What was I doing? These were the years when you were five, six, seven, eight, still young enough to believe that, because I told you wonderful things, I was wonderful as well. Back then, it seemed not just harmless but helpful. It made me feel, for the first time in my life, like I might be a king after all. Here was this land that my grandfather thought was paradise, and so why should I not agree? Who was I to say that he might not be right?
You may be wondering what your grandmother thought of all this. When she discovered I was with Edward again—and of course she was going to discover it, that was an inevitability—she didn’t speak to me for a week. Though such was the power of Lipo-wao-nahele that, as I remember it, I didn’t even care. I had a different, bigger secret, and that secret was a place where I would feel invincible, where I for once would feel like I belonged, where I would never feel shame or apology for who I was. I had never rebelled as a child, not ever, and yet I had still disappointed her, because I had never been able to be the son she had wanted. But I hadn’t done that on purpose, and if I’m to be honest, there was a thrill in defying her, in being the agent of her dismay, of inviting Edward back to our house, my house, to have him at our table, my mother a hostage.
We began driving out there every weekend, Edward and I, and although the first time we went I was deflated, thinking only of Uncle William’s dismissals （a useless piece of land）， Edward was so excited that I let myself become excited as well. “Here’s where my offices will be,” he said, pacing out a square around the acacia. “We’ll keep the tree and build the courtyard around it. And there is where we’ll build the school, where we’ll teach the kids only in Hawaiian. And there’s where your palace will be, near that monkeypod tree. See? We’ll situate it facing the water, so when you wake you’ll be able to see the sun rise over the ocean.” The following weekend, we spent the night there, camped out on the beach, and after the sun had gone down, Edward scooped up a dozen of the tiny firefly squid that had washed onto shore, and skewered them on ‘ōhi‘a branches and roasted them for us. The next morning, I woke early, before Edward, and looked toward the mountains. In the dawn, the land, which normally looked so scorched, appeared lush and soft and vulnerable.
Now, however, I can see that Lipo-wao-nahele meant different things to us—different, but the same as well. It was, for both of us, a fantasy of usefulness, our own usefulness. Edward had inherited a small amount of money from his mother, enough to rent a single-room cottage on a Lower Valley property owned by a Korean family about a five-minute walk from me; he had an occasional job painting rooms for a construction crew. I didn’t even have that—after you left for school for the day, I had nothing to do but wait for you to come home. Sometimes I helped my mother with simple things, like stuffing envelopes with solicitations for the Daughters’ annual fund-raiser, but mostly I just waited. I read magazines or books, I took long walks, I slept. I hoped for my attacks in those days, for they would prove that my inactivity wasn’t laziness or driftiness but a necessity. “Are you taking it easy?” my doctor—my doctor since childhood—would ask me at my appointments, and I would always say I was. “Good,” he would say, solemnly, “you mustn’t overtax yourself, Wika,” and I would promise him I wasn’t.
We were inessential in every way. I to you and my mother; the both of us to Hawai‘i. That was the irony—we needed the idea of Hawai‘i more than it needed us. No one was clamoring for us to take over; no one wanted our help. We were playacting, and because our pretending affected no one—until, of course, it did—we could be as indulgent as we wanted. The things we convinced ourselves! That I would be king, that he would be my first adviser, that in Lipo-wao-nahele we would rebuild the paradise my grandfather had supposedly dreamed of, though he certainly couldn’t have dreamed that someone like me would be his representative. In reality, we did nothing—we didn’t even try to plant the forest he wanted.
The difference between us, however, is that Edward believed. He was rich in belief; it was all he had. Lipo-wao-nahele was a retreat and a pastime for him just as it was for me, but it was something more, too. Looking back, I can understand how Edward needed to be Hawaiian, or at least this idea of Hawaiian he had created. He needed to feel that he was a part of some larger, greater tradition. His mother was dead, and he had never known his father; he had few friends and no family. To be Hawaiian was not a political imperative for him but, rather, a personal one. Yet here, too, he was unconvincing to others, kicked out of Keiki kū Ali‘i, unwelcome （or so he said） in the Hawaiian-language classes he tried to take, expelled from the hālau because a painting job had meant he would miss too many practices. This was his birthright, and even here he was unwanted.
But at Lipo-wao-nahele, there was no one to tell him no, and no one to tell him that his way of being Hawaiian was incorrect. There was only me, and sometimes you, and we believed whatever he said. I was the king, but he was the leader, and over the years, those thirty acres were being reclassified in his mind from metaphor to something else. It would be his kingdom after all, and we his subjects, and no one would be able to deny him ever again.
* * *
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The first step was changing our names.
This was 1978, a year before we left. He had already changed his, the previous year. First he had become Ekewaka, the Hawaiianization of Edward, and a strange and awkward name to say aloud. I had been relieved when he told me he was changing it again, to Paiea, his middle name. “A real Hawaiian name,” he said, proudly, as if he had thought of it himself, instead of merely remembering that it had been there all along. Paiea: the crab, and Kamehameha the Great’s given name. And now Edward’s, as well.
I should have anticipated his wanting to change our names too, but somehow, like so much else, it never occurred to me that he might ask for something so large. “A Hawaiianization of a Christian name is still a Christian name, just in brownface,” he said. It was clear that he had learned this term, “brownface,” recently, because uncertainty softened his voice a bit as he said it.
“But it was the king’s name,” I said, in a rare show of resistance, though I wasn’t arguing so much as I was bewildered. Was the king not Hawaiian enough, either?
“That’s true,” he admitted, and looked momentarily confused. Then his face cleared. “But we’re going to begin again out in Lipo-wao-nahele. Your blood gives you a right to the throne, but we’re going to begin a new dynasty for it.”
He had begun keeping a list of what he considered “true” Hawaiian names, those that predated Western contact. But he bemoaned how few there were, how they had gone almost extinct from lack of interest. It had stupidly never occurred to me that a name, as much as a plant or a creature, could vanish from lack of popularity, nor did I quite see the point of Edward’s quest: You couldn’t force a name back into existence. A name was not a plant or an animal—it flourished from desire, not need, and therefore was subject to all the fickle attentions of humans. Had the old names disappeared because, as he claimed, they had been banned by the missionaries, or had they disappeared simply because they couldn’t withstand the novelty of the Western ones? Edward would have said that both arguments began in the same place: They had been shoved aside by the interlopers. But shouldn’t a name that was meaningful be meaningful enough to hold its place, even in the face of insurrection?