Local Hawai'i as home in Darrell H.Y. Lum's plays

Local Hawai'i as home in Darrell H.Y. Lum's plays

著者（英） Masami Usui

journal or

publication title

Doshisha literature

number 46

page range 55‑78

year 2003‑03‑15

権利（英） English Literary Society of Doshisha University

URL http://doi.org/10.14988/pa.2017.0000014832

MASAMIUSUI

1. Introduction

Darrell H. Y. Lum's plays embrace localism in Hawai'i with an intense consciousness that Hawai'i is a home for Asian Pacific Islanders or Locals and "a strong sense of identity with and long-term commitment to a particular locale" (Watanabe and Bruchac ii). In almost all aspects- geographically, politically, socially, economically, historically, and culturally -Hawai'i has been segregated from the mainland within the same national boundary of the United States of America. As a co-founder and co-editor of Bamboo Ridge, fiction writer, and playwright, Lum has been playing the leading role in establishing and nourishing the local litera- ture in Hawai'i, which is different from simply Asian American literature to say nothing of the Anglo-and Euro-centric American literature. Even within the ethnic literature category, Hawaii's local literature by writers of Asian ancestry has to be distinguished from Asian American literature as "a mainland term" and also from Hawaiian literature as native Hawaiian literature (Lum, "Local Literature and Lunch" 3). Lum defines Hawaii's local literature in a respect that local Pacific Asian Islanders have "a distinct sensitivity to ethnicity, the environment (in particular that valuable commodity, the land), a sense of personal lineage and family history, and the use of the sound, the languages, and the vocabulary of island people" ("Local Literature and Lunch" 4). Lum's theatrical works focus on the conflicts and resolutions of the Chinese and Japanese immigrants and their off springs in Hawai'i, which is emblazoned with its local culture, the extended and closely knitted family tie, the multiracial

(55J

and multicultural community, and the usage of Pidgin as their first lan- guage.

Lum's personal history of creative activities recounts the birth and growth of Hawaii's local literature itself. Lum's creative activities began in 1968 when he left Hawai'i for the first time in order to study at the Case Institute of Cleveland and became terribly homesick so that he could not help writing letters home (Watanabe 91). His freshmen year in the mainland determines his life-long work to evaluate Hawaii's local space and Pidgin as his own home and his native tongue respectively.

Lum transferred to the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and received his Bachelors in Liberal Studies, both Creative Writing and Graphic Design, in 1972. In December 1976, he received his Masters in Educational Communications and Technology from the UH at Manoa. In those years, creative writing and theatre classes were primarily engaged in by white male professors, such as Professor Frank Steward of English Department and Professor Dennis Carroll of the Department of Theatre and Dance.

The academic sphere protected and supported by white Anglo-American teachers is not exactly the place where Lum can be rooted.

From 1978 to 1980, Lum with other local writers ventured into being involved in a series of conferences oflocalliterature and a small publishing press and community; Talk Story Conference in 1978 and in 1979, and the Writers' Hawai'i Conference in 1980. When Marie Hara, Arnold T.

Hiura, and Stephen H. Sumida had the first local literary meeting at Hiura's rented house, Lum was one of 150 people who joined the meeting with Eric Chock (Hiura Interview).2 In 1978, Lum co-edited the Talk Story Anthology on behalf of the 1978 Talk Story Conference organized by Hara, Hiura, and Sumida. In the same year, Lum co-founded Bamboo Ridge Press with Chock, his life-long friend since the first grade. As a non-profit, tax-exempt literary small press, Bamboo Ridge began to pub-

lish Bamboo Ridge, A Hawai'i Writers' Quarterly (once changed into Bamboo Ridge, A Hawai'i Writers Journal, and now called Bamboo Ridge, Journal of Hawai'i Literature and Arts). Both local writers of Chinese ancestry launched into their own search for local literature. As for the foundation of its press and journal, Chock states that they wanted not "just to publish, but to help define 'local' literature" and tried to "help create a sense of community, at least a sense of literary community"

(Burlingame B-1). Since the late 1970's till now, Lum and Chock have been contributing to examining, introducing, and improving Hawaii's local literature until such young writers as Louis-Ann Yamanaka and Nom Okja Keller were born in the Bamboo Ridge community and published their works by the major publishing companies. In their 20^th celebration, Hara assures that "Bamboo Ridge's longevity is directly attributable to Lum's and Chock's devotion" (Oi, "Bamboo Ridge" D1). In 1997, Lum received his Doctorate in Educational Foundations from the UH at Manoa, and the title of his dissertation is What School You Went?

