, largely abandoned by Americanized local kids unless for organized sports, have become the de facto community centers of the local Micronesian diaspora, and basketball is the game of choice. On any given rainless night, parks in Pearl City, Makiki, Kalihi, and Waipahu host mini tournaments with guys who, given another foot in height, could probably walk onto the current L.A.

“The general public thinks we get handouts and deplete resources, but in reality, we more than pay our share in taxes, we serve in the military, we contribute,” says Dr. Sheldon Riklon, a family medicine practitioner who was born on Kwajalein Atoll, regarding Micronesian communities.

Lakers roster. “I used to think they called it the ‘All Mike’ because of a guy named Mike,” Sound-Kikku recalls with a laugh of the tournament she and her husband helped to create. “But it comes from the Pacific Games—that’s what some of the teams were called in the ’70s, short for Micronesians.” Since its inception in 1963, the Pacific Games, like the Olympics, occur every four years, with 22 nations currently participating. New Caledonia dominates. It is not uncommon for French Polynesia or one of the islands that comprise Micronesia to host hundreds of young visiting athletes and their families. Inspired by the Pacific Games, the inaugural All Mike Men’s Basketball Tournament in 2009 on O‘ahu was, essentially, a community organizing strategy. Twenty teams participated in the tournament held in the arena at the Neal Blaisdell Center (which will host the 2015 L.A. Lakers training camp) in central Honolulu. Between games, service providers spoke of health issues. A few years in, a female volleyball league was created. Last year, the organizers added a youth track and field competition.

“Micronesians love church and sports,” says Dr. Sheldon Riklon, a family medicine practitioner and lecturer at the John A. Burns School of Medicine. “These are the ways we’re trying to educate people and keep them healthy. … That basketball tournament is our main avenue to the community.” Born on Kwajalein Atoll and raised in Majuro, Riklon was educated in Hawai‘i and went home to assist with patients affected by radiation and to teach visiting resident doctors. Like many in the community he serves, he came back to Hawai‘i in 2008 with his family to provide a better education for his kids. In 2010, Riklon and his colleagues published an article in the Hawaii Medical Journal titled “The Compact Impact in Hawaii: Focus on Health Care.” Its authors wrote that “The U.S. federal government does not take full responsibility for the adverse economic consequences to Hawai‘i due to COFA implementation,” and that “[t]he lack of health and education infrastructure in the COFA nations, as well as the unique language, culture, political, and economic development of the region have contributed to the adverse elements of the Compact Impact.”

“We have negative connotations. The general public thinks we get handouts and

deplete resources,” Riklon says. “But in reality, we more than pay our share in taxes [through sales, income, and property], we serve in the military, we contribute.”

Contributions or not, this year, as a result of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, the state changed the insurance plan for all COFA adults who are not disabled, blind, or aged (children and pregnant women continue to have access to Medicaid). All able-bodied adults must now apply through the state’s health connector, an online insurance marketplace, or go uninsured. It also means that such COFA residents will likely pay more out-of-pocket expenses, which range from $5 to $20 for doctor visits and prescriptions to thousands for more expensive procedures—further exacerbating a community that struggles to make ends meet. Advocates continue to work through language and cultural barriers to maintain services. If this were a basketball game between the Micronesian community and the state, teams have been playing well into overtime. Sports may not be a metaphor for all of life, but certain aspects, say tenacity, or teamwork, or the transparency of the rules, are certainly applicable to the experience of organizing a community. In sport, the way the world works can almost seem fair, with the most dedicated or talented or strongest emerging victorious. And if your team doesn’t win, at least you know how it happened.

health services. That basketball games are played here without worry of violence is a generational victory.

In the South Pacific, the U.S. military continues to play its war games. The compacts with Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and the Republic of Palau were not completely benevolent: They gave the military wide control over swaths of ocean, including the expanded Ronald Reagan Ballistic Missile Defense Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll, another post in the U.S. military’s vast Pacific Command network. The compacts had other effects. The three countries agreed to waive their sovereign rights to create militaries, and young men and women have signed up in droves for American deployments. Throughout the Afghanistan and Iraqi campaigns, the recruiting stations in Micronesia have had the highest per capita enrollment, continuing the young people’s exodus from their home islands.

***

In 2013, Kuhio Park Terrace was finally fixed, backed by a public-private partnership and a $135 million investment that completely altered the towers. The new developers even gussied up the name, calling the building The Towers at Kuhio Park. Of course, everyone still calls it KPT; calling it by the sanctioned name would only result in head scratching by the uncles out front. Kalihi Stream now boasts a series of massive murals by local artists from the neighborhood. The methamphetamine crisis, which began in the 1990s in Hawai‘i and swamped KPT, crested years ago, having receded to the occasional sad case. Much of the work outside of capital investment was done by Kokua Kalihi Valley, a nonprofit dedicated to providing comprehensive

Back in Room 105, Sound-Kikku’s computer stops cooperating. “Some of these kids are the worst,” she says with a laugh when her laptop stalls out. “They’re always taking pictures, that’s why this thing is slow. How many times we had to tell our son Junior, enough selfie already. But they’re good kids, and we want them to be active. Sports is what we do. … Our kids play a lot, and at least we know where to find them.” One can see the community organizer’s gears turning in her head. “In Utah, I’ve heard of people using the kava talks to discuss domestic violence. Maybe we’ll try that. I’d rather they do that than drink alcohol.” She puts back the chairs, readying the room for the deluge of kids who will return home in a few short hours. “We are stronger as a community, and we see ourselves within that community. We all pass the ball.”

Though it’s easy to place blame on developers for what many consider a lack of affordable housing in Kaka‘ako’s building boom, it’s not so simple, since heavy subsidies, federal grants, and tax credits are required to finance this type of housing.

WHOSE KAKA‘AKO?

LIFE IN HONOLULU’S KAKA‘AKO DISTRICT STANDS TO BE EXCITING, WELCOMING, CULTURAL, AND CONVENIENT. BUT AS THE AREA’S DOZENS OF TOWERS ARE ERECTED OVER THE NEXT TWO DECADES, WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THOSE NOT INCLUDED IN THE MASTER PLANS?

TEXT BY TINA GRANDINETTI | IMAGES BY JONAS MAON

In the Ward Village information center, the climate-controlled air is cold and crisp. A refined silence hangs overhead, the kind that coaxes voices into whispers and turns footsteps into quiet echoes. At the entrance, a touchscreen display greets me with information about the building, and around the corner, architectural models of Kaka‘ako light up as I use an iPad to navigate through the miniature masterplanned community.

In a circular nook adorned with a bright yellow mural depicting scenes of Hawaiian mythology, a promotional film loops, sending calm, collected voices drifting across the room, all of them praising the vision of Ward Village and its developer, The Howard Hughes Corporation.

This is the face of development in Kaka‘ako: perfectly planned and cutting edge. Whether it’s sleek and modern in The Howard Hughes Corporation’s Ward Village or edgy and artistic in Kamehameha Schools’ Our Kaka‘ako, the rebranding of this industrial district has dominated a collective discussion about the future of Honolulu. Over the last century, it has gone through many incarnations. As late as the 1930s, salt pans, loko i‘a (fishponds), and lo‘i (taro fields) pervaded the landscape. In the 1950s, it was home to a multiethnic community of Native Hawaiians and immigrants who were eventually replaced by light industry and gritty auto shops. Today, people are excited by Kaka‘ako’s thriving arts scene and its promises of picturesque urban villages. But as I tinker with iPad displays, a latent anxiety bubbles in my gut. Though Kaka‘ako offers a shining vision of urban Honolulu, in light of skyrocketing housing prices and stagnant wages, many cannot

help but ask, “How have we arrived at this urban identity? Who is going to live in those shiny glass towers? Who is Kaka‘ako for?”

DEVELOPMENT

The question is unsettling, perhaps, because there is a difference between what we want from an urban Honolulu and what we can afford. For me, a 20-something writer and graduate student born and raised on O‘ahu, this dissonance is personal. I look at artist renderings of the future Ward Village, or cruise the bars and restaurants in Our Kaka‘ako, and I like what I see. A promised four-acre public park, a craft cocktail bar, a mural of legendary navigator Papa Mau—and soon, a Whole Foods. Like any good Honolulu millennial, all of these things make me feel at home in Kaka‘ako.

As the promotional video plays on repeat in the information center, Howard Hughes’ senior vice president of development, Nick Vanderboom, tells me that Ward Village will be a true “gathering place.” But, as I step outside and the parking attendant hands me the keys to my old, dinged up Toyota, I realize that Kaka‘ako will not be home anytime in the foreseeable future.

Faced with a severe housing shortage

and a growing population, O‘ahu will need an estimated 4,000 additional housing units each year between now and 2020 in order to meet demand, according to a 2014 report by University of Hawai‘i’s Economic Research Organization.

Kaka‘ako, located within Honolulu’s urban core, has been identified as a prime spot for redevelopment under the oversight of the Hawaii Community Development Authority (HCDA). The area’s major landowners, Kamehameha Schools, Howard Hughes Corporation, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, have eagerly jumped on the chance to do so. As many as 30 new high-rise towers are slated to be built in Kaka‘ako over the next 15 to 20 years.

