[In the following essay, Sumida examines the emergence of Hawaii's literatures as a postcolonial and cultural phenomenon.]

When I was drafting this chapter, I had the opportunity to discuss with Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor, a historian of Native Hawaiian and ethnic studies, my questions about examining the emergence of Hawaii's literatures as a postcolonial historical and cultural phenomenon. “Post-colonial?” she said. Her eyebrows leaped up. “Since when?”¹

Applied to American literary histories, the term “postcolonial” makes an imperfect but, in some ways, useful lens. In “minority” American literatures generally—and because they are often still considered “minority” ones, continuing to struggle for equality—an incongruity of “postcolonial” models arises from this: for peoples of racial minority groups of the United States there has not been a point of “liberation” from colonialism in the political, international sense that the British colonies became “liberated,” gained independence and nationhood, whether in North America or, say, in South Asia. It is arguable that in minority American literatures generally, political and cultural issues are being played out in ways that resemble dynamics of race, class, and gender in postcolonial nations engaged in processes of creating new national narratives out of their old and their recent indigenous, colonial, and current postcolonial histories and languages. Rather than establishing a similarly, however, a comparison between postcolonial literary phenomena and various ways in which Asian/Pacific American literatures have been “emerging” brings into view, as well as into question, certain distinctions among Asian/Pacific American and other “minority” literatures of the United States.²

From the point of view of indigenous peoples of the United States, colonialism did not end in 1776 and with the Declaration of Independence. The colonizers remained in charge under the new dispensation. The language in which a national literature of the United States emerged was primarily English. The transition from British colony to independent nation did not result in a rejection of English—for the most part the rebels' native tongue, after all—and a return to an indigenous language and culture predating the arrival of colonists, though such a construct (and adoption of a Native American language) for the new nation was once and again proposed by colonizers. The colonization of the indigenous peoples—and the notion that they are subjects (namely, subjected to) rather than agents of changes—continues despite the fact that, importantly, American culture has been and is alive with changes effected not only by the arrivals of peoples, ideas, and arts from around the world but by influences of indigenous cultures, and with changes necessitated or inspired by the very lands, waters, and skies that comprise the United States.³ Agents of American cultural changes are not exclusively European colonizers; but these changes are not exactly “postcolonial” because they are still largely claimed and owned by the colonizers themselves.

In Asian/Pacific American literary history, questions regarding postcolonialism ought first of all to be applied thus to Hawai‘i, a state of the union that has, however, capitalized on an exceptionalism which aims to give the impression that Hawai‘i and its cultures are, in appeal to some recess of the yearner's desire, most naturally untouched by whatever colonialist grip the rest of the United States may have on the Islands. I find it important to begin this discussion with thoughts about Native Hawaiian history, because of how it simultaneously affects the development and characteristics of the Asian American literature of Hawai‘i and exposes some assumptions about class and national values in the Asian American literature of immigration, whether of Hawai‘i or of the continental United States.⁴ In a colonialist view, 1778 and the first arrival of the British Captain James Cook signify the beginning of the colonization of Hawai‘i by Europeans. But a different view, a view from the shore, though recognizing the fact that Cook interacted with changes historically under way in his time, would place 1778 within a long struggle waged by and among native Hawaiians to unify and gain political control over the entire chain of islands of Hawai‘i (Sumida 1991, 7-19, 160-2). This warfare culminated, not in some kind of Native Hawaiian defeat at the hands and brains of superior Europeans led by one who arrived by accident in Hawai‘i, but in the successful conquest and unification of the Islands, completed in the mid-1790s, by Kamehameha I, first monarch of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i. Hawaiian sovereignty under a unified monarchy lasted almost a full century, during which many Europeans and Americans, with their colonialist views of taking over the realm, might have thought and acted as if Hawai‘i were their “colony” and did fight over whose it was. But it was Native Hawaiians who ruled. When, in the late twentieth century, assertions of and opposition against Hawaiian sovereignty are voiced, it is to this history that the partisans allude—indeed to this already powerfully mythical time when Native Hawaiians consolidated political, national agency for themselves, among themselves, and by themselves.