Stories from a Pidgin Culture. Lum's profound involvement in nourishing and establishing Hawaii's local literature as a writer / editor / organizer outlines a microcosmic map of Hawaii's local literature movement and its achievements.

Lum's own challenge of formulating his own belief in the significance of localism into his own creative activities is examined in his theatrical works in which he manipulates the long-inarticulate voices of local immigrants' lives through Pidgin. Lum's theatrical works are divided into two groups. One group is a trilogy of one-act plays portraying three generations of Chinese families struggling and living within the Chinese community in Hawai'i; Oranges Are Lucky as the grandmother's story, Fighting Fire as the father's story, and the third play on which he is currently working as the children's story. The other group consists of two

plays whose extended themes of conflicts of local people of Asian ancestry are described within the crucially transforming scheme of family and community in Hawai'i. My Home Is Down the Street depicts the life-long unsolved conflict between the aging Chinese father in a Chinese-oriented nursery home in Hawai'i and his professionally-established son who settles and works as a doctor in Boston. Written from a Japanese local's perspective, on the contrary, A Little Bit like You explores a secret of an interracial family of Chinese and Japanese locals of four generations.

Magic Mango, which is written for preschool children, illustrates the reaffirmation and importance of the old mango tree planted in the garden. The story is grounded upon the passage from the conflict to the resolution between the father who wants to cut down the tree and his daughter and her grandmother who want to save it. As for Lum's 'home' defined in short stories, Lum's emphasis is "on interactions between different ethnic groups and on the pidgin English language that has become the linguistic coin of exchange among locals" (Sato 18). As called

"cultural accommodation" (Carro1l63), Lum's search for home throughout his dramas is enlarged into his mosaic construction of multi ethnic, multicultural, and multilinguistic elements embedded in Hawaii's locals.

All of these plays are, overall, based on the same quest for identity; how local islanders have nourished and affirmed their identity in Hawai'i as a home oftheir own. In order to explore Lum's identity search, it is important to examine the significance of Pidgin as the first language, the sense of national/racial roots and boundary of the first generations, the multi-layered codes of conflicts of the second and the third generations, and the establishment of the new identity oflocals toward the new era.

n.

Defined as his first language, Pidgin is the language whose historical background Lum embraces as that of Hawaii's localism and whose values he regards as the islanders' pride and self-esteem. The spoken language effect on stage is enormously significant in Lum's plays where he advo- cates the linguistic heritage of multi-layered pidgin languages through generations. Sumida states that Lum is "a master of local symbols, espe- cially his use of pidgin and Creole vernaculars" (98).

Pidgin embodies the modern history of Hawaii's multiracial and multi- cultural society since the nineteenth century as the first generation's Hawaii Pidgin English "originally merged as a lingua {rance out the of need among non-English-speaking sugar and pineapple plantation work- ers-principally speakers of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, and Spanish dialects-to communicate among themselves and with the English-speaking planter oligarchy (Okawa 179). Hawai'i Pidgin English has a similar foundation background as Mrican American vernacular in the South where pidgin becomes a creole in the second gen- eration of its speakers "including plantation pidgin and creole forms"

(Okawa 179). The power structure within the plantation both in Hawai'i and in the South is, in a larger scale, the same, as it is based on the segregation of English-speaking whites from non-English-speaking non- whites. This power structure corresponds to that of languages. In Hawaii's plantation, however, the power structure is also constructed upon a hierarchy of different races and languages, so that the common language is needed among all the non-English-speaking laborers. A young pidgin writer Lee Tonouchi quotes from Eileen H. Tamura, '''Language intolerance has been especially strong when those in power have felt threatened by people they consider culturally different from

themselves'" (ai, "Baddah You?"). Hawai'i Pidgin English is an inevitable factor in evaluating and defining Hawaii's localism that is definitely rooted in Hawaii's plantation history. Lum's act of employing Pidgin is his embrace of political, social, economical, and cultural history of Hawaii's localism.