News of multi-million dollar luxury penthouses have grabbed headlines and sparked controversy, while the HCDA’s reserve housing program has come under harsh public scrutiny. Of the 7,189 units that have been built or approved in Kaka‘ako since 2005, less than 8 percent are affordable for low-income households (low income is defined as 80 percent of area media income, or $76,650 for a family of four in 2014). Yet, alarmingly, a 2014 housing study by the City and County of Honolulu found that 75 percent of the total projected housing demand on O‘ahu would come from this low-income demographic. When I request an interview with the staff at Ward Village to discuss their plans to address this discrepancy, I am referred to their PR representative, Bennet Group, which sends me a written correspondence that enthusiastically announces, “A mixedincome community truly makes people feel welcome and part of Ward Village.”

It’s easy to place all the blame on developers who build for a privileged few, but Lindsey Doi, community outreach officer at HCDA, points out that the issue is much bigger than that. “Developers need to make sure that their financing models are viable and profitable,” she says. “So when we’ve been able to provide low-income housing, it has required heavy state subsidies in addition to federal grants and tax credits.” The HCDA itself contributed $17 million to finance Halekauwila Place, a 19-story building where households earning 60 percent area media income (AMI) or less can rent a two-bedroom unit for $1,210

per month. With a barely detectable sigh, Doi adds, “That doesn’t even get to the fact that people’s wages don’t match the cost of living, which I think is really at the heart of the matter.”

Despite the tremendous burden that housing places on many household finances, attributing Hawai‘i’s high cost of living to the lack of affordable housing oversimplifies a much larger problem rooted in systemic economic injustice. Hawai‘i lacks a living wage, and our regressive tax system, which applies a uniform tax across the board and thus impacts lower-income individuals more deeply, ranks fourth worst in the nation for taxing the poor. (Hawai‘i, coincidentally, also ranks fourth in the nation for millionaire households.)

“It’s a huge issue,” Doi says, “but we’re trying to be part of the solution.”

The HCDA, which oversees development in the district, requires that 20 percent of units in any new development be set aside as reserved housing, generally for five to 10 years. This means that rather than pricing these specific units at market rates, price points must be determined by affordability. Rental units must be affordable for households at 100 percent of AMI, while for-sale units must be affordable to households at 140 percent of AMI. But looking at the numbers has led many to question the effectiveness of these measures: For a family of four, 140 percent AMI amounts to $115,650. Meanwhile, many of our essential workers, from rookie police officers to experienced teachers, fall decidedly within the lowincome category, which goes unaccounted for in HCDA requirements. While these reserve requirements match the guidelines established by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, in Hawai‘i, setting such a lenient threshold for affordable housing seems to neglect a substantial segment of our island family.

CULTURE

If, as they claim, the aim of HCDA and developers like Howard Hughes and Kamehameha Schools is to create a mixeduse, mixed-income gathering place, they need not look further than Nā Mea Hawai‘i, a bookstore and shop tucked away at the

‘ewa end of Ward Warehouse. As I talk with owner Maile Meyer, a group of tutu tidy up after a block-printing class and a university student wanders in to buy a book for school. Meyer is warm, generous with her hugs and encouragement, but also incredibly frank. She leans in and gestures towards an impeccably dressed woman who is browsing through art prints. “This is one of the few places where you can see people dressed like that spending their day with people dressed any kine,” she says, calling my attention to the subtle ways that class politics manifest in our everyday lives. “We’ve always wanted it to be that kind of place.”

Meyer has a more nuanced view of the hype surrounding Kaka‘ako. With Ward Warehouse slated to be torn down to make way for new developments, Meyer will soon have to transition her business, which carries books, arts, and products related to Native Hawaiian issues and culture, to a new location. But, as a leader in the Honolulu arts community, she has seen how developers like Howard Hughes and Kamehameha Schools have provided valuable support to the cultural sector. “In a lot of ways, they’ve been excellent partners,” she says. Indeed, Kamehameha Schools has helped artists turn Our Kaka‘ako into a hub of creativity, and HCDA has agreed to lease a plot of land for a dollar a year to support a live-and-work loft development that will provide 84 rentals to low-income artists making 60 percent AMI ($57,000 for a family of four, or $40,300 for a single person). Howard Hughes has committed an impressive $1 million to the community through the Ward Village Foundation. In fact, Meyer sits on the board of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, which received a $15,000 grant from the foundation to provide stipends to Native Hawaiian artists participating in the council’s 13th Annual Native Hawaiian Convention.

“The developers have worked hard to include artists and the Hawaiian community in their process, because they know that they need us to create interest and diversity,” she says. But when the rest of the community isn’t afforded the same inclusion, Meyer says, “somewhere it shifts from feeling like you’re getting a great deal to feeling like you’re being

Xian, director of the Pacific Alliance to Stop Slavery. Xian first became involved with the houseless through her work to protect young runaways who are often at risk of being targeted for human trafficking. Now, she is here in Kaka‘ako Makai nearly every day, working to provide services for the community. At first, the sight of the tents is intimidating, but the feeling doesn’t last long. Xian ducks her head into a tent. “Eh, you guys have health insurance?” she asks, directing a mother towards the Hawaii Health Connector tent, where they can enroll. With a cool flick of the wrist, a young woman throws out a shaka towards Xian. “Sup girl!” she calls out as she walks over to talk story. She flashes a disarming smile at me, and I listen as she gives Xian a rundown of what has been happening in the area, who needs help, who might be causing trouble. It’s clear that the community has its own way of policing, governing, and supporting each other.

used.” And Meyer is on to something. As urban theorists like Sharon Zukin argue, the cultural sector has played an important role in the gentrification of cities around the world, creating the aesthetic and symbolic preconditions for commercial redevelopment. The distinct energy of a thriving cultural core is turned into an attractive selling point in an increasingly monotonous global market, and the natives, artists, and creatives themselves are recruited as the foot soldiers of gentrification.

The catch is that as developers brand their neighborhoods according to a city’s subcultures, the subversive power of these subcultures can strengthen. As Meyer puts it, the centrality of the creative cultural sector in Kaka‘ako gives artists a unique chance to steer development in a different direction. “When we sit at the table with the developers, we have a chance to disrupt their self-affirming conversation and pressure them to listen to our values.” She adds, “We have to remind people that we don’t forget about our houseless or our working poor. Our standard should be much higher than that.” Meyer takes a long look around her store, at the motley crew hanging out among a treasure trove of art prints, books, and local goods. She turns back to me and says, “Here in Hawai‘i, we

have great familiarity with each other. We’re not strangers. But all of a sudden we’re treating each other like we are. So we have to ask ourselves what has happened to our community.”

PEOPLE

What’s happened is that despite the support these developers have provided for our cultural sector, the veneer of “a community for everyone” reaches only so far—to the corner of Ohe and Ilalo streets, if we’re being literal. Here, the sidewalks are not pedestrian promenades connecting hip urbanites to their places of work and play. Instead, they are home to a community of roughly 400 houseless people. Dozens upon dozens of tents line each side of the road. While people are often reluctant to connect the growing Kaka‘ako skyline to the sprawling encampment on the other side of Ala Moana Boulevard, as the midday sun beats down onto hot asphalt, they twist together like a knot in your stomach.

On a weekday afternoon, the encampment is fairly quiet—like any neighborhood, many adults are at work, and most of the children are at school. I walk through the community with Kathryn

As Xian tells me about the daily struggles faced by each member of this community, whether man, woman, keiki (child), or kūpuna (elder), the luxury towers lose the last of their seductive hold over me. It becomes clear that Honolulu’s urban reality is increasingly characterized by what urban theorist David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession.” A select few are amassing immense wealth by clearing out unwanted and marginalized populations to make room for new investments. I can hear the frustration in Xian’s voice when she tells me that the population in the Kaka‘ako encampment surged from around 150 people to nearly 400 as a direct result of the City and County of Honolulu’s sit-lie ban in Waikīkī. Xian estimates that 68 percent of this community is made up of families with children, and the majority are Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders, many working multiple jobs. Looking around at the children’s tricycles tucked away under tarps, it is hard to understand the logic of protecting our economy from our people, rather than protecting our people from our economy. “When advocates asked lawmakers to wage a war on poverty, we did not mean to wage a war on poor people,” Xian says.

If what is taking place in Kaka‘ako and across Honolulu is a war on the poor,

For houseless advocate Kathryn Xian, it is hard to understand the logic of protecting our economy from our people, rather than protecting our people from our economy.

Shown clockwise from top: art murals in Kamehameha Schools’ Our Kaka‘ako; Lindsey Doi, community outreach officer at the Hawaii Community Development Authority; Halekauwila Place, one of the area’s only low-income rentals in Our Kaka‘ako; Maile Meyer, community leader and owner of Nā Mea Hawai‘i, a bookstore in Ward Warehouse.

then city raids are its battles. During these raids, state and city crews tear down tents, tossing tarps, mattresses, and personal possessions into dump trucks. Having homes torn down, even temporary ones, is a traumatic experience, and police are always present, ready to arrest anyone that tries to interfere or resist. To make matters worse, identification is often confiscated and thrown away during these sweeps, making it much harder for the houseless to access services or apply for jobs. “It only makes it more difficult for the houseless to leave poverty,” Xian says. While policies designed to sweep the houseless under the rug exacerbate the problem, Xian says that the political will to come up with real solutions is absent.