Nonetheless, outside would-be colonialist influences were certainly strong enough that Hawai‘i, even under the monarchy, struggled with such forces. Hawaiian arts such as the mele (poetry) and hula (dances), including mele ma‘i celebrating the genitals of royal ones and other honored persons, were suppressed by Christian missionaries and some of their converts (Elbert and Mahoe 1970, 6). Although genital chants may seem an extreme form of art in our (postmissionary) minds, the genre had not been extreme in pre-Christian Hawai‘i; and the suppression of arts and culture extended to historical chants, for Hawaiian history was pagan history, to be wrested from the convert entering the new life of Christianity.⁵ Whatever his own strategies of sometimes opposing, sometimes courting the support of Americans in the realm, in the 1870s and 1880s the elected king, David Kalākaua, instituted what became known as a “Hawaiian Renaissance” of native arts and sciences. The fact that there was a recognized “renaissance” clearly suggests that Kalākaua sought through it to supply something he felt lacking but needed for the life of the land. The “reborn” Hawaiian culture emerged in opposition to the European imports and influences in eclectic and sometimes secret ways. Here was an assertion of Hawaiian nationalism even while in principle as well as in practical rule it was the Native Hawaiians themselves who were still in power.

The need for the sovereign nation to proclaim a renaissance and a cultural nationhood in Kalākaua's reign foretold the change that soon followed. His successor, Queen Lili‘uokalani, who has the reputation of being one of the greatest Native Hawaiian poets and songwriters and is still widely known for her lyrics today, was overthrown by American businessmen, backed by U.S. naval power, in January 1893.⁶ President Grover Cleveland declared this takeover illegal when the businessmen offered the United States the opportunity to annex Hawai‘i immediately. The illegal takeover is the occasion that marks in Hawaiian history the beginning—not the end—of the American colonial period. Immediately after the overthrow of the queen and monarchy, Ellen Wright Prendergast, an attendant of Lili‘uokalani, composed the mele, “Kaulana nā Pua.” Though its words, in the Hawaiian language, were little understood through much of the next century, this song has become one of the most familiar-sounding expressions today of protest against colonization (Elbert and Mahoe 1970, 62-4; Sumida 1991, 62-3, 109, 1992, 218-19). This mele was at first considered sacred, not to be accompanied by a hula. It was a document in an underground movement. The very music of the song seems happy (as in the former vice president Dan Quayle's saluting American Samoans by calling them “happy campers”) to anyone who does not understand its language. Merely hearing the tune, who would suspect “Kaulana nā Pua” of being subversive?

Kaulana nā pua a‘o
          Hawai‘i
Kūpa‘a mahope o ka ‘āina
Hiki mai ka ‘elele o ka loko
          ‘ino
Palapala ‘ānunu me ka
          pākaha.
Famous are the children of
          Hawai‘i
Ever loyal to the land
When the evil-hearted messenger
          comes
With his greedy document of
          extortion.(7)

The song's statement of protest and its invocation of indigenous, heroic traditions and values springing directly from a precontact history of self-sufficiency of the island culture—an experience centered on the cultivation of the land and of families, the work and the rule of sustaining the life of the land—became “masked” from the ignorant. This already, in about February 1893, was assuredly a colonized Hawai‘i with a poetry and discourse crafted for that new status. This too is the colonial period some of the two hundred thousand indigenous Hawaiians see themselves living in today, as evidenced by sovereignty movements currently under way.⁸

Simultaneously energizing and confusing arguments over cultural and historical relations in Hawai‘i, however, is the convergence today of the Native Hawaiian renaissance with a “Local” cultural upwelling that includes a large measure of diversely Asian American participation. Whether of indigenous or immigrant descent, most “Locals” of Hawai‘i are quick to note the irony when a tourist refers to the “States” and implies that Hawai‘i is not one. Asian Americans in this Local society also generally assume identification with the national, political, and economic label “American,” as well as their specific ethnicities within Local, heterogeneous culture. Historically, these Asian American peoples were imported under contract, amounting to indentured servitude, to work on the sugar plantations in Hawai‘i. As laborers, and in particular as non-white laborers, they were at best promoted to the ranks of subalterns, not colonialists like the sugar planters, missionaries, big capitalists, and military leaders. Today when those who are Asian American Locals—people like myself, third- or fourth-generation descendants of imported laborers—voice ethnically specific and collectively Local identities and unity through a recognized body of fiction, poetry, and drama, it appears in a sense that a postcolonial, nationalist movement is under way, under an implicit assumption that we have been liberated (supposedly by American opportunities) from colonialist and class oppression and are in the process of forging a new national identity through politics, economic strides, and the raising of our own voices. But this construct, based as it is on assumptions about immigrant histories and dreams, again leaves out the Native Hawaiian. Further, the idea that the emergence of a Local culture in Hawai‘i is evidence of a kind of nationalism, not primarily Native Hawaiian but heterogeneous, obscures the fact that the Asian American Locals, too, despite their numbers in the population, are still inheritors of a colonial history they have not escaped, a history shaped greatly by nineteenth-century notions of white superiority and therefore white rule. The nation of Hawaii's peoples is still the United States, where Asian Americans are assuredly not the majority.