Lum himself defines Pidgin as his "first language" that partly deter- mines his own identity and installs in his works as pidgin-speaking child narrator "in a consistent and authentic voice" ("On Pidgin" 298) before the educators deprive the pidgin-speaking child from using in it in an institutionalized system ("On Pidgin" 299). Lum has been active in evalu- ating Pidgin not only by using it in his literary works but by encouraging its usage in schools as well as at home and in community. Pidgin has been confronted with the strong prejudice and discrimination both in the American school system and in mass media. Pidgin was called 'mongrel' in schools and pidgin speakers formed stereotypes of comedians or those of being in "lower class, inarticulate and stupid" in popular media (Lum,

"On Pidgin" 299). Even in 1999, it is a controversial issue over Gov. Ben Cayetano's criticism that pidgin influences Hawaii's local school chil- dren's and students' low score in a national writing test so that pidgin should not be used in education (Kau A-3). As a member of "Da Pidgin Group," which was founded and organized primarily by faculty and students of the University of Hawai'i, Lum states that pidgin is "an asset and not a handicap" since Pidgin and Standard English "are on the same side of the scale in developing language fluency" (Kua A-3). In 1999, a five-day conference, "Wat, Bada Yu?": Voices Heard and Voices Unheard:

Pidgin, Local Identities and Strategies for Multicultural Learning," was held at the UH at Manoa, and there were two pidgin-literature related sessions presented by Lum with the other local writers such as Chock, Juliet S. Kono, Hara, and Tonouchi. Lum attempts to evaluate its rich

linguistic heritage issued by the everyday real life and present it in a form oflocalliterature.

The Talk Story / Bamboo Ridge conference / journal/community project also asserted a question of the language as Chock remarks that it is "no secret that the so-called 'blending of cultures' often manifested itself in a clash of languages, sometimes in a competition for sovereignty"

(Chock, "On Local Literature" 7). Hawai'i as a multilinguistic community needs to embrace both Standard English as a common language within the national boundary of the United States and Pidgin as another common language in which islanders can articulate and locate their own voice. Lum's evaluation of Pidgin is his pose of encouraging local islanders to have their own genuine voice and possess a pride and self- esteem over localism.

Lum's manipulation of Pidgin embodies the necessity and importance of multi-layered communication systems within the immigrants' families' domestic sphere. Before Lum, Milton Murayama explores the same multi-layered codes of languages in All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) where nisei spoke "four languages-good English in school, pidgin English among themselves and their non-Japanese friends, good Japanese, and pidgin Japanese to their parents and their old folks"

(Hershinow 110). A younger and most successful writer, Yamanaka, is obsessed with telling in Pidgin the inescapable agony and real lives through adolescents' views rooted in rural area of Hawai'i. Yamanaka is one of the writers whose works are recorded in audio tapes by Bamboo Ridge because they "allow the listener to 'hear the music' in poetry and stories" (Gibbs). Lum as a third and half generation of Chinese immi- grant employs four languages: the first generation's good Chinese in a monologue disguised by Standard English and their Hawaii Pidgin English, the second generation's Hawai'i Creole English to younger people

and broken Chinese to older people, and the third generation's Standard English trained at school and Pidgin nourished in his childhood days, and the fourth / TV generation's Standard English. The diversity of these overlapped-language codes which manifest the rich linguistic heritage of locals in Hawai'i is constructed by Lum's consistent belief in Pidgin as his first language.

Ill. The Sense of N ationall Racial Roots and Boundary

The sense of national and racial boundary is the most important element for the first generation among the immigrant families because of their strong tie to the native country where their cultural codes are nourished and established. Due to the physical distance from the native land, the tie is psychologically strengthened in a transplanted and dislocated place. The first generation of Chinese immigrants in Hawai'i is the earliest immigrant group from Asian so that their conflicts were enormous. It was in 1925 that the first Chinese sugar cane plantation contract laborers were imported by the Royal Hawaiian Agricultural Society. The planters were confronted with a serious problem of the lack of laborers as the number of Hawaiians as possible plantation laborers had decreased because of disease and their migration to California (Takaki) and Hawaiians were not appropriate for the regulated wage labor because they "preferred kin-based production" (Okihiro 15). At the same time, a large number of Chinese began to emigrate overseas in order to escape from the disaster and poverty caused by a series of wars including the Opium War and civil wars between 1839 and 1860's (Takaki). Both the demand and the supply meet together and Chinese laborers were admitted as diligent workers even in the harsh working conditions in the sugar cane plantation. As Lum points out, it is quite easy and natural for Hawaii's islanders to "find one's roots in the soil of Hawaii's sugar plan-

tations: grandparents or great-grandparents who immigrated to the islands as contract laborers" ("Local Literature and Lunch" 4). The roots in the plantation signify the planters' strategy of cunningly classifying and segregating the laborers not only from the ruling white class but among different ethnic groups in order to avoid the mass strike by the laborers. The racial hierarchy within the plantation camp becomes the root of modern Hawaii's multiracial and multicultural society, and Lum explores the root ofthis local society in Oranges Are Lucky, Fighting Fire, and A Little Bit like You by giving the voice to the first generation of immigrants.

Lum's presentation of the first generation's conflicts in a transplanted land is testified to in Ah Po as the Chinese immigrants' family's matriarchy in Oranges Are Lucky; Ah Ba as the conflicting figure and father for the second generation Cowboy in Fighting Fire³; and Ah Sook or a Chinese manupua vendor and Bachan or a Japanese great-grandmother in A Little Bit Like You. The first generations whose immigration periods and reasons are slightly different from each other share the same psychologi- cal strife caused by the hardships in the native land, during the passage to America, and in a newly-transplanted land.

In Oranges Are Lucky, Ah Po's dominant position as the family's matri- archy over her SIst birthday conversation is reversed when she recalls her past as a submissive and weak vessel of Chinese patriarchy in China and the doubly oppressed self by Chinese patriarchy within the house- hold and by the non-Asian dominant power in Hawai'i. Lee interprets this play as "resolving years of hardship and racism with a modicum of success" (161). The play is set in mid-1970's at a Chinese restaurant where the Chinese grandmother's birthday is celebrated by her children and grandchildren. The birthday table reflects two psychological spaces with two linguistic levels. One is Ah Po's eloquent internal monologue,

presumably in Chinese, that frees her from all the restrictions that bound her in her second home, Hawai'i. The other is a stilted conversa- tion between Ah Po in Hawai'i Pidgin English and the younger people in Hawai'i Creole English. Ah Po's conflicts are expressed in both languages within two spaces. Ah Po intends to arrange her grandson's marriage to a Chinese girl in Hawai'i Pidgin English, saying that "Hai-Io ... yes, get nice lady at da temple for Ah Jiu. [Turns serious] What about da Yim's daughter? Nice girl fo you" COAL 10). Her matriarchal position in the Chinese family for three generations is, however, turned into her oppressed position in patriarchy, which forced her to marry Chew Mung.

In her monologue, Ah Po expresses her refusal recited only to her mother,

"I cannot be a good wife, Mama, say that I need not marry Chew Mung.

Tell Daddy that I cannot marry, that I am barren and cannot have chil- dren. I will go to the temple to live. . . . I cannot even become a simple farmer, my feet are useless. Say that to him" (OAL 11). Ah Po's articulation in a monologue is contrast with her inarticulate past life. Ah Po's personal history transited from China to Hawai'i is shaped by a series of physical and emotional oppressions both within the Chinese patriarchy and in Hawaii's white-dominant hierarchy. Lum's tracing the history of Chinese immigration is marked by Ah Po's story of all the hardships of her own life as an uneducated young woman with bound feet, her marriage to a scholar arranged by their parents, her half-forced immigration with him to Hawai'i, their broken dream and poverty in Hawai'i and her struggle for identity in a new land.

Lum's discovery, by giving her own voice to Ah Po, is also the fact that the Chinese first-generation grandmothers founded the ground of local identity because they "created the practices of being 'Chinese' against the backdrop of a dominant white, Western culture and a native Hawaiian host culture" ("Local Girls" 356-66). As for his own grandmothers, Lum

as a young local boy used to refuse to understand, embrace, and respect them because they could neither speak nor read English and maintained the Chinese traditional manners and customs, so that Lum used to despise them as "the personification of all things Chinese" ("Local Girls"

365-66). Evaluating the birth of localism within the grandmothers, Lum succeeds in creating Ab Po's voice that can reveal and explore the long- misunderstood and lost self of the first generation. Oranges Are Lucky was what Lum's grandmother used to tell him when she urged him to eat oranges. His boyhood refusal to eat the grandmother's 'lucky' oranges is transformed into his redemption by presenting to his audience her long- inarticulate story. Lum concludes the play with Ab Po's birthday, which is "not a concession to assimilation but her coming to an understanding of her role as matriarch of her family in Hawaii and America" ("Inventory List").

Ab Ba, who appears as a spirit in Fighting Fire is a representative of the first generation of Chinese male immigrants whose hardships and value system become the conflicting elements to the second generation.

Set up in a basement warehouse of a store in Chinatown, Fighting Fire is told by two elderly lifelong yet conflicted friends. These two aging Chinese of the second generation, "Gunner" Loo and "Cowboy" Lee, can share the past days when they belonged to the basketball team and the present days when they prepare their coffins for their funerals. Chinese firecrackers are used as the symbol of the business success as Gunner is a successful businessman who deals with firecrackers and as that of the fights between father and son, between generations, and between men.

Ah Ba's words are intermitted as Cowboy's memory of his father's repeated sayings: "1 donno why da hell people wann burn firecracker.

Waste time. Just like burning money ... One boom and pau, erryting to up in smoke" (FF 6). Ab Ba embodies his initial fighting with his life as

the first generation whose hardships both in immigrating to America and in starting a new life in a transplanted place are ironically symbolized by firecrackers that are generally used for celebrations at Chinese weddings and birthday parties, New Year's Eve, and Chinese New Year.

Ah Ba's voice plays a role to enable the second generation to realize and understand their roots of immigration. Cowboy's failure as a businessman, which results from his unsolved relationship with his father, is resolved within Cowboy in his communication with his father's spirit. Ah Ba's restored voice conveys to Cowboy the crucial life that Ah Ba underwent as a young laborer who carried the firecrackers as the hand-made products by Chinese cheap laborers from China to America by ship and as a young husband / father who had to protect his wife and their baby from the ill environment occupied by gamblers on boat. Ah Ba's immigration passage with Chinese firecrackers as the explosive articles is the Chinese immi- grants' risky voyage to the new land as the first and most unforgettable peril in their lives. Ah Ba's voice, insisting on the economical way of life and encouraging Cowboy to keep playing basketball without a rest, also embodies Ah Ba's suffering from poverty and hard working conditions, which determine his value system. Ah Ba's life without wasteful fire- crackers is the Chinese immigrants' practice of thrift and hardworking under the unbearable living and working conditions in the new land.

Lum's encoding the ethnic and racial roots and boundary as the first conflict for immigrants is shown in a conflicting couple of Ah Sook or a Chinese manupua vendor, and Bachan or a Japanese great-grandmother who appear as ghosts in A Little Bit like You. Written from a Japanese family's perspective, Keiko "Kay" Chang, a yonsei teenager born of a Japanese mother and a Chinese father is confronted with her grandpar- ents' aging and discovers the family secret that Kiyoko Sakamoto, Keiko's grandmother, is herself hapa, mixed blood in Hawaiian, as she

was born of a Japanese widow and a Chinese single laborer who sells Chinese buns around in the sugar cane plantation in Hilo. The adultery between a Japanese widow and a Chinese bachelor embodies a hidden aspect of the race-bound and sex-unbalanced plantation camp. The never-united and unmarried couple's spirits which repeatedly appear convey the long-inarticulate voices of unsolved agony and regret. Ah Sook tells Bachan about his agony over their baby-daughter: "Night time, I dream her cry, I wake up. Little bit like me, I tink. I no can sleep; I wanna look around, wanna move around, don't wanna stay one place.

She little bit like me" (37). The difficulty that Bachan was left with six children after her husband's disappearance and had Ah Sook's baby rep- resents the social and economical weakness of an immigrant woman who cannot live without men's physical support and attention. In a plantation camp, women laborers face and sacrifice themselves to the harsh working conditions with lower wages than men's, the unbalanced sex rate, the dif- ficulty of marriage life, the lack of financial stability, and the decay of the sense of morality.

Another difficulty that Bachan is confronted with by having a baby of a Chinese man raises a controversial racial issue between the Japanese and the Chinese at the beginning of the immigration period. Bachan's rejection to Ah Sook's proposal of marriage is motivated by the racial con- flict between the Japanese and the Chinese in Hawai'i, which is rooted in that in their native lands. When the Japanese began immigrating to Hawai'i, Japan had invaded China so that the Japanese had a strong discrimination against the Chinese. In addition, both the Japanese and the Chinese were obsessed with the strong sense of the monoracial heritage among them. Yet the Japanese immigrants learned the fact that the immigrants from China had already settled earlier than the Japanese in Hawai'i and were occasionally positioned as leaders to the

Japanese. Most of early Chinese immigrants were bachelors, while Japanese began to immigrate with their families (Takaki). The sexual conflicts between Chinese men and Japanese women reflects the politi- cal, racial, and social differences transplanted from their domestic Asian region to the new land.

Lum's intention to revive and restore the voice of the first generation of immigrants to Hawai'i marks the ground of nation / race related boundary in the transplanted foreign land and the emergence of sex / self disclo- sure in the settled local community.

IV. The Multilayered Codes of Conflicts between the Second and the Third Generations

The conflicts between the second and the third generations are caused by various differences between them such as the degree of oppression in the dislocated land, the educational and professional backgrounds, and the degree of economic and social stability. My Home Is Down the Street reflects the definite strife between the father as the second generation and the son as the third generation. In a series of changing scenes from a hospital room, the father's old home, to Kaimuki Home or a nursing home for elderly Chinese, the life-long conflict is gradually resolved between Kwan Choy Lee, now in his late seventies, and his single son, Bernard, in his mid-fifties. Kwan Choy is rooted in the local Hawai'i after years of efforts of having a better life, while Bernard escapes from his father as a local Chinese with a wish to find a more sophisticated life in the mainland.

Kwan Choy's life as a local boy of the second generation without a higher educational background is established by a step-by-step rise to a modest life. This establishment is made by a series of jobs in the same working place, "First, janitah. Den stockboy, kichen boy, office boy, cashier"

(MHIDTS 35), since the fourth grade when her father died, yet ended with the lunch counter manager at a drugstore by working for two dollars a week for forty years. The position as the lunch counter manager was supposed to be to the white Americans; however, Kwan Choy's temporal appointment substituted for a white manager turns his life-long working sphere. Kwan Choy's strategy for surviving in the white-oriented busi- ness society is presented by his gradual promotions from the bottom and by his subtle yet cunning tactics to make a careful examination of "da inventory" at the counter. Kwan Choy's struggle since his childhood days form his stoic personality to his children and causes another fighting fire between the father and the son.

Bernard's hostility and rejection of his dominant father, who worked hard and used to "catch the bus" instead of buying a car, made him free from all local Chinese embodiments such as his father, Chinatown, pidgin English, and all the Chinese heritages in Hawai'i. Bernard's value system is determined by the white-oriented value system. Bernard's professional establishment and success in the WASP society of the American East Coast, which long segregated Asians from the permanent residents, embodies his desire for assimilating into the American society.

The reconciliation is accomplished when both Kwan Choy and Bernard recognize and admit that both of them are local boys. Bernard's memory of his own, who was scared of being left alone on the first day of school, is accompanied by Kwan Choy's realization that he is scared of being left alone at a nursing home. Bernard's return to a ten-year-old child also enables him to reconcile with his father. Both Kwan Choy and Bernard experience the reversed position between the father and the son.

Bernard's success as a doctor in Boston ironically does not help his own father who needs special care and his own son in Hawai'i. The worse Kwan Choy's physical conditions and memory become, the stronger his

wish to live with Bernard during the rest of his life becomes. The gap between Kwan Choy and Bernard appears in a difference of behaviors and languages as well as of professions and spheres. The settlement as a local Chinese in Hawai'i is the fIxed discipline for the second generation;

while the exile from the fIxed discipline is the liberated code of behavior for the third generation. The gap between two opposing forces is resolved in Bernard's return to a local boy who tells the stories in Pidgin. In flash- backs to the past recited in Pidgin, Bernard traces the roots of his conflict with his father. The fIrecrackers which are used as the symbol of fIghts in Fighting Fire are again illuminated in the process of the flashback to the past, to childhood days of the third generation.

My fahdah stay to tight, so pake. He no like buy fIrecraker, man. He only buy one fIve hundred pack fo burn at New Year's time. Ho man, everybody get da thousands or da fIve thousand strings or sevn da ten thousand strings but Daddy, he no like buy nutting fo me."

(MHIDTS2)

Bernard's confrontation with the past agony filled with psychological fIrecrackers brings him the real liberation of his emotions to himself and to his father because the multi-layered conflicts are rooted in their home and they can be retrieved only in Pidgin. Bernard's final decision to return to his father's house is made along with two "boo-look," Chinese grapefruits, which Bernard picks up in his father's barren garden as a sign of a resolved relationship between the father and the son. The recon- ciliation between the second and the third generations within the local family becomes the breakthrough of being aware of the local identity as the defInitely rotted heritage.

V. The Establishment of the New Identity of Locals

The establishment of the new identity of locals is made by the fourth generation who were born and brought up in the global communication age as well as in the interracial or multiracial heritage. Both Magic Mango and A Little Bit like You are centered in the narrators of the fourth generation whose ultimate embrace of their local identity influ- ence their parents of the third generation. The communication between the fourth generation and their grand- and / or great-grandparents is registered as a crucial process of re-establishing the tie between and among generations with the shared consciousness of rooted localism. In Magic Mango, Lisa at three or four, with her grandmother's support, attempts to make her father decide to abandon his desire to cut down the old mango tree in the family garden as the token of their rooted localism.

In A Little Bit like You, the teenager Keiko succeeds in lunching the voyage to the hidden aspect of the family roots as the rooted localism by way of encountering the grandparents' aging and the great-grandparents' secret of interracial roots.

Lisa in Magic Mango plays a role to communicate with the forgotten mango tree, a symbol of the fading old family and local heritage, and with her grandmother, who laments by telling Lisa; "Dis tree ... just like your Grandma, old and tired. No give mangos anymore" (MM 6). Lisa's father's practical way of cutting down the old mango tree is caused by his economical way of living and by his lack of appreciation of the past legacy of useful fruits: "Nobody like take care da tree fo long time and now you guys take care. Fo what? Aftah too old. Waste time!" (MM 7). The conflict between the mango tree and the father is traced back to his childhood days when he and his brother picked the baby and ripe mangos and did mischief by them. Magic Mango's fight with Lisa's father originated from

a conflict between the second generation, who nourished the mango tree, and the third generation, who abandoned its fruits. The mango's anger is symbolized by Magic Mango's "katonk bonk," the mango's falling down upon Lisa's father's head. The understanding between Lisa / Grandma and Lisa's father is finally made when Magic Mango, empowered by Lisa and Grandma, produces one big mango which embodies how deeply the family and the tree are rooted and still living in the local land.

A Little Bit like You presents the teenager narrator who speaks Standard English yet who understands the older people's pidgin English as the bridge between the flourishing consciousness of inter-multiracialism in the conflicting global/local age and the crucially transformed and deeply obsessed sense of the mono-racial heritage within the family of four generations. Keiko as an embodiment of hapa, mixed blood in a contemporary era, enables the conflict between Keiko's Japanese / Chinese parents and her grandparents via her communication with the spirits of her Japanese great-grandmother and Chinese great-grandfather.

The term hapa has been primarily used in Hawai'i, but it embodies and embraces the larger and more complicated groups of offsprings of inter ra- cial couples not only in Hawai'i but in such global cities as Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Tokyo. The number of hapa offsprings has increased after World War II when American GI's brought a number of European and Asian women to the States. Within the racially oppressed local community in Hawaii, hapa was a hidden agenda as a victim of sex / race related violence and power conflict. The emerging consciousness has appeared especially after World War II when the third generation's outracial marriages have increased. In this transnational and global age, hapa local islanders represent the unique local heritage conflicting yet blended with the primarily homogeneous homeland culture and social values and the emerging wave of the new identity of multiracial and

multicultural self.