“We have somehow been convinced that the poor are responsible for our economic hardship because their presence deters economic activity, when the truth is that it is big businesses with no true sense of responsibility to Hawai‘i and its people that are responsible,” Xian says. “To me, as an advocate, it looks like the priority is to make a fast buck at the expense of the people of Hawai‘i, and in the meantime, pit the poor against the middle class.” Though the cruelty of dispossession is most visible here on the streets, it is also felt in more subtle forms by the middle class. While most of Hawai‘i’s hidden poor have support networks that serve as a safety net between their paychecks and the streets, many of them end up living with family or leaving the islands altogether. A 2011 Hawaii Housing Planning Study reported that 30 percent of people expecting to move away from the islands cited housing prices as their main reason for leaving; meanwhile, nearly 30 percent of all condominium units are owned by people from outside the state of Hawai‘i. The struggles of Hawai‘i’s houseless are inextricably bound to the struggles of the working class, and both are suffering greatly in O‘ahu’s urban core.

CHANGE

In the shadow of those rising skyscrapers, things can start looking pretty dark. But Meyer and Xian both point out that change is possible when people take matters into their own hands. Two years ago, Meyer welcomed a houseless artist into the shop, and he has since become a valuable part of the Nā Mea ‘ohana, selling his illustrations and even teaching art classes. Xian was recently able to get one houseless family off of the streets and into a little 300-squarefoot apartment by using revenue from sales of her homemade organic Pono Soap to provide rent assistance, and she plans to expand on this experience to help more families get back on their feet. Throughout Honolulu, people are quietly reaching out to those in need. But transformative, systemic changes—like shifting our development paradigm, establishing a living wage, and reforming our regressive tax system—demand political action. Xian emphasizes over and over again, “Economic justice needs to be at the forefront of every platform of every lawmaker, and if it isn’t, we need to force the issue.”

There are signs that policymakers will listen when they have to. In response to widespread public criticism of the lack of affordable housing in Kaka‘ako, the HCDA is exploring reforms that would lower the reserve housing threshold from 140 percent AMI to 120 percent AMI and lengthen the terms of reserve housing so that units stay affordable for longer. Although the HCDA isn’t sure how much longer that might be, it’s a step in the right direction. “The loudest voices came through in the last legislative session and at our community hearings,” Doi says. “We heard a lot of concerns from the community.” It remains to be seen whether the HCDA will follow through with these policy changes, but it is clear that those loud voices will be important in shaping Honolulu’s future.

The archetypal city can be a place of extreme wealth and desperate poverty; of electric density and crushing isolation; of high culture and bold delinquency. While

it is these stark, sometimes violent contrasts that make the urban world so fascinating, perhaps it is also what has made Hawai‘i so reluctant to adopt an urban identity, opting for the safer “vacation destination” instead. There is violence there, squeezed between the sidewalk tent encampments and the real estate showrooms, though we keep trying to look away. We don’t want to have to account for it in our collective identity. But if we turn our backs on our most vulnerable, we are turning our backs on ourselves. Because the other fascinating thing about cities is that they take on lives of their own. Honolulu won’t wait for us to decide who belongs in our vision of an urban Hawai‘i. Rather than allowing a select few to sell us a prepackaged urban identity, we will need to discover our own.

DEFINED :

RESERVE HOUSING : defined as 100 percent of AMI, or $82,600, for rentals, and 140 percent of AMI, or $115,650, for purchase, for families of four. Twenty percent of new developments in Kaka‘ako must be set aside for reserve housing.

LOW-INCOME HOUSING : defined as 80 percent AMI, or $76,650 for a family of four. It’s estimated that 70 percent of housing demand between 2011 and 2016 will come from low-income households. There is no provision in HCDA requirements that addresses this.

OUR BEAUTIFUL, HIDEOUS ELECTRONIC IDENTITY

IN TODAY’S ELECTRONIC WORLD, A PERSON’S BEST FACE FORWARD IS SOMETIMES NOT AS IT SEEMS.

TEXT BY BEAU FLEMISTER | IMAGES BY NOA EMBERSON

WHO ARE WE?

Something feels different. Sometimes it feels like we have never been so connected and somehow never so far apart. We live in a different time. Then 10 years ago, then two years ago, then last goddamned week. It seems like there’s always a software update I haven’t yet downloaded. I could’ve sworn I had the latest version of iTunes.

But I don’t.

Maybe once upon a time before the Internet, we took chances. We didn’t have personal GPS but were much more aware of our surroundings. We looked for love in all the wrong and right places. We talked to each other. We did silly things like ask people what time it was as an excuse to talk to each other. We asked people to dance. We got shut down. We got invited in. Once upon a time before the Internet, we couldn’t Google our dates. Once upon a time, we got to know each other point blank, and it was quite exhilarating. We made discoveries and gasped at the coincidences (you like chapbooks, too?!), and it was all that much more magical in person. Once upon a time, we wrote letters. We missed each other and had a lot to say when we finally met back up. We could talk for hours. We used to know each other’s scents. We used to touch.

It started as a prank, but it just as well may have been a social experiment. But what social experiment isn’t kind of prank-like in nature? OK, one of them had it coming. One of the two young men bragged to the other that he could never get got. Thus the provoked one decided that he’d put an end to this aggravation. He’d pull off the most devastating prank, sorry, social experiment of them all: He’d make his nemesis fall in love … with him.

James* and Dave* have been friends since, as the ancient scholars call it, “hanabada days.” They grew up on Kaua‘i together, moved to O‘ahu for college at the same time, and even dormed at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa together. Upon graduation, they worked part-time at the same Italian restaurant in Honolulu as servers. It was at this very restaurant that James hatched his plan to catfish Dave. Catfishing, for those of you still living in your analog world, is a somewhat common practice by both friends and strangers of varied intentions in which one lures another into a relationship by means of a fictitious online persona (named after the 2010 movie Catfish, in which the sorry main character tracks down the roots of his unfortunately

falsified love. He got an MTV gig after).

With the help of his own girlfriend— now, wife—James created a fake Myspace persona. James poached some photos from a random girl’s account and click-and-dragged her onto his desktop. A fit and attractive blonde: just Dave’s type. James gave her an identity, as if the poor girl whose photos he rustled didn’t already have one. But that’s beside the point. Or maybe that’s precisely the point. In any case, James spent a week and a peculiarly creepy amount of his own time giving this girl—Jennifer, he called her—a few dozen friends, some of which were mutual friends of Dave’s. (Go figure!) James created a few photo galleries featuring places they’d both been to in Southern California, which is where she supposedly resided. He even threw in some shots of destinations they’d both been to on Kaua‘i and O‘ahu, housing these in her “Hawaii Staycay” gallery.

Coincidentally, Dave and Jennifer had a lot of the same interests. They both paddled, loved to surf, enjoyed the beach, loved to hike. They liked the same movies, similar music, even fanned out over the same canines (“Must Love Frenchies!”). She was a marine biology major with an affinity for Hawai‘i. She even hailed from the same hometown in Southern California where

Dave’s grandmother lived, a wicked detail that only a best friend (or psychopath) could contrive. Perhaps James had created Dave’s dream girl. That, or just another notch on Dave’s belt. It was hard to tell with Dave, because he was a little bit of a sleaze-bag when it came to girls. But Jennifer asked Dave if he’d add her as a friend and naturally Dave bit—hook, line, and sinker.

A few days passed. James saw Dave at work on dinner shifts and gauged his moods, waiting for him to start yammering about a certain someone. Not long after Dave friended her, they began to talk, leaving messages with one another on their Myspace accounts. Two a day, then three, then four—nothing too innocuous, all very innocent at first. Jennifer hinted at wanting to come back to Hawai‘i, for grad school, perhaps. Predictably, Dave started to flirt with her. “Wow, you’re really cute!” he’d coo. “How’s your beach bod!?” or, “You should come out, I’ll buy your ticket!” He actually made that offer, the schmuck. So Jennifer kept feeding the line.

I am not sure if it’s oddly beneficial, extremely harmful, or just plain weird how these days it’s so easy to be who we are not. To reinvent ourselves. A culture in two worlds: virtual and actual. Regular media and social media. Perhaps catfishing is just the new normal in dating. Remember when San Diego Charger Manti Te‘o got duped? And while it’s easy to spit, “How could he not have known?”, men, from Adam to Samson to Paris of Troy, have fallen for lesser tricks. And people have built empires in letters. People have built love without contact. And every human being since the beginning of time has come to that same disappointing realization at least once, of friend or love, when they stop and sigh: You are not who I thought you were

Just last year, a young Dutch woman named Zilla van den Born documented a five-week trip to Southeast Asia through posts on Facebook and Vimeo clips. She smiled for photos mid-slurp, devouring exotic, steaming noodles. She posted shots of herself grinning underwater with colorful fish while snorkeling in a turquoise sea;

bowing with palms clasped; praying with monks in a golden temple. This trip also never happened: She staged the whole thing from her hometown. She Photoshopped the fish into the shots of her snorkeling in her apartment complex’s pool. She’d visited a local Buddhist temple for the monks. She’d even fooled her parents who lived in another town by Skyping with them in traveler’s garb.