In Hawaii's Local literature today there is, however, a language of agency, of self-determination. It is Hawai‘i Creole English, or what Locals popularly call “pidgin.” If there were an emergence of a postcolonial literature of Hawai‘i today, one of its languages would be this pidgin. Here is a sample from Lois-Ann Yamanakas, a poem called “Parts” (that is, body parts):

“THE FACE”

Stop muttering
under your breath
before I pound
your face.
Want me
to punch
your face in?
You cannot run away
from me.
Try.
I catch you
and give you
double lickens.
Now get
your ass
in your room
and fold
all the laundry.
Then I'm gonna
teach you
how to iron
your father's shirts.
Go. The laundry
is on your bed.
Hurry up.

“THE EYE”

I

found this letter
in you panty drawer.
Did you write
all these evil things?
Looks like your
handwriting.
Like me read this
to Joy and her mother?
Like me call them up
come over for lunch
right now?
What you mean,
no, wait?
So you did
write it.

I

cannot believe
that so much evil
can live
in one person.
You are a evil child.
You are filthy.
You are a hypocrite.
Stay in your room.
Forever.

[Sister Stew (1991), 27-28]

If Hawai‘i were a postcolonial site, how apt would Yamanaka's poem be, with its blunt and nuanced, parodic verbal assaults against the daughter's body and her sexuality? This treatment courses through the mother from a history of being virtually owned, bodily, by the plantation boss and of being suppressed by fears of sinning and looking bad, where an individual's looks and behavior could have consequences for the entire community if the boss decided so.⁹ The poem would aptly be postcolonialist, too, because it exposes how we inherit colonialism even when we may think we are and should be free of it, and the poem critiques what it exposes: the pecking order, the downhill course of the sewage ditch, or the abuse of the subordinate runs headlong down the hierarchies exposed in Ota's Upon Their Shoulders (1951), Lum's “Primo Doesn't Take Back Bottles Anymore” (1972) and “Beer Can Hat,” Murayama's “I'll Crack Your Head Kotsun” and all throughout his All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) to Yamanaka's “Parts.” In this lineage Yamanaka's speaker also inherits an identification with a social class, a labor class. It is an identification which in this case opposes and transcends colonial standards, gendered constructs of how boys and men might talk pidgin, “bad English,” whereas girls and women are supposed to “talk nice” and become schoolteachers, middle-class, haolefied (whitewashed), and accepting of being colonized.

Yamanaka's “pidgin” language is Local identity in one of its many forms, whether in daily life or in the poem, and therefore in its treatments of otherwise widespread themes. The primacy of the voice of one person speaking to others, in Hawaii's Local literature, is expressed through the poem's genre: it is a dramatic monologue, a valuable device among Hawaii's contemporary poets, including Cathy Song, who, writing in so-called standard English, may be said moreover to demonstrate that poetic traditions of Hawai‘i are by no means confined to Hawai‘i Creole.

Another language of a postcolonial Hawai‘i, if there were ever to be such a place, would be Native Hawaiian, the prime language of Hawai‘i. Put Hawai‘i Creole and Hawaiian together in the linguistic identity of a hypothetical postcolonial nation, and we have the tongues native to Hawai‘i. If in an instant you could take away all other languages, including English, that native speakers have brought from outside Hawai‘i, then certain Local writers and most of the population would still have their own tongues of Hawai‘i to exercise cultural agency in the literary arts and talking story.

The same may not yet be said of Asian American cultures of the American continent. Frank Chin grumbles about the failure thus far of West Coast Asian Americans to create a language that can be sustained and put to every conceivable linguistic use even if the speaking of English, Spanish, Black English, and a variety of Asian tongues were to vanish.¹⁰ Beyond the immigrant generation, Asian Americans of the mainland generally write in English. Native Hawaiian and pidgin being quite different matters, in Hawai‘i and elsewhere in the Pacific a similar phenomenon is occurring in the emergence of a new growth in “traditional” indigenous literatures, this outgrowth being Pacific Island literatures written by indigenous peoples but in the languages of the colonizers.¹¹ On some of these islands, now nations, we can truly speak of the emergence of a postcolonial literature in English, just as there is a strong Anglophone, postcolonial literature in India. Regarding Chin's observation about the confinement of Asian American writers to the language that has dominated them, there is something to be learned from African American literature and the arts of subversion or of strategic, ostensible accommodations to domination through artistry in the English language. And as Chin has been insisting for some years now, verbal strategies and the creation of Asian American discourses of agency as resistance can be derived from abundant methods found in “heroic” Chinese and Japanese stories about social, sometimes interethnic, oppression and social justice, as well as from the early history of the Chinese American laborer and adventurer classes.

