* * *
—
It would be another decade, almost, before I returned to Edward’s orbit, but in those years, many things happened.
The first thing is that I graduated—we all did. Most of my classmates went to college on the mainland; it was what we had been groomed to do, after all—it was the entire point of the school. We were to go away and get our degrees, maybe do a bit of traveling, and then we would return after college or law school or medical school and get jobs in the most prestigious local banks and law firms and hospitals, which were owned or founded by our relatives and ancestors. Quite a few of us would go into government, leading the Departments of Transportation or Education or Agriculture.
At first, I was among their number. The dean had directed me toward an obscure liberal-arts school in the Hudson Valley of New York, and in September 1962, I left home.
It quickly became clear that I was not meant for the college. It may have been small, and expensive, and unknown, but the other students, most of whom were from rich but vaguely bohemian New York City families, were somehow much more sophisticated and much better educated than I was. It wasn’t that I had never traveled, but my travels had been oriented toward the East, and none of my new classmates seemed to care about the places I’d been. They’d all traveled to Europe, some of them every summer, and I was soon made aware of my own provinciality. Few of them knew that Hawai‘i had been a kingdom; more than one asked if I lived in a “real” house, by which they meant one made of stone, with a shingled roof. The first time, I hadn’t known how to reply, the question was so ludicrous, and stood there blinking until the other person moved away. The references they made, the books they quoted, the vacations they took, the food and wine they preferred, the people they all seemed to know—all of it whirred past me.
The strange thing, though, is that I didn’t resent them: I resented where I had come from. I cursed my school, where generations of Binghams had gone, for not better preparing me. What had I learned there that was useful? I had taken all the same subjects my new classmates had, but so much of my education, it seemed, had been taken up with learning Hawaiian history and bits of Hawaiian language, which I couldn’t even speak. How was that knowledge meant to be useful to me, when the rest of the world simply didn’t care? I didn’t dare bring up who my family was—I sensed that half of them wouldn’t believe me, and the other half would mock me.
I knew this for certain after the variety show. Every December, the college presented a series of brief sketches by different students satirizing various professors and administrators. One of the sketches was about the school’s president, who was always talking about recruiting students from new countries and unlikely places, trying to convince a Stone Age tribe boy—Prince Woogawooga of the Ooga-ooga, was his name—to attend the school. The student playing the tribe member had darkened his skin with brown shoe polish and wore an oversize diaper; on either side of his nose was taped one half of a cardboard bone, so that it looked as if the length of it had pierced though the bridge. On his head he wore a mop, its ropes dyed black and tied back from his face.
“Hello there, young man,” the student playing the president said. “You look like an intelligent young person.”
“Ooga booga, ooga booga,” hooted the student playing the tribesman prince, scratching beneath his arms like an ape and bouncing from foot to foot.
“We teach everything that a young man needs to learn in order to be considered educated,” the president continued, stoically ignoring the tribesman’s antics. “Geometry, history, literature, Latin; and, of course, sports: lacrosse, tennis, football, badminton.” And here he held out a badminton ball to the tribesman, who immediately stuffed it into his mouth.
“No, no!” cried the president, finally flustered. “This is not for eating, good man! Spit it out at once!”
The tribesman did, scratching and jumping, and then, after a pause during which he looked at the audience, his eyes opened wide, his mouth, which had been circled with red lipstick, stretched taut, he made a lunging leap at the president, trying to take a bite out of his cheek.
“Help!” shouted the president. “Help!” The two began to run around the stage, the tribesman’s teeth coming together in a sharp wooden click as he bit down on air, cackling and whooping as he chased the president into the wings.
The two actors returned to the stage to loud applause. The audience had been laughing the entire time, in an exaggerated, obscene way, almost as if they’d never laughed before and were just learning how. Only two of us were silent: me, and an upperclassman from Ghana whom I didn’t know. I watched him watching the stage, his face still and clenched, and realized he thought it was about him and his home, but I knew it was about me and mine—the cardboard palm trees, the ferns tied in clumsy bunches around the savage’s ankles and wrists, the lei made of cut-up plastic straws and newsprint flowers. It was a cheap, coarse costume, cheaply and coarsely made, dismissive even in its ridicule. This is what they thought of me, I realized, and later, when Edward first mentioned Lipo-wao-nahele, it was this night that I remembered, the sensation of watching, frozen, as everything I was, and everything my family was, was brutally dismembered, stripped naked, and pushed onto the stage to be howled at.
How could I have remained there, after that? I packed a bag and took a bus south, to Manhattan, where I checked in to the Plaza, the only hotel whose name I knew. I sent a telegram to my uncle William, who managed my father’s estate, asking him to wire me money and not tell my mother; he sent one back saying he would, but he wouldn’t be able to keep this from her forever, and he hoped I was being smart.
I spent the days walking. Every morning, I went to a diner near Carnegie Hall for breakfast, where I could have fried eggs and potatoes and bacon and coffee for far less than I’d have to pay at the hotel, and then I walked north or south or east or west. I had a tweed coat, expensive and handsome but not quite warm enough, and as I walked, I breathed on my hands, and when I could bear the cold no longer, I would find a diner or coffee shop and go inside to have a hot chocolate and get warm.
My identity changed with the neighborhood I found myself in. In midtown, they thought I might be black, but in Harlem, they knew I wasn’t. I was spoken to in Spanish and Portuguese and Italian and even Hindi, and when I answered, “I’m Hawaiian,” I would invariably be told that they or their brother or cousin had been there after the war, and asked what I was doing up here, so far from home, when I could be on the beach with a pretty little hula girl. I never had an answer to these questions, but they didn’t expect one—it was all they knew to ask, but no one wanted to hear what I had to say.
On my eighth day, though—Uncle William had sent me a telegram that morning saying that my mother had been alerted by the bursar’s office that I had left school, and was instructing him to send me a ticket home, which would be waiting for me that evening—I was walking back to the hotel from Washington Square Park, where I’d gone to see the arch. It was very cold that afternoon, whipping wind, and the city seemed to mirror my mood, which was gray and bleak.