“I did this to show people that we filter and manipulate what we show on social media,” she said to Dutch journalists. “We create an online world which reality can no longer meet. … What a picture finally really shows is never the exact situation as it really was, it is a flavored version of the truth.”

A couple weeks after James created Jennifer, Dave confided in James at work one evening. Dave confessed that he’d met someone. It should’ve been sweet, but it came out more like: “Brah, there’s this chick on Myspace, and she’s sooo fucking hot.” James engaged him: “Oh, really? Tell me about her.” And Dave did, but mostly he bragged about what he’d do to her when she finally did come out to O‘ahu. In actuality, James knew, Dave’s messages to Jennifer were a far different tone. Mostly, they talked about school. Dave constantly asked her about her classes or exams. He’d tactfully suggest that she should come to O‘ahu and that he’d show her exclusive hikes, secret-ish restaurants that only a local would know. He offered that she stop by his grandmother’s and say hello. But to James, back in the restaurant: all douchebaggery and crass.

One night, very late and after a series of messages, Dave asked Jennifer for a photo. But, like, a sexy one. James, a little at a loss and perhaps tired and not thinking so clearly, took a blurry photo of his own butt and sent it to Dave. There was no response. The following evening at work, Dave recounted the incident to James. “Brah. She had the weirdest ass. Like, it looked like a boy’s butt or something.” James said that it couldn’t have been that bad, a little too defensively.

That night, James poached some far more flattering photos of a similar blonde he found online and sent them to Dave.

“Aw yeah, that’s what I’m talking about,” Dave pecked back approvingly.

Nearly four weeks after Dave met Jennifer, the unsuspecting nit began pushing more contact. Jennifer had sent some racy photos, some of the conversations were taking a turn for the risqué, and now it was his turn to reciprocate. One night, after an oddly stressful evening shift, James came home, logged into Jennifer’s account, and opened an attachment Dave had sent her. It was a batch of photos. Twelve of the most graphic nude photos that he had ever seen of anyone—of Dave, for that matter. Use your imagination, or don’t, they were … well, there were mirrors and … it was officially time to stop the charade. The next morning, James sent Dave a large photo of his own grinning face from Jennifer’s Myspace account. Dave quickly called James, confused, and within five seconds of asking, “Whyyyyyy … are you … emailing me from Jen …” he had figured out the answer to his own question. He politely asked James to delete the photos, and James mercifully obliged.

And while today, years later, the two are the best of friends again, Dave admits that the blow—the breakup, if you will— wasn’t any less painful, having never even met the girl. As much shit as he talked to James at work, he had thought that, beyond a fling, this girl might’ve been something. He saw a future, as some special people make us do. He looked forward to her messages and emails while at work, at school, at play. He realized that online, just as in real life, the pain from a terminated relationship wasn’t any less authentic. He also admitted to hooking up with a few women while this whole charade was going on though, too. Classic Dave.

same way of “if a tree falls in the forest,” if we do something amazing but don’t tell everyone we know about it, did it really happen? Now, I could harp on about the stats and detrimental effects of social media on our society as a whole; they’re publishing papers by the week. And even though I, myself, am a strong proponent of tangible living and loving, who am I to judge?

Inevitably, we will find a way to fall, find a way to love. Even if we’re fudging our profiles and juicing our interests or touching up our online selves, when we’re typing away on those keyboards waiting for that response, are the butterflies in our bellies any less restless? Do our hearts soar at lower altitudes or beat less beats at the unknown on the other side of the screen?

Perhaps we have changed—our language, our technology, our would-youlike-to-dance moments—but our hearts have not. We still run naked and feverish and hysterical into the abyss, even from a seat facing the monitor. We all still try, urgently, to show the ones we love our best selves (plus, sometimes, our risky body-part bits) before they realize that all we are is … this. Online or off, it’s always just another blind date. Another chance to break our hearts. Another terrifying and wonderful way to know we’re still alive and human.

*Names have been changed.

In our brave new electronic world, are we our best selves online or in reality? In the

ESSAY

DO YOU SEE ME?

KIMIKO MATSUDA-LAWRENCE REFLECTS UPON HER LIFE GROWING UP MULTIRACIAL IN WASHINGTON, D.C. AND HAWAI‘I.

BY KIMIKO MATSUDA-LAWRENCE

BY JOHN HOOK

TEXT

IMAGES

“HOW

“IfeelmostcoloredwhenI amthrownagainstasharp

whitebackground.”

IT FEELS TO BE COLORED ME,” ZORA NEALE HURSTON

In 2014, I wrote and directed a play entitled I,Too,AmHarvard based on interviews with fellow black students exploring the experience of being black at Harvard University. The accompanying Tumblr photo campaign— images of black students, their words, their hurt, emblazoned on whiteboards—quickly went viral, spurring, among other things, national media coverage and front-page stories in the New York Times and The Boston Globe.

Over the next few months, I, Too, Am Harvard inspired similar photo campaigns on campuses across the country, from “I, Too, Am Iowa” to “I, Too, Am Oxford,” revolutionizing the national conversation surrounding race and belonging on predominantly white college campuses. As the nation’s unaddressed racism continues to make front-page news, I—a half-black, half-Japanese woman born in Washington

D.C. with roots in Hawai‘i—continue to reflect upon the journey that led me to create I, Too, Am Harvard and the moments that shaped my own racial consciousness and identity.

JUST WORDS

I am riding home from middle school in Washington, D.C. one day when a white man gets on my bus full of black faces and calls us the n-word. My stomach drops. The boys at the back of the bus rise. This is the first time I will hear that word exit the mouth of a real life white person, not in the movies, but here, on my bus, on this bus full of blackness. As I walk home from the bus stop that day, I struggle to make sense of the feeling this man has left with me, the smallness, the brokenness, the shame slowly growing inside me. I will not hear this word shouted by a white man into a crowd of black and brown for another eight years, and eight years later I will still not know what to do.

In the basement cafeteria of my black elementary school, I am teased for the musubi I bring in my lunchbox, white rice formed in the salty palm of my Japanese-American mother into its familiar pyramid shape and wrapped in nori. “Ewww what is that smell?” they jeer. “Seaweed,” I answer. The word feels foreign and wrong on my tongue, but I push it out anyway, attempting awkward translation. “Seaweed??” They crinkle their noses and I feel I am foreign, I am wrong, I do not fit into this landscape of Lunchables, Gushers, and free and reduced frozen fish sticks. I go home. I ask my mother to pack me a sandwich. I miss musubi. When my

classmates pull their eyes into slits, contort their mouths into ching-chong-Chinaman talk, and call our volunteer chess teacher Mr. Tsunami, though that is not his name, my cheeks flash hot again. Do my eyes look like that? Are they talking about me? Somehow I know I am tied to this taunting, that I am their target even though they’re not looking at me, the words still clinging to my skin as if sensing the yellow beneath the brown. I look at my eyes in the mirror, turn my head to the side, search for slits. Who is this they’ve made of me?

At 14, I move to Hawai‘i. Here, they say, there’s no racism, yet the familiar geography of difference says otherwise: Micronesians made the punch line of every joke; Native Hawaiians displaced onto tent city sidewalks and in Arizona prisons; Filipina housekeepers working under Japanese and Chinese management, all under the watch of white hotel owners. I pass by Punahou School and see brown-skinned construction workers placing rows of heavy rocks around the prep school’s kindergarten area, building walls that will keep their own brown-skinned children out. This seems no racial paradise to me.

In high school, I cringe at a local classmate’s T-shirt: cartoon characters sporting afros, grills, rims, and fried chicken—and somehow I know these images, as much as I would deny them, are kin to me. For four years, I hear classmates use the n-word, not a black person in sight. When I confront a classmate one day, telling him of the pain the word triggers inside me, he says, “What? It’s just a word.”

It’s just a word. It’s just a song. It’s just a shirt. It’s just a joke. It’s just—are they talking about me? Since there are no blacks in this environment, I am the only one they know. But do they know? I am not brave enough to make them.

This is what I learn from the other children in school. I learn what I look like. I learn what I sound like. The slit eyes. The ching-chong. The n-word. The black joke. The violence of black on yellow, and yellow on black, and white out of sight, and an ocean apart, and me in the middle. We are children. We are learning racism’s language. We are becoming American. And slowly, I am learning my skin.

A SHARP WHITE BACKGROUND

The first week of my freshman year at Harvard University, the Asian American Association shows up at my dorm room door with an invitation to their welcome mixer. I answer, and they ask, “Is your roommate here?” “No,” I say. “Well, could you give this to Kimiko for us?” “I am Kimiko.” “Oh,” they say, and we stand there in the doorway, awkward, staring at the difference in the distance between us.

It is two months later, and everywhere we go—in the dining hall, in our dorm rooms, in our classes—they are talking about affirmative action, debating our deservingness, our belongingness, our bodies in these seats, our hands on these books. At the black table in the dining hall, people are discussing their SAT scores, their AP classes, listing their résumés of accomplishments, as their questioning of us becomes our questioning of ourselves, as the defense of our presence here becomes an urgent daily task. We turn in on ourselves, taking refuge at the black table, gravitating toward black friends, not sure of whom we

can trust. The campus feels threatening, like our footsteps are unwanted, like our bodies are dangerous, disruptive. In class, we choose our words carefully. We study too hard. We write too well. We are trying to prove them wrong.

I move through buildings named for owners of slaves, some former presidents of my school. I sit in rooms where dead white men whose grandfathers used to own people who look like me gaze down from 7-foot portraits on the wall. I go to parties where boys in tuxes call me exotic to my face, see my face copyrighted behind the gloss of brochures. The caption reads “diversity.” I look around my classrooms, all I see is white. Where is this diversity? They’re all looking at me. ***

I am passing through Harvard Yard with friends one Friday night when a group of large drunk white males approaches us. They yell in our faces, “Can you read??” “Can you read?” I ask. “That’s racist!” they say. “White dudes suck!” I scream back, as my friends pull me away, back into sanity. I am reminded of the white man on the bus. I try to remember the shape of their faces, but all I remember is their bodies, big and white and man, and everything I am not, will never be—everything that makes their bodies bel ong here, and mine always a question. I want to show them my essays, want to pull out my exams and throw them on the snow, want to pull up my transcript on their smartphones, ask them can you read this? Sometimes I wonder if I have ever seen these men again. Have we passed each other in the hallway? Shared a lecture hall, a library book, a table in the dining hall? Later, I write their words on a whiteboard,

stand in front of a camera, post the picture online, and wonder if they will ever see it, ever see me.

NAMES

I am looking at a photograph where I am 5 years old, my brother 3, and we are peeking out from behind the corner of my father’s protest sign in the streets of Washington, D.C. We are old enough to walk, so we are old enough to march. We are marching for Amadou Diallo, killed by New York City cops who saw a black man and imagined his wallet into a gun. That night, my brother’s small voice fills the house: “No justice! No peace! No racist police!” I later will learn those cops fired 41 shots. The sign in my hand says: “Enough is Enough.” Amadou Diallo. At 5, this is a name I know, like many I will come to know: Oscar Grant. Sean Bell. Jordan Davis. Renisha McBride. Aiyana Jones. Rekia Boyd. Ramarley Graham. Jonathan Ferrell. Kimani Gray. Kollin Elderts. Even at 5, I know the names are somehow connected to mine. I know the black, the brown of my skin somehow ties me to these nowdead men and women, the same black and brown that ties them to death. I know more names are coming.

My mother is crying at the kitchen table. Trayvon Martin is dead in the street, America pleading not guilty, and she is trying to explain to my 16-year-old brother what it means for him to be a black man in America: hood down, hands out of your pockets, don’t walk at night, don’t walk at all, these streets are not yours, you are my baby, that could’ve been you.

It is the night of non-indictment of Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot and killed 18 year-old Michael Brown. I am tucked into the couch with a cold, still numb with the pain of this familiar heartbreak. Cities are burning, highways halted, hands up, raised to the sky. I want honey and tea, but I will not go to the dining hall, where I know they’ll be laughing, eating, drinking, studying, texting, Snapchatting, Yik Yaking, Facebooking, and living … like we aren’t dying next door.

ESSAY

VIEWS IN FLUX

They took my grandmother’s name in grammar school. Told her she’d have to get a real American name, and just like that, she became Carolyn. Years later she is in New York, now a young woman, when a friend asks her how her parents could have given her that name when they couldn’t speak English. And that is when she decides to take it back, unveiling this name, my name. Kimiko. The name her mama gave her the morning she was born into red dirt, bare feet, and one-dollar days, crying out amidst Kaua‘i canefields. Sometimes I wonder what my name would be if she’d never stolen it back for us.

It is one year after I, Too, Am Harvard, and I am still gathering my voice to speak. On the first day of classes, I sit in a seminar on the Civil War, surrounded by white faces. They go around the room. They say their names. I hear the professor say that this past Monday was the 150th anniversary of the 13th Amendment, and it strikes me just how close we are to slavery. I think of the plantations that birthed me into this nation, the fields of cotton and cane, the stolen bodies, stolen land, and stolen lives that live on in me, the stories I carry with me to this place. I gather my voice. I gather the stories. I open my mouth, I say my name.

“I learn what I look like. I learn what I sound like. The slit eyes. The ching-chong. The n-word. The black joke. We are learning racism’s language,” writes Kimiko Matsuda-Lawrence.

ON BEING HAWAIIAN

KALEO ALAU CALLS FOR A RALLYING AMONGST TRUE HAWAIIANS.

TEXT BY KALEO ALAU

IMAGE BY JONAS MAON

My full name is Thomas William Kaleo o Kahekili Alau, which means the “voice of the thunderer.” My name comes from Kahekili II, the 25th king of Maui, and is short for Kāne-Hekili, after the god of thunder. When Kahekili died, it was said his chiefs cut up his body and scattered him all over the island, so technically nobody should have been named Kahekili, but my grandma gave it to me anyway.

Our family believed that whatever you were named in Hawaiian is how you were going to grow up to be. For me, this is true. On the one hand, for the longest time, I couldn’t control the volume of my voice. But also, I’m pretty transparent. If I have an opinion about something, you’re going to know about it, and I don’t sugarcoat it.

If you look at me, you probably would guess that I am white. When I go to New York City, I’m white. When I go to any

Asian country, I’m extremely white. When I go to Los Angeles, I’m Mexican—I’m not white enough to be a white person there. I’m maybe the most non-Hawaiian Hawaiian person you’d ever meet. My great-grandmother on my dad’s side was 100 percent Hawaiian. My grandmother was half Hawaiian, half Chinese, and my grandfather was Chinese-Hawaiian, making my dad a little over half Hawaiian and me just over a quarter.

Growing up, I met a lot of people who looked Hawaiian as hell and were extremely proud to be 10 percent Hawaiian. In fact, I find that the less Hawaiian you are, the prouder you seem to be. My siblings and I grew up knowing we were Hawaiian, and my dad could speak Hawaiian, but he always told us, “Doesn’t matter how much Hawaiian you are, it matters how smart you are.” I’ve met a lot of pro-Hawaiian

dudes, not like pro-sovereignty or anything like that; they were just happy to be Hawaiian—proud to be Hawaiian. You know, Hawaiian flags on the back of their trucks, not upside-down flags, just regular Hawaiian flags. To me, being Hawaiian was never a thing. It became a thing the older I got. And then the sovereignty movement came along.

I thought Onipa‘a, the massive rally that marked 100 years since Queen Lili‘uokalani’s abdication, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs-led Kau Inoa, which started registering Native Hawaiians in 2004, were great ideas and produced huge turnouts—and then nothing was done with the momentum created from them. I signed up for Kau Inoa because I needed to register as a Hawaiian to apply for something through Kamehameha Schools. I can’t even remember what it was for, but I know I didn’t get it, and I remember thinking, “Why did I go through all that?” I felt like I signed up to be Hawaiian so people knew there was another Hawaiian out there. So instead, I just got a job, got a loan, and fixed my own problems.

I think there are many issues affecting Hawaiians today, drug use being one of the biggest. It’s incredibly stupid to me that issues like that are pushed to the background because louder voices are saying something about sovereignty. Most of what we have right now are dissenting voices, screaming people who can’t form a coherent thought without yelling or being upset. It’s as if they’re angry that they’re Hawaiian and that they don’t have more because they’re Hawaiian; as if they blame being Hawaiian for why their lives aren’t so

great, because they were never afforded the luxury of the land. And in the end, what do you get when you have a whole bunch of voices? You have no voice.

It’s not that I disagree so much with those who believe Hawai‘i should be a sovereign nation, but it’s not true that Hawaiians deserve their land back solely on the basis that it was taken. Because if you’re going to go down that road, then, well, China deserves a lot of land back, so does Rome, the Egyptians, the Persians— you know what, why don’t we just give everyone their land back? It doesn’t make sense. When Akaka was a senator, he pushed very hard to make a nation within a nation happen (formally called the Akaka Bill), and instead of the Hawaiian people banding together behind him to give him a louder voice, we split. If that had passed, then Hawaiians would’ve had the same rights as the American Indians, who have rights, have a voice. Not that the American Indians have everything. Their lives aren’t perfect; one in four lives in poverty. So you can’t just assume that if we get sovereignty, we get everything.

Hawaiians are not the only ones who live in Hawai‘i. And if you can trace your roots back and your family is Hawaiian, then yes, you are Hawaiian. But being Hawaiian means a whole lot more. Being Hawaiian is as much how you feel about Hawai‘i as it is genealogy. There are a lot of people out there who love Hawai‘i—love the spirituality of it, the beauty of it, the history of it—and absorb it into who they are. For them, and for anyone else truly Hawaiian, Hawai‘i is home.

A FEW FAVORITE THINGS

BIG ISLAND-NATIVE CRYSTALYN COSTA FILIPOVICH FIGHTS HOMESICKNESS WITH LOCAL-STYLE EATS IN WILLIAMSBURG.

TEXT BY MITCHELL KUGA

IMAGES BY SARAH FORBES KEOUGH

If you can’t make the 5,000-mile trip home, then bring the islands to you.

That was Crystalyn Costa Filipovich’s reasoning behind opening Onomea, the only strictly Hawaiian restaurant in New York City. Homesickness was the inspiration. After hustling in New York for over four years in her early 20s, Crystalyn, who is now 25, was ready to move home. “For New York to be the first place to move after living in Hilo, a small town, it was night and day,” she says. “I don’t know how many times I cried and called my parents being like, ‘Can you buy me a plane ticket home?’” Greg Filipovich, a native New Yorker and her fiancé at the time, convinced her otherwise. Instead, he asked, why not channel the homesickness into a business? One that would bring the islands a little bit closer to New York?

The two are now business partners, and married. When I meet them at the Brooklyn restaurant in January, the newlyweds are recently returned from Hilo, where they got married at a sugar plantation with a view. “Sorry we’re late!” Crystalyn calls out. “Still trying to adjust back to this weather.” Inside, the 34seat restaurant is cozy. Glossy pictures of beaches and lava reference the birthplace of menu items like shoyu chicken and Spam musubi. But outside, snow thaws behind a

landscape of corrugated graffiti.

Onomea opened in August 2013 with a name that roughly translates to “delicious things,” though for Crystalyn it means “the favorite place.” Here, humble Hawaiian staples are served up against the backdrop of a Williamsburg food scene fixated on reinvention and pizzazz. The restaurant has no chef. Although she hops behind the line when the kitchen is short-staffed, Crystalyn refers to herself as “a self-taught home cook gone restaurateur.” It’s in this same modest spirit that she has resisted revamping her grandmother’s recipes, which have been passed down for six generations. Growing up, family gatherings centered around grandma’s cooking. “It’s what kept our family together,” Crystalyn says. “No one has a perfect family, but when there’s food around everyone’s happy.”

In the process of healing her own homesickness, Crystalyn has provided a space for others to deal with theirs. Through food, Hawai‘i émigrés are able to share their love for the islands with people who have no homegrown experience of slow-cooked kālua pig or Spam fried rice. “You can see that pride,” she says. “Like, this is what I ate when I was growing up.” Diners have traveled from as far as

Connecticut to wrap their chopsticks around cubes of fresh pokē, and a group of regulars gathers every other week to talk story over food they grew up eating on the beach as music streams from a Big Island radio station. Crystalyn recounts one diner jumping out of his seat at the sight of loco moco on the menu.

Others note the taste of Aloha shoyu, which Crystalyn imports monthly by the crate. (The sign out front reads, “Shoyu a good time.”) Shipping costs more than the product itself, but it’s one of those things she can’t let go of. “I can taste the difference,” she says. “When you change things too much, you’re taking away the nostalgia that someone has for that flavor.”

It’s this quiet stubbornness and fighting spirit that landed Crystalyn on last year’s Zagat “30 Under 30” New York City list. It’s also how she met Greg, during her first weekend in New York City. The two had gathered at an acquaintance’s apartment to watch an Ultimate Fighting Championship bout. “The fight was happening, and I was just sitting around being quiet because I didn’t know anybody,” she recalls. Greg was commenting on the fight, using UFC jargon. Crystalyn eventually spoke up to correct him.

“That’s actually an Americana,” corrected Crystalyn, referring to the submission mount.

“Who are you?” he shot back.

The two made small talk, and later ended up grappling. “He put me in a triangle choke,” she says. “And I picked him up with my one arm, off the ground, to slam him.”

“She tried to slam me on my head,” says Greg, smiling. “And after that I was like, ‘I love her.’ I was chasing her around for weeks.”

Onomea is located in Williamsburg at 84 Havemeyer St. For more information, call 347-844-9559.

TO LIVE AND DINE IN L.A.

WHEN HOMESICK PANIC HITS, THESE L.A. EATS WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE.

TEXT BY MATTHEW DEKNEEF

IMAGES BY RICARDO MORENO

There are days when it really hits you. Maybe you’re “freezing” at 72 degrees Fahrenheit. Or the physical pain of forcibly pronouncing it “care-ee-oh-key” around co-workers is too much to bear. You let someone cut in front of you on the dreaded 101, and, once again, this person doesn’t wave thank you. Yes, you’re surrounded by a never-ending supply of palm trees, but you’re most definitely not living in Hawai‘i. Yet through those taunting fronds, all my Hawai‘i expats, there is hope! Three years and approximately eight lack-ofmac-salad-induced panic attacks later, I’ve discovered a mixed plate of places in the immediate L.A. area that’ll give you a much-needed taste of home.

PONO BURGER

Just shy of two years old, Pono Burger has become a quick favorite for easily recreating some of Hawai‘i’s fondest flavors amid an atmosphere reminiscent of Kāne‘ohe or Kailua. Oh, yeah, and the waitstaff actually calls it “shoyu” here. Started by chef Makani Gerardi of Big Island’s popular Ultimate Burger, you can find her latest venture in Santa Monica. Enjoy a unique menu infused

with local touches, such as a spicy guava rum sauce or a Kona coffee bourbon BBQ sauce, in what feels like one of the only four blocks in Los Angeles where drivers rarely honk their car horns, i.e. paradise. Gerardi’s creations boast solid, health-conscious portions made with only non-GMO, grass-fed meats, and as many organic and locally sourced veggies as possible. But the true marker of its Hawai‘i roots? The Paniolo Burger, a twist on a Texas-style burger stacked with three perfectly flaky buttermilk beer-battered onion rings, because when it comes to food, go big or go home, right? Its second location is scheduled to open soon in West Hollywood near a couple places that could really use some chill vibes: Whiskey a Go Go and The Viper Room on Sunset Boulevard. 829 Broadway St., 11 a.m.–10 p.m., ponoburger.com.

COMMISSARY

Sometimes, after a long sleepless night out, you just want to wake up to the warm and familiar embrace of Spam, eggs, and rice because screw your juice cleanses, Los Angeles! Yes, I still pay a dumb monthly

premium to take the same Flywheel class that Gwyneth Paltrow does every weekend, but before I do, I want the arteries in my calves to be fueled entirely by Spam. Turns out that even in godless Los Angeles, prayers can be answered. Commissary at The Line Hotel in Koreatown recently added this very basic local dish to its novel farm-to-table-centric panoply of offerings, and it’s now the bright new spot for those mornings when you’re too hungover to fry it all up yourself. Also, when you’re living in a city like Los Angeles, anything remotely green will remind you of Hawai‘i, which eating inside Commissary’s lush greenhouse surroundings will do. You may balk when you see how much they charge for a plate ($13), but it’s still cheaper than that one-way ticket to grandma’s house in Pālolo Valley. 3515 Wilshire Blvd., 7 a.m.–11 p.m., thelinehotel.com.

RUTT’S HAWAIIAN CAFE

The menu at Rutt’s reminds me of what I miss, crave, and love so much about Hawai‘i: how you can put five distinct cultures on a plate—kālua pig next to Korean short ribs on a bed of Puerto

Rican rice—and no one bats an eyelash. The Culver City establishment has changed ownership since its inception in the mid-1970s, but the food and portions haven’t: lau lau, hamburger steak, mac salad, haupia, Hawaiian bread French toast–you can pretty much fill in the rest. The restaurant itself has the charming wear and tear of any decades-spanning eatery (images of your neighborhood’s Big City Diner should be flashing before your eyes right now). If you peek in through the kitchen’s window at Rutt’s, you might expect to see your cousin’s neighbor’s sister’s boyfriend’s Little League coach’s son on the grill. Yeah, it feels like that kind of place. 12114 Washington Blvd., 6:30 a.m.-8 p.m., ruttscafe.com

MARUKAI MARKET DTLA

If places to find a decent lau lau in Los Angeles are considered the stuff of urban legend, then a place that sells Zippy’s chili is nothing short of the Holy Grail. For months, I had only heard rumors that you can actually excavate the foodstuffs of our famed fast food chain at an L.A. supermarket. Then one day I saw it with my own eyes, felt it with my own hands, and whispered “STFU” with my own lips because this place really sells Zippy’s chili. There are Marukai stores, the chain of Japanese markets, strung all across Southern California, but the one in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo is the only one that, to my knowledge, has a ready supply of Zippy’s Portuguese bean soup and its signature chili. Of course, like most Marukai markets, this location also has a glorious Hawaiian snacks aisle, the one that feels like walking directly into a never-ending care package sent by your mom: macadamia nut candies, li hing mui, senbei, that Japanese-chocolate-biscuitthing-that-looks-like-a-mushroom-topped-withmilk-chocolate-y’know-da-one, and more. In the city where movies are made, you never have to watch another one without mochi crunch in your popcorn. 123 S. Onizuka St., 10 a.m.–9 p.m., marukai-market.com.

Burger offers a menu infused with local flavors like

Get your plate lunch fix at Rutt’s

Started by Big Island’s Makani Gerardi, Pono

guava and Kona coffee.

Hawaiian Cafe in Culver City.

SNAPPING BACK

OPAKAPAKA PACKS A PUNCH IN THIS POISSON CRU RECIPE BY CHEF

MARK NOGUCHI.

TEXT BY LISA YAMADA

IMAGES BY JONAS MAON

For years after Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine exploded into the mainstream in the early 1990s, the snapper, with its delicate flavor and moist texture, became something of the de facto fish of Hawai‘i. Premium varieties like onaga (long-tail red snapper) and opakapaka (pink snapper) appeared on fine-dining menus across Hawai‘i, the most-oft method of preparation being—you guessed it—steamed with ginger and soy, encrusted in macadamia, or baked in salt.

But as demand for snapper grew and overfishing led to the inception of regulated seasons, restaurants began importing the fish from places like Tonga. “So I stopped eating it,” says Mark Noguchi, owner of newly opened Mission Social Hall and Café, as well as Lunchbox, the café for Hawaiian Airlines. “The thing that bothered me was that onaga and opaka were scarce in Hawai‘i, so now we’re just going to go take another person’s resource?”

It’s this kind of thinking and adherence to responsible sourcing—a value ingrained in him from his time spent dancing hula on the Big Island—that has won Noguchi fans in the community (or could it be his endearing honey badger-esque ways?). Not to mention, his food is pretty tasty, too.

Due to steadying snapper populations, the Department of Land and Natural Resources opened the fishing season up, and fish like onaga and opakapaka can be reeled in all year long in Hawai‘i (though peak months span from October through March). The season will remain open year-round unless populations start declining again. Noguchi, back on the opaka bandwagon, gets his fish delivered whole by local fishermen like Abe Jazmin, who regularly peddles his cooler full of fishy fare to local restaurants around the island.

While most people have only had opakapaka served

At Mark Noguchi’s newly opened Mission Social Hall and Café, he adheres to his belief in responsible sourcing.

Steadying snapper populations have Noguchi eating the delicate, meaty fish once again.

cooked through, Noguchi insists it’s just as yummy served raw in a dish like a poisson cru, the Tahitian version of the Spanish ceviche (or “a fish salad,” according to Noguchi) characterized by its use of coconut milk. “Though, I’ve had poisson cru made with canola oil and ketchup made by one of my Tahitian friends,” Noguchi says, “and it was really fucking good.”

As with all his recipes, Noguchi’s poisson cru incorporates the superfecta of flavors— hot, sour, salty, sweet. It is also defined by the same values, which are simplicity and local sourcing, that drive the dishes at Mission Social Hall. Although his menu features straightforward items like sandwiches and salads, Noguchi emphasizes the importance of attention to detail, like, for example, making sure filling runs the length of the sandwich. “Little shit like that is important to me!” he practically shouts.

Noguchi cut his teeth in such fine-dining establishments like Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia, the Kona Village Resort, Chef Mavro, and Town Restaurant, but he couldn’t be happier with the pace of his life now. “Everyone always asks me, ‘Don’t you wish you had a real restaurant?’” he says. “I love fine dining … but I also know this is my calling, just accessible food.”

Mission Social Hall and Café is located at 553 S. King St. (inside Mission Houses Museum) and is open for lunch Tuesday through Saturday.

OPAKAPAKA POISSON CRU

SERVES: 4–6

1 lb. fresh opakapaka, diced (fish can be substituted with almost any fresh catch)

1 can coconut milk

2 kaffir limes, bruised

1 stalk lemongrass, chopped and bruised

1 jalapeño, deseeded and roughly chopped

1 Hawaiian chili pepper, deseeded and minced

1 local orange, peeled, half segmented, rest juiced

1 local lemon, juiced, mix with orange juice

1 Tbsp. negi (green onion), sliced paper thin, soaked in ice water 5 min.

1 Tbsp. sweet onion, sliced paper thin, soaked in ice water 5 min.

4 Tbsp. cucumber, diced

1 Tbsp. mint, torn

1-2 Tbsp. extra virgin olive oil

Salt and fresh cracked pepper

PREPARATION :

1. In a small sauce pot, combine coconut milk, kaffir lime, lemongrass, and jalapeño. On low heat (do not let boil), reduce by half. Strain and cool.

2. In a large bowl, mix fish, Hawaiian chili, cucumber, orange segments, negi, sweet onion, and extra virgin olive oil.

3. Dress with coconut milk and citrus juice. (Don’t add all, just adjust for taste. You will have leftovers that can freeze or keep for a week in the refrigerator.)

4. Season with salt and pepper, add mint, and serve immediately with a salad.

The poisson cru shown above uses veggies from Hirabara Farm on the Big Island and oranges from Kolea Farm on O‘ahu.

MAUI’S BEST:

AN INTIMATE COUPLES’ ESCAPE

The epitome of a romantic sanctuary, Hotel Wailea is perched 300 feet above sea level, with dramatic views of the Pacific Ocean and three neighboring Hawaiian Islands. The former private members club was recently awarded the honor of becoming the first Relais & Châteaux property in Hawai‘i, and joins an exclusive association of the world’s finest hotels and gourmet restaurants that have set the standard for excellence in hospitality.

Set across 15 lush acres, Hotel Wailea offers 72 intimate one-bedroom suites, designed by Honolulu’s Marion PhilpottsMiller, that bring together indigenous island character with the feel of an ocean-view pied-à-terre. Residential-style cabanas and an orchard-to-glass apothecary bar are among highlights of the newly finished pool area, aptly named “The Cabanas,” where raw-foodchef-turned-mixologist Kerry Mekeel crafts custom cocktails with handpicked island fruit, fresh-pressed juices, organic hydrosols, and tropical infusions.

“Today’s refined luxury traveler desires privacy and relaxation above all, a challenging commodity to find in a 300-room beachfront resort,” says owner Jonathan McManus. “Hotel Wailea was conceived as the ultra-private Hawai‘i couples’ escape centered on gracious service and exceptional culinary experiences. It’s an honor for Hotel Wailea to be admitted into the Relais & Châteaux family, and we welcome the opportunity for our guests to experience firsthand the essence of a Maui-based Relais & Châteaux property.”

Hotel Wailea is raising the bar on the farm-to-fork movement on Maui by artfully bringing the island’s full bounty to life through cuisine. Capische?, Hotel Wailea’s fine-dining restaurant, blends Southern Mediterranean flavors, artisanal Hawaiian products, and Maui-grown ingredients, including those sourced from the hotel’s on-property farming operation, Wailea Organics. Executive chef Brian Etheredge and chef de cuisine Chris Kulis, both graduates of the Culinary Institute of America, share a passion and understanding for creative techniques and superb quality in the culinary arts, a philosophy that is infused throughout Hotel Wailea’s entire culinary program.

Island pursuits are enhanced by Hotel Wailea’s skilled and passionate staff, who are true arbiters of their crafts. Guests can escape on a private safari to Maui’s hidden beaches or take on the famed North Shore during kite-boarding lessons led by the hotel’s expert kite-boarder and general manager, Markus Schale.

O‘AHU’S BEST:

HAWAIIANSTYLE EXCITEMENT IN WAIKĪKĪ

Explore the excitement of O‘ahu in one of Hawai‘i’s most fashionable zip codes. Just steps from renowned warm waters and spectacular views of Waikīkī, Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa features an award-winning spa, retail shopping, cultural activities, and cuisine from celebrated chefs. The newly remodeled guest room are some of the largest on the island and are the perfect retreat for watching the sunset from a private lānai. Close to Honolulu attractions such as the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor, ‘Iolani Palace, and Diamond Head Crater, the hotel is the ideal solution for those who want it all.

Rich in modern conveniences and the finest amenities, the 1,230 newly remodeled guest rooms and suites at Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa are the perfect place to relax, unwind, and take in a perfect mix of authentic Hawaiian culture with contemporary surroundings. For guests seeking superior services and upgraded accommodations, the Regency Club features an exclusive lounge open 24 hours to provide private concierge services during the day and snacks and refreshments at any time of day or night. The resort also has an array of outlets for leisure activities including a weekly farmers market, full-service Na Ho‘ola Spa, 24-Hour Hyatt Stay Fit Gym, sumptuous pool, openair sundeck, complimentary cultural classes, and private cabanas available for day or half-day rental.

When it’s time for sustenance, Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa is home to three restaurants. Fill up before the day begins each morning at one of the largest buffets in Waikīkī at SHOR, or enjoy some light fare at SWIM poolside bar. At night, take in live entertainment at SWIM or dine on Hawai‘i Regional Cuisine by local celebrity Chef Jon Matsubara at Japengo, which features flavorful fish, steak, and other ingredients sourced from Hawai‘i farms.

With snorkeling, golf, and nightlife close by, Hyatt Regency Waikiki Beach Resort and Spa offers Hawaiian-style excitement paired with the warmth of the authentic aloha spirit.

Inspiration meets tradition where Waikiki meets the sky. Búho offers south-of-the-border classics with an inventive twist, fresh local ingredients and an open air cantina. It’s like a street party in Mexico, but on a rooftop in Waikiki.

COCINA

CANTINA

BRINGING CIVICS BACK

In his popular TED talk, Eric Liu says most Americans are illiterate when it comes to the language of power and politics. “We have to make civics sexy again,” Liu says. He’s not talking about House of Cards or sensationalized sex scandals among politicians but true reform by the people, which is a lot less common and definitely more sexy.

Hawai‘i was once a national leader when it came to issues like environmental laws and healthcare reform, but people seem to have lost their democratic vigor over the last few decades. If voting was as popular as Viagra, more people would be standing up for their rights, demanding action, and seeing radically different results at the legislature.

To help the state get its groove back, the Surfrider Foundation’s O‘ahu Chapter

TEXT BY STUART H. COLEMAN

hosted a free legislative workshop at the Hawai‘i Capitol in mid-January. The main theme: “Civics Is Sexy.” More than 60 people showed up on a Saturday, including scores of high school, college, and graduate students eager to learn how laws are made. Participants learned how to work with legislators to draft bills, track their progress on the state website at capitol.hawaii.gov (one of the first and best in the nation), and give oral testimony at legislative hearings.

Based on the turnout and enthusiasm of the attendees, the event was a success and civics is making a sexy comeback. The workshop featured presentations on Native Hawaiian rights by Office of Hawaiian Affairs, alternative energy by Rep. Chris Lee, and marine plastic pollution by the Surfrider Foundation. All of the presenters

stressed the importance of our natural environment in everything we do—call it “50 Shades of Green.”

Along with Lee, the workshop included younger legislators like representatives Kaniela Ing, Nicole Lowen, and newly elected Sierra Club leader Matt LoPresti, as well as veterans like Tom Brower and Sam Kong. Reflecting on the event, coordinator Rafael Bergstrom says he hopes the attendees “left with tangible tools to navigate our state’s power structure.” Let’s hope this wave of sexy reform takes hold of the Capitol and the rest of the state this session.

To learn more about Surfrider’s legislative efforts and Rise Above Plastics (RAP) campaign, go to surfrider.org/oahu.

ILIKAI HOTEL & LUXURY SUITES

Internationally recognized as the famous opening shot of Hawaii Five-O with Jack Lord as Steve McGarrett standing on the penthouse balcony overlooking Waikīkī Beach, the Ilikai Hotel & Luxury Suites is truly a reinvented Waikīkī landmark. Each beautifully renovated luxury studio and suite on the top four floors feature spacious condo accommodations with fully equipped kitchens and large lanais offering

fabulous views of the Honolulu skyline and Pacific Ocean. The sophisticated guest room design elements offer a modern appeal for today’s savvy travelers, as well as celebrate Ilikai’s rich history and tradition. In addition to the exquisite suites, the resort is home to the newly opened Cinnamon’s at the Ilikai and famous Sarento’s at the Top of the I, Ilikai Hotel & Luxury Suites is redefining condo resort stays in Waikīkī

with exceptional on-site dining options, world-class guest suites, and luxurious amenities in an ideal oceanfront location at the edge of Waikīkī.

For more information, or to book your stay, visit ilikaihotel.com.

DINE OUT

WITH STARWOOD HOTELS AND RESORTS HAWAII

From fine dining to exotic cocktails, you’ll find an eclectic mix of cuisines to delight your taste buds on O‘ahu at Starwood Hotels and Resorts Hawaii.

RUMFIRE AT SHERATON WAIKIKI

Known for its trendy interior, lively entertainment, and stunning views of Diamond Head, RumFire serves up local favorites with sizzling new twists. Introducing Spiked Afternoon Tea, RumFire “burns up” the traditional

afternoon tea and features bite-sized sliders, delectable desserts, and variations of teainspired cocktails.

LEGENDARY

MAI TAI BAR AT THE ROYAL HAWAIIAN

Setting the stage for world-class romance and elegant relaxation, the legendary Mai Tai Bar at The Royal Hawaiian has been the destination for Hollywood stars, international jet-setters, heads of state, and kama‘āina for decades. Live local entertainment melds with exotic handcrafted cocktails to provide the perfect atmosphere for winding down from a day at the beach or igniting an evening of island fun. Just steps away from the sands of Waikīkī Beach, Mai Tai Bar will leave you with an indelible imprint of Hawai‘i’s idyllic lifestyle.

VERANDA AT MOANA SURFRIDER

The ambiance at the Moana Surfrider’s Veranda is tranquil and relaxing, evoking memories of yesteryear beneath the Moana’s historic banyan tree. Indulge in a Waikīkī tradition of fine teas, elegant finger sandwiches, and sweet pastries.

KAI MARKET AT SHERATON WAIKIKI

Inspired by the plantation era that brought an influx of ethnic cuisine to the islands, Kai Market offers traditional Hawaiian delicacies using the freshest locally grown products. Nosh on Kai Market’s fare while enjoying the cool tradewinds near the resort’s new infinity edge pool and Waikīkī Beach.

For more information, call 808-921-4600 or visit dininginhawaii.com

A TRANSPLANT’S GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING YOUR TYPE

TEXT BY ANNA HARMON

Like more than a quarter of the population living in Hawai‘i but born on the mainland, I am a transplant. I moved to Honolulu in 2009 after getting a lucky break in the job market, a one-year AmeriCorps assignment. I showed up fresh from college with collarbone-length hair highlighted blond, a pair of knee-high boots, and a couple sweatshirts in case it got cold. I made it to my rented room at an apartment behind Walmart after dark. It was short a bed, so I slept on an air mattress borrowed from one of my roommates, a nurse from North Carolina splitting a room with her boyfriend from Colorado (also my home state). Across the kitchen lived a joke-cracking man from Minnesota, and down the hall, a woman who was on O‘ahu for law school. I spent a lot of time at Ala Moana Center on my way to the beach, to a bus stop, looking at things I could not afford. I realized, on one such bus, what it means to feel like a minority, albeit an empowered one. Not long after my move, I also found myself walking through a protest of statehood on its 50th anniversary and thought, Oh shit.

Some version of these experiences, the fresh-off–the-plane arrival and subsequent realizations of race, place, or identity, are true to the nearly 46 percent of transplants that live in Hawai‘i today (26 percent hail from the mainland, the other 20 percent from abroad). And there are different types of those mainlanders I’ve met during my time here, a few of which follow.

The forever changed: This can be an early phase of a transplant (which includes me) or a permanent one, until some do

what they promised their parents and move back. This type Facebooks every sunset, practices the shaka, and gushes over mac-nut syrup. The forever changed fills with rays of sunshine when the first brown neighbor brings over a fresh catch, a validation that “the wonderful people” love you back. This type may be combined with another, the lost soul. These ones, they go with the flow. For example, an unlikely employment opportunity brought me here. For others, it’s a sister, a friend, a cheap ticket, a Craigslist scam. After, when whatever brought them here goes away, you will find the lost souls working random jobs (copy machine salesman, flower girl) or desperately searching for work on the mainland that will enable a return to the selves they once knew: reliable, ambitious, and tapped into the real world.

Lost souls may also develop into the wanderlust yogi. These types love to explore, shake off the dust of [fill in previous exotic location], and wake up with Vinyasa every morning. You will find them getting their yoga teacher certification or debuting yet another freshly pressed juice shack. I still haven’t figured out how the exorbitant supply of yoga instructors doesn’t lower the cost of classes here. The price of paradise, I suppose.

Transplants of all origins may also claim the type of the mover and shaker. Stereotypically, these are loud, brash New Yorkers, but they can actually hail from anywhere. They have a little bit, or a lot, of job experience and a penchant for reading Forbes or Art Forum. They know things, and they just don’t get why people here

refuse to value criticism, prompt action, or work all hours of the day. Often, they relocate to the islands for a job that brought them here for this express reason.

Far contrary to this type are the Ohioans. They live in Waikīkī, miss their moms, and make spreadsheets to pinpoint the cheapest happy hours. The Ohioans make public appearances for things like St. Patty’s Day and college football games, but usually return home quickly—unless they find a critical mass of dudes exactly like them. And then, of course, there’s the surfer: Californian, Jersey Boy, the rare Floridian, sometimes Christian. This type comes for the waves and plans on returning home after driving enough tourists to North Shore to snorkel; getting tired of retail shifts at Billabong; or completing nighttime classes at the university. There is a high risk, however, that they will haul significant others to the islands and never leave. Wave love is a strong thing.

As for this transplant, I’ve become another type, one I haven’t come up with a name for yet. I’m still shaky at the shaka, but Hawai‘i has left me forever changed. Moving here—moving anywhere—makes you realize things about the world, and about yourself. I discovered, somewhat begrudgingly, that we are defined by our origins just as much as our current location. And, whether we know it or not, we also help define what is around us. Transplants come and go, create businesses, integrate into communities. Like everyone, we have our virtues, our faults, and for those of us who stay, we have our reasons for sticking around.