But whereas in Hawai‘i the literary uses of pidgin and native Hawaiian languages may allow a writer to be expressive in what are perceived to be his or her own terms, in virtually monolingual Asian American literature of the continent assertions of cultural identity, I think, tend to be made by way of opposition or resistance that in a sense depends upon, and unavoidably reifies, the racial, cultural, and nationalistic constructs of a perceived “majority” American culture, the adversary when it assumes and asserts domination. Thus, in any number of works we find a central conflict or tension addressed, though in significantly different ways, between what it is to be “Asian” and what it is to be “American,” or what it is to be stereotyped as one or the other or both.¹² This occurs, for instance, in works by Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Amy Tan, to name only three out of a century-long history of Asian American writers. Some, like Tan, simply assume an intercultural conflict and the opposing sides to be “real.” This is a well-established, highly problematic tradition in continental Asian American literatures. Others, like Chin and Kingston, in their different ways deconstruct the sides, and therefore the conflict, and show them to be profoundly “unreal” yet a virulent basis for racist actions. Still, in Kingston's Woman Warrior and Tripmaster Monkey, and in Chin's Donald Duk, the protagonists have to approach a radically different understanding by first exhausting old, ultimately pointless questions about their identities as supposedly being alien, in contrast or opposition to the identities of others by race, culture, and language—pointless in part because, except for immigrants among them, the protagonists do not possess or own any Asian “race,” “culture,” or “language” apart from American orientalist constructs of these concepts, and in part because their questions of ethnic and racial identity are “American,” ones asked in distinctly twentieth-century American contemporary and historical contexts. “Asian” cultural elements that immigrants transmit to younger Asian American generations are selectively remembered, reduced to serve the needs and purposes of the immigrant trying to deal with life, security, and the upbringing of Asian American youngsters in a land that lacks the full support of the culture the immigrant has left. Yet both the immigrants and the American-born characters have to deal with the construct of the former as supposedly a full-blown representation of an Asian land, culture, and people. By comparison, in Yamanaka's “Parts,” the poem's speaker and daughter have other concerns than cultural identity on their minds, and they have these concerns with no need for self-consciousness about the language they speak and its difference from “standard” English (except that Yamanaka is highly conscious of her linguistic choices in writing the poem).

This is to suggest that Asian American literature of the continental United States, too, has been emerging not exactly as a postcolonial phenomenon. It is indeed a “minority” literature in a troubling sense, sometimes and perhaps at its best an oppositional literature in an American culture that “colonizes” Asian Americans within America's own borders. When Asian American literature is postcolonial, it is about another nation and is written in languages taken from those of the former colonizers. Thus Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters and Ninotchka Rosca's State of War are novels about the Philippines, the setting also for parts of Peter Bacho's Cebu and of Michele Cruz Skinner's Balikbayan, after the nation was granted independence from the United States in 1946. N. V. M. Gonzalez's works (for instance, his short story “The Popcorn Man,” about a Filipino who teaches English composition to American soldiers on an installation resembling the former Clark United States Air Force Base) are “postcolonial,” drenched in references to things, ideas, and terms of a combined four centuries of Spanish and American rule and the author's consciousness of taking part in the creation of a national literature. A similar observation may be made of Meena Alexander's novel, Nampally Road, sparked by the rape of a woman by police in a station house in Hyderabad during the Emergency of the 1970s in India.

Indeed, about the immigrant's refusal to see that in America he is no longer in Asia, no longer of a national majority group, George Leong recites a poem with the refrain, “Are you a Chinese? Or are you a Chinaman?”¹³ A Chinese American speaker (a “Chinaman”) addresses an immigrant who still considers himself “Chinese”:

Do you have a flag? Do you have an army?
Are you a Chinese? Or are you a Chinaman?
Do you have one billion people? Are you a nation?
Are you a Chinese? Or are you a Chinaman?

In other words, the immigrant is now a “Chinaman” like the poem's speaker, a subject of a nation in which he is not of a majority that matters in ways he might wish. This awareness is seen, in Leong's poem, to be a necessary first step toward any possibility of the Chinaman's becoming empowered, not fractured from a meaningful historical identity and not rendered bone by bone into one more soul exploited, an “individual” who emerges from divisiveness rather than a fulfilled selfhood.

Some writers seem to me to be most aware that Asian America is not a “nation” and that the nation they are most determined to affect, indeed transform, is the United States, in a vision which includes Asian America, in order that fresh immigrants and nativists of long standing alike might perhaps understand that being “American” ought not be restricted by race. That is, even sometimes-so-called Asian American cultural nationