22
Apr
2009
Hawaii by James Michener
Before my sister, Sally, had her baby last summer, we were sitting around trying to think of names. My other sister, Monique, suggested Jerusha. ”No,” Sally said. ”If I were going to name it after some from Hawaii it would be Wu Chow’s Auntie.” Wu Chow’s Auntie Handley didn’t flow too well, so literature was dropped as a source of inspiration.
Now, maybe you have to know my sister, but to me that conversation says something about the persuasiveness of Michener’s characters.
Hawaii is a book of Epic status. And yes, that capital “E” was intentional. When I say Epic, I mean it as what the word epic really means: a sweeping saga, spanning many years, usually centering around a hero, written or sung in a lyrical form. This book doesn’t have just one hero, it has many, set over the course of centuries. And while it is written in prose, the beauty of the islands shines through Michener’s words like the Hawaiian sun on a volcanic beach.
The first chapter is an ode to the creation of the islands. Michener starts out by describing the forces that created his setting millions of years ago. He writes about the strong waves, gradual rise of basalt rock, the shifting plates, and the chance beginning of the islands. Geology has never sounded so pretty!
Skip a couple billion years, give or take, to about 1200 years ago and the first human inhabitants of Hawaii, then living in Bora Bora, and their travels across thousands of miles of open ocean to establish Hawaii.
If you have seen the movie version, you will be familiar with the story of the missionaries. Abner and Jerusha Hale, along with 11 other missionary families, sail through dangerous waters from Massachusetts down along South America and back up to bring God to the heathens of Hawaii. Abner is not really a likable character, but that’s O.K., he is not meant to be. Some of the other missionaries aren’t so bad, but they’d all have been better off if they had just listened to the polynesian polytheists a little bit more.
The children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc., of the missionaries create the white population of the islands, who go on to cultivate plantations and rule the islands.
The next section, in the second half of the 1800’s is about the Chinese immigrants in Hawaii. Kee Mun Ki gets married back in China, but is not able to impregnate his wife before he leaves for Hawaii shortly thereafter. He takes a new Chinese wife in Hawaii, by whom he has many sons. They call second wife Wu Chow’s Auntie, for even though she is the biological mother of the children, they are taught that their true mother is the one back in China, Kee Mun Ki’s first wife. Wu Chow means “The Whole World” in Chinese. She is given this name because upon the birth of her first son, it is prophesied that she will give birth to the whole world. Indeed each son is named after a different continent. When Kee Mun Ki contracts Leprosy, Wu Chow’s Aunti accompanies him, at her own risk, to Molokai. She takes care of him there until his death, after which she returns to her family.
The children of the Kee family make up another tier of Hawaiian society, and while it is difficult for them, do eventually start businesses and a find a degree of prosperity.
The next part of the saga centers around the Japanese immigrants to Hawaii around the turn of the century (again, brought in as laborers for the plantations). In particular, it is about the Sakagawa family. The father cleans latrines, a justification to keep his sons out of elite schools. Eventually some of his younger sons are admitted to the mostly haole schools. Naturally the bombing of Pearl Harbor is a key point. The second generation Japanese, at work or school, looked up and realized it was Japan’s flags on the planes’ bellies. It is put most succinctly in one paragraph, when Michener writes of two Sakagawa boys, on ROTC duty:
“It was on that this silent duty that Tadao Sakagawa thought out explicitly what he would do if Japanese Imperial soldiers came over the rise at him. ’I'd shoot,’ he said simply. ’They’d be the enemy and I’d shoot.’ At the water reservoir, Minoru Sakagawa, of the Punahou ROTC, reached the same conclusion: ‘I’d shoot.’ Across Hawaii in those angry, aching days some fourteen thousand young Japanese Americans of military age fought out with themselves this same difficult question, and all came up with the same answer: ‘They’re obviously the enemy, so obviously I’d shoot.’”
In the next paragraph Michener explains that in the following weeks all of the Japanese ROTC members were dismissed. But eventually, the haoles of Hawaii come to their senses and of all fifty states, only Hawaii convinced the government of its need of Japanese workers, as well as their loyalty, and so no internment camps were created in the islands. Many second generation Japanese Hawaiians fought in WWII in the European arena (they were not convinced of their loyalty enough to let them fight in the Pacific). Considered expendable, the Japanese soldiers fought bravely in order to rescue a unit from Texas, during which many of them died. This is all historically accurate.
This was my favorite and also the saddest part of the book. I read Hawaii in the months following 9/11, when bigotry was gaining momentum. And while I am neither Middle Eastern nor Muslim, I had many friends who were. Even when nobody said anything outright to them, the icy looks they got were enough to worry me that history was repeating itself.
The final part of the book is, in my opinion, the least interesting. Its about the tourism industry that started booming in the 1950’s. Mainly it was about the rich divorcées who went there to get laid. But still it’s part of Hawaii’s history, and since the book was published in 1959, it set the tone for the next fifty years of Hawaiian culture.
If you like this book/author, you might like:
Moloka’i by Alan Brenart
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
Shark Dialogues by Kiana Davenport
Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley
Mark Twain in Hawaii by Mark Twain
Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii by Mark Twain
Travels in Hawaii by Robert Louis Stevenson
Hawaiian Mythology by Martha Warren Beckwith
Hawaiian Myths of Earth, Sea, and Sky by Vivian Laubach Thompson
Hawaii’s Story by Liliuokalani
The Last Fox: A Novel of the 100th/442nd RCT by Robert H Kono
The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd by Jim Fergus
Then There Were None by Martha H Noyes
Stories of Hawaii by Jack London
The Secrets and Mysteries of Hawaii: A Call to the Soul by Pila of Hawaii
Rising Sons: The Japanese American GIs Who Fought for the United States in World War II by Bill Yenne
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Snow Flower and the Secret Fan by Lisa See
Shanghai Girls by Lisa See
Silence by Shusaku Endo
The Concubine’s Children by Denise Chong
Other works by James Michener*:
The Source
Centennial
Caravans
Return to Paradise
The Fires of Spring
The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Chesapeake
Drifters
The Voice of Asia
Tales of the South Pacific
The Covenant
Sayonara
Poland
Iberia
Floating World
Bridge at Andau
Caribbean
The World Is My Home: A Memoir
Alaska
Rascals in Paradise
Recessional
Matecumbe
Texas
Mexico
Legacy
Journey
*Note: This is not an exhaustive list. For the most part it only includes works still in print, though you can still find many of his other works used.
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