（Real Hawaiian, true Hawaiian—it was the first time I would hear him use those phrases, and soon I would be sick of the terms, as much because I felt accused by them as because I didn’t understand them. All I knew was that a real Hawaiian was something I was not: A real Hawaiian was angrier, poorer, more strident. He spoke the language, fluently; he danced, powerfully; he sang, soulfully. He was not only not American, he would be angry if you ever called him that. The only thing I had in common with a real Hawaiian was my skin and my blood, though later, even my family would become a deficit, proof of my accommodationist tendencies. Even my name would be deemed not Hawaiian enough, even though it had been the name of a Hawaiian king—it was the Hawaiianization of a Christian name, and therefore not Hawaiian at all.）
We might have sat there, frozen, forever had my mother not looked over to me—no doubt in anger—and gasped. “Wika!” I heard her say, and when I opened my eyes next, I was in my bed in a darkened room.
She was sitting next to me. “Careful,” she said, when I tried to sit, “you had a seizure and hit your head. The doctor said you should stay in bed for another day. Kawika’s fine,” she continued, when I began to speak.
For a while, we were silent. Then she spoke again. “I don’t want you to see Edward anymore, do you understand me, Wika?” she asked.
I could have laughed, I could have scoffed, I could have told her that I was an adult, that she could no longer tell me who I could talk to or not. I could have told her that I found Edward alarming as well, but exciting, too, and that I was going to keep seeing him.
But I did none of those things. I simply nodded, and closed my eyes, and before I fell asleep again, I heard her say, “Good boy,” and then felt her lay her palm on my forehead, and as I lost consciousness, I had the feeling that I was a child again, and that I was being given the chance to live my life all over, and this time, I would do everything correctly.
* * *
I kept my promise. I did not see Edward. He called, but I didn’t come to the phone; he stopped by the house, but I made Jane say I wasn’t there. I stayed inside and I watched you grow. When I went out, I was anxious: Honolulu was （and is） a small town on a small island, and I was always afraid I would encounter him, but I somehow never did.
Nothing changed for me in those three years I was in hiding. But you changed: You learned to speak, first in sentences and then paragraphs; you learned to run, and to read, and to swim. Matthew taught you to climb up to the lowest branch of the mango tree; Jane taught you how to tell a juicy mango from a fibrous one. You learned a few words in Hawaiian, which my mother taught you, and a few in Tagalog, which Jane taught you, but only in secret: Your grandmother didn’t like the sound of the language, and you knew not to speak it in front of her. You learned which foods you liked—like me, you preferred salt over sugar—and you made friends, effortlessly, in a way I had never been capable of doing. You learned to call for help when I had one of my seizures, and then, when I emerged from it, to come pat the side of my face, and I would grab your hand in mine. These were the years when you loved me the most. You could never love me more than, or even as much as, I loved and love you, but in that period, we were closest in mutual affection.
You changed, and so did the rest of the world. Every night on television there was at least one report about the day’s protests: First there were people protesting against the war in Vietnam, and then there were people protesting for blacks, and then for women, and then for homosexuals. I watched them on our little black-and-white set, those swaying, shifting masses of people in San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., and New York, and Oakland, and Chicago—I always wondered if Bethesda, who had left the island directly after his speech, was in one of those crowds. The protestors were almost always young, and although I too was young, not yet thirty in 1973, I felt much older—I didn’t recognize myself in any of them; I felt no affinity for them or their struggles or their passions. It wasn’t just that I didn’t look like them; it was that I couldn’t understand their fervor. They had been born with access to and an understanding of extremes, but I had not. I wanted time to slip past me, one year indistinguishable from the next, you the only calendar I had. But they wanted to stop time—stop it, and then speed it up, making it go faster and faster until the entire world burst into flames and would have to start over.
There were changes here, too. Sometimes there would be stories on TV about the Keiki kū Ali‘i. This was a group of native Hawaiians who, depending on which member you asked and on which day, were demanding either Hawai‘i’s secession from the United States, or the restoration of the monarchy, or nation-within-anation status for native Hawaiians, or the creation of a Hawaiian state. They wanted Hawaiian language classes to be mandatory in schools, and they wanted a king or queen, and they wanted all haoles to get out. They didn’t even want to call themselves Hawaiian anymore: Now they were kanaka maoli.
Watching these reports always felt like an illicit activity, and fear that one of them might air while I was in the room with my mother made me stop watching the early-evening news altogether. I only did so when I knew she’d be out of the house, and even then, I kept the volume low, so if she came back early I’d be able to hear her and turn off the television. I’d sit close to the set, ready to switch it off in a flash, my palms tacky with sweat.
I felt oddly protective—not of my mother but of the protestors, those wild-haired young men and women, my peers, chanting and raising their fists in an imitation of the Black Power members. I already knew what my mother thought of them—“What fools,” she’d murmured, almost sympathetically, after the end of the first segment that had aired and which we had watched together, in mesmerized silence, a year ago, “they don’t even know what they want. And how do they think they’ll get it? You can’t ask for the restoration of the monarchy and a new state at the same time”—and I for some reason didn’t want to hear her insult them further. I knew this was irrational, in part because I didn’t disagree with her: They did look ridiculous, in their T-shirts and big hair, breaking into ragged chants and song when the camera turned to them; their spokespeople could barely speak proper English, yet they stumbled in Hawaiian, too. I was embarrassed for them. They were so loud.
And yet I also envied them. Except for you, I had never felt such ardor for anything. I looked at those men and women and I knew what they wanted—their want was greater than logic or organization. I had always been told that I should try to live my life with happiness, but could happiness give you the zeal, the energy, that anger clearly could? Theirs was the kind of avidity that seemed to override any other desire—if you had it, you might never want again. At night, I’d experiment with pretending I was one of them: Could I ever be that incensed? Could I ever desire something so much? Could I ever feel that wronged?
I could not. But I began trying. As I have said, I had never before much considered what it meant to be Hawaiian. It was like considering being male, or human—they were things I was, and the fact that I was them seemed always to be enough to me. I began wondering if there was in fact another way to be, if I had been wrong this entire time, if I was somehow incapable of seeing what these other people seemed to see so clearly.