Roots

I’m not from here, really.

Yes, I was born at Kaiser Hospital on Ala Moana Boulevard—the place where the two-tower Prince hotel now boasts the same view of the Ala Wai and Magic Island my mother must have enjoyed just after giving birth to me.Yes, I was raised here, reared in Kane`ohe, and sent to Saint Ann’s. I watched the undeveloped field of weeds that Velcro-like, stuck to my tube socks when I ran through, become monolithic Windward Mall.

And yes, when people ask me, “What school you went?” I answer “Maryknoll,” beginning the routine of naming people who went to my school until we stumble upon a person in common, however far-removed. “You know Trudy Vierra? She wen grad ’90? Her aunty is Violet Vierra? Her cousin went Farrington, grad same year as me.” Because that’s how locals appropriate the strangers we meet, force-fitting them into our collective pasts by association so that the ‘other’ becomes almost familial.

But I maintain: I’m not from here. I never belonged—my parents weren’t issei or nissei, and my friends were mostly one thing. How I rued not being full-Asian! My community may have been mixed like me, but at least they looked Japanese or Korean; Filipino or Chinese. I was a quagmire of ethnicity and I still am.

My people are from two other islands, but go back a few generations, and they’re not from there at all. My mother was born and raised in New Zealand, about a half-hour’s drive outside Christchurch on the South Island. There in the now-destroyed city square, a plaque once named her great-great-great grandmother, Sarah Stokes, one of the immigrants on the first colonizing ships from England into Lyttleton Harbor.

I imagine her, black-haired and mousy, long strips pulled out of her up-do by the rushing wind, on the deck of New Zealand’s equivalent of the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria. Of course, she and her husband were in steerage with their five sons and three daughters, so the likelihood of this wind-blown fantasy could have only happened during the very un-sexy daily mattress-airing, when she and twenty-one other families with their sixty-five children did the same, peeling their bedding from the wall-to-wall bunks built into eight hundred seventy-five square feet of shared living space.

Let’s say she’s got a minute during the one hundred and three days she spent on the Randolph (did I mention she was pregnant with child number nine, and gave birth en route?). She’s there on deck trying not to puke, thinking about the life she’ll have on that other shore; the England of her birth so close behind her heels she can still feel the cobbles beneath her feet. She knows she’ll never return to that home again, or does she? Could she ever imagine her great-great-great granddaughter (my mother) one day sailing across another expanse of sea, even farther East?

Her mother, my grandmother, was the only grandparent I ever met. She was kind to me and gave me great bosomy hugs, but she lived in New Zealand, which was much too far away for me to know anything about her. We wrote letters on aquamarine stationary I bought for her during the trip I made there before she died. I was eight, I think. Whenever one of those envelopes came in the mail, I felt important and loved. My grandma didn’t have an address. Instead, she lived at “the Knoll,” where prize-winning roses were grown and a babbling brook was spanned by two hand-carved bridges.

Married to my grandfather who had kind eyes, blonde hair, and wore bow ties, I’m not sure my grandparents ever left New Zealand. They may have tooled around Akaroa Bay or caught the ferry to the North Island, but they mostly stayed close to the street where my grandfather owned a liquor distribution company. Four of their six children also remained relatively close to King Street. One moved as far away as Perth, Australia, but my mother, the eldest, hitched herself on two other boats, first to Fiji, then to Hawai`i.

Fiji sucked. It was hot and she had to live with her in-laws who didn’t speak English. To them, she was a white devil who stole their perfect number one son. For two years, she endured living upstairs from her mother-in-law, who had nothing good to say about the way her daughter-in-law cooked, cleaned, or breathed. Eventually Mom became pregnant and gave birth to a son she named Paul who died about 24 hours after he took his first breath. This loss wasn’t easy for my parents, who probably left Fiji to start fresh. But forty-plus years after she reached Hawai`i’s shores, my reticent mother still speaks with a slight accent, still drinks cups of tea, and eats toast with Vegemite.

My deceased father did the same.

And likewise, a boat carried his father’s father from China to New York, where he worked for years, perhaps going West to work on the railroads. He died abroad, but his body would make the trip back and be buried somewhere in Hong Kong; his two sons (one of them, my grandfather) making sure their father was interred in Chinese earth. I hear he missed his wife, but I don’t actually know anything about his life or what he looked like—all I have is a photo of his gravestone; the characters of my name: a waterfall of tears carved into stone. I don’t know whether he loved opium or whiskey, what kind of white men spat at him as he walked the unpaved streets. Was his queue amputated with his chi, or did he learn enough English to protect himself? Chances are he was illiterate, or he might have sent for his wife and two boys, gone to San Francisco, opened a laundry, and I would be cut into eighths.

I know more about his son—my father’s father, who rode another boat from China to Fiji, and would not return, ever. Born January 27, 1893, my granddad looks the stud. In his twenties, he posed for a shot with legs crossed and white patent leather lace-ups, the cuffs of his pants crisp and the creases of his blazer so very F. Scott Fitzgerald. In one hand, a book. His other elbow rests on a potted plant, the hand open and relaxed. With a slight frown he penetrates the sepia page, gazing hard at me. Later pictures of the curly-headed man with glasses prove he never went gray. I think he loved whiskey, gambling, and not opium. He smoked cigarettes and owned lots of sharp suits.

A long time passed before granddad sent for his four-foot-nothing Chinese wife. As a young woman, my grandmother shaved a couple of inches from her widow’s peak and tied her hair in a bun that covered her ears but not her gold earrings. Fierce, her dark brows frame eyes that aren’t really sure whether the camera will steal her soul, but her lips are soft and stifle a smile. Aging, she became a tight scowling woman with wiry hair cut at her chin. She must have sewed because all her dresses look the same, all with round collars, all cut from material like old curtains that don’t seem to touch her skin.

A long time after they reunited, when they were both past forty, and had established themselves on the island of Gau (pronounced n-gaow) with a coconut farm and a bakery, my father was born. When Dad sailed to Suva for boarding school at age five, then to New Zealand for university where he’d befriend my mother’s brother, I know he wasn’t just a little afraid.

            But when the time came to pick up his new wife and move her from her hometown, he was already well-acquainted with diaspora. My mother, on the other hand, was not. Like her predecessor, I can see my mother on that other sunny deck staring into her future, her past trailing so close behind she can still hear her mother’s voice in her ear, feel her father’s warm hand on her shoulder. Does she know the son she buried would not be her only child? That she would bear three more children, returning each time to that same Waikiki maternity ward next to the movie theater?

            Probably not. And it likely wouldn’t have mattered so much to me not being from here had things been different growing up. If my friends did not go to their grandmother’s house after school or garden and fish with their grandfathers, if they didn’t tell stories about their cousin’s cousin’s cousin who was now their aunt or share starfruit and lychee from their great-great uncle’s farm at lunchtime, perhaps I wouldn’t have felt so disconnected.

            When I was five or six, my father’s brother immigrated with his four children to O`ahu, and ended up buying a house not more than half a mile from where we lived. My cousins went to the same school as us, and though they weren’t much quantity-wise in comparison, at least they were something. But having all been born in Fiji, they were even less from here than me.

            I’m Polish, English, Irish, German, and Chinese, but my parents are essentially Pacific Islanders. Where’s the box I’m supposed to check that encapsulates all of that? There is no ‘home place’ with people exactly like me, and there never will be. To make matters even more confusing, perhaps I should move to Russia and marry an African-American Latino who was born and raised in Bangladesh.        

But maybe that’s what everyone here is from—a great long line of crossed wires and discombobulated connections. And here’s the thing: coming from a place, coming from a people only means you have roots, and no matter how convoluted and twisted up; no matter how skinny mine are from stretching, they do exist.