Marrying my father had quieted most of the rumors—his origins were inarguable, unimpeachable—but with his death, I believe she felt she was once again on the defensive, alert and attuned to any challengers. It was why she did so much work with the Daughters—why she hosted their annual fund-raisers, why she led committees, why she chaired charity initiatives, why she tried, in all the ways appropriate for her imagination and her era, to be the ideal Hawaiian woman.
The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.
When Edward first met my mother, he was careful and polite. It wasn’t until later, when we became close again as adults, that he became suspicious of her. She couldn’t speak Hawaiian, he pointed out （neither could I; aside from the few phrases and words we all knew, and a dozen songs and chants, I spoke only English and some French）。 She didn’t support the struggle. She didn’t support the return of the Hawaiian kingdom. But he never mentioned, as others had, how light-skinned she was; he was lighter still, and if you hadn’t grown up on the islands, you wouldn’t know to look past his hair and eyes to see his Hawaiianness, a secret hiding just beneath. By that point, he had grown envious of my own appearance, my own skin and hair and eyes. Sometimes I’d look up to catch him staring at me. “You should grow your hair out,” he said to me, once. “More authentic that way.” It bothered him that even then, when everyone was wearing their hair long, I still wore mine as my father had worn his—tidy and very short—because it was woolly and dense, and if it got too long, it puffed out around my head.
“I don’t want it to look like an Afro,” I said, and he sat up from his usual slouch, leaning forward.
“What’s wrong with an Afro?” he asked, giving me that unblinking stare he sometimes did, when his eyes darkened, turned a deeper blue, and I began to stammer, as I did when I was nervous.
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing’s wrong with an Afro.”
He leaned back and gazed at me for a long moment, and I had to look away. “A real Hawaiian wears his hair big,” he said. His own hair was curly but fine, like a child’s, and he wore it tied back with an elastic band. “Big and proud.” He began calling me Accountant after that, because he said I looked like I should be working in a bank somewhere, counting other people’s money. “Howzit, Accountant,” he’d say in greeting when he came to pick me up. “Business good?” It was a taunt, I knew, but at times it felt almost loving, a term of affection, something only we shared.
I never knew what to say when he criticized my mother. By this time, it had long ago been made clear that I could never make her happy, and yet I couldn’t help but feel protective of her, even though she’d never asked for my protection, and, indeed, I had none to give her. I would like to think, in retrospect, that part of what made me uncomfortable was his implication that there was only one way to be Hawaiian. But I hadn’t been sophisticated enough to think in those terms back then—the idea that my race compelled me to be one way or another at all was so foreign that it would have been like telling me that there was another, more correct way to breathe or swallow. I now know that all around me there were people my age who were having those very conversations: how to be black, or Oriental, or American, or a woman. But I had never heard those conversations, and when I finally did, it was in Edward’s company.
So instead I would just say, “She’s Hawaiian,” though even as I said it I could hear it sounded like a question: “She’s Hawaiian?”
Which is maybe why Edward answered as he did.
“No, she’s not,” he said.
* * *
But let me go back to when we first met. I was ten at the time, recently made fatherless. Edward was new that year. The school admitted new waves of students in kindergarten, fifth grade, seventh grade, and ninth grade. Later, Edward would curse the fact that we’d attended this school when we could have attended the school that only admitted students with Hawaiian blood. Our school had been granted by the king’s charter but was founded by missionaries. “Of course we didn’t learn about who we are and where we came from,” he’d said. “Of course we didn’t. That damn school’s entire mission was to colonize us into submission.” And yet he’d gone there as well. It was one of the many examples of things in my and Edward’s shared life that he would come to hate or be ashamed of, and my refusal or inability to be equally ashamed—though I was ashamed of plenty of other things—came to infuriate him, too.
I attended the school because members of my family had always attended the school. On the high-school part of the campus there was even a building called Bingham Hall, one of the first structures the missionaries had built, named for one of the reverends who would later marry the crown princess. Every Kawika Bingham who had attended the school—my father, and grandfather, and great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather—posed for a photograph or drawing in front of the building, standing beneath the name, which had been tapped into stone.
No one from Edward’s family had ever attended the school, and it was only—he told me—because of a scholarship that he was able to go at all. He told me these things matter-of-factly, without self-pity or embarrassment, which I found remarkable.
We became friends slowly. Neither of us had any others. When I had been younger, there were some boys whose mothers wanted them to befriend me because of who my father was, who my mother was. It makes me cringe even now, the memory of one of them trudging across the playground toward me, introducing himself, asking if I wanted to play. I always said yes, and there’d be a lackluster game of catch. After a few days of this, I’d be invited to his house; Matthew would drive me if they didn’t live in the valley. There, I’d meet the boy’s mother, who would smile at me and serve us a snack: Vienna sausages and rice, or bread and passion fruit jam, or baked breadfruit with butter. There’d be another, silent game of catch, and then Matthew would drive me home. Depending on how ambitious the boy’s mother was, there might be another two or three invitations, but eventually they would stop, and at school, the boy would bolt toward his real friends at recess, never looking at me. They were never cruel to me, they never bullied me, but that was only because I wasn’t worth bullying. In the neighborhood, as I told you, there were boys who bullied me, but I grew used to that as well—it was a kind of attention.
I was friendless because I was boring, but Edward was friendless because he was strange. He didn’t look strange—his clothes weren’t as new as ours, but they were the same clothes, the same Hawaiian shirts and cotton pants—but he had, even then, a kind of inwardness; he was somehow able to suggest, without ever saying it, that he needed no one else, that he knew something that none of the rest of us did, and until we did, it wasn’t worth his trying to have a conversation with us.