The early hapa islander in a seemingly mono-racial family is confronted with the loss of identity. Though Ah Po in Oranges Are Lucky and Kwan Choy in My Home Is Down the Street lament that their granddaughters have Japanese boyfriends, A Little Bit like You is narrated from a perspective of an offspring of the interracial couple of the third generation.

Keiko's family's surface strife is with the two aging grandparents, Jiro and Kiyoko Sakamoto, who suffer from Alzheimer's Disease. Kiyoko's obsession with sweeping the house and returning to her hometown Hilo represents her lost self and lost identity, which was caused by the lost- inarticulate secret of her racial background. Kiyoko, who would not admit her daughter's marriage to a Chinese and uses an insulting term

"pa-ke" for the Chinese by saying "I told her no good marry dat 'pa-ke'"

(8) and wishes Keiko to be a Japanese girl, embodies the strong sense of mono-racially oriented localism. The trauma that Kiyoko suffered since her childhood days is caused by the absence of her father: "Mama always tell me bumbye he come home, but I wait fo him and he no come home"

(35). Kiyoko's life-long wait for her lost father is symbolized by her memo- rized and repeated act of sweeping the porch. Keiko's encouragement to Kiyoko to accept her identity is at the same time Keiko's self-esteem;

"Sometimes you just have to be who you are, Grandma. Look Grandma, look in the mirror. You look like me. I mean, I look like you. Little bit like you" (46). Kiyoko's resolution and acceptance as a Chinese-Japanese manifests the inter / multi racially oriented localism rooted in the soil of Hawai'i and emancipates the newly-born identity of hapa as an embodi- ment of Hawai'i's mixed racial, cultural, and social heritage from the wrong practice of mono-racial local heritage.

VI. Conclusion

Lum's plays represent his insistent beliefs in localism in Hawai'i, especially in respect to its multilayered linguistic and cultural heritage and his atti- tude toward local identity. Lum's forte is his detailed drawing of the transforming and transferring domestic and social scenes of local Hawai'i and local people through the immigration and plantation days to the contemporary era. In responding to a sharp criticism that Bamboo Ridge has become "the new canon and neocolonial," Lum insists that local literature "that has become more 'central' still acknowledges the struggles of an immigrant part or that of disenfranchised people ... hardly canonical or neocolonial" (Ling 98).3 In his plays, Lum proves that Hawai'i is 'A Home of Their Own' where the locals appreciate its unique yet universal values that were confronted with conflicts between and among generations yet that were resolved as their local shared experience.

I would like to express my gratitude to Mr. Darrell H. Y. Lum, who kindly allowed me to use his unpublished typescripts and private videos of his plays and patiently answered to my endless questions. I also thank Professor Dennis Carroll, Ms. Marie Hara, Mr. Arnold Hiura, Ms. Lisa Kakaneole, Ms. Joy Kobayashi-Cintron, Ms. Juliet S. Kono, and Mr.

Harry Wong for their warm support, encouragement, and helpful assistance.

I thank the American Studies Foundation for the travel grant to attend the 22^nd Annual American Studies Forum by the Center for Asia-Pacific Exchange in Hawaii from July 31 through Aug. 8,2002. For my research on Hawai'i's local literature and play, I deeply appreciate the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science for two grants: one is for the 1997- 2000 "The Path of Japanese Immigrants' Literature in Hawai'i: Its Reconstruction with a Post-Colonial View; and the other is the 2002-2005

"The World of Hawaii's Local Drama: The Birth and Development of Kumu Kahua Theatre."

Notes

*

1 AB for Lum's bibliographical information, see Usui's "Darrell H. Y. Lum."

2 According to Hiura, Hara, Hiura, and Sumida began to work together in order to build a local literature project, founded Hawaii Ethnic Resource: Talk Story Inc., and planned to have a local writers' meeting in 1977 (Hiura Interview).

3 As for reviews of the 1996 double production of Oranges Are Lucky and Fighting Fire, see Kam and Rozmiarek.

4 Lum himself is one of the playwrights who joined the multicultural project,

"Search for an Inn," produced at the Waipahu Cultural Park: Victoria N.

Kneubuhl wrote a Hawaiian part; Lee Cataluna, a Portuguese part; Chris Millado, a Filipino part; Karen Yamamoto-Hackler, a Japanese part; and Lum, a Chinese part (Berger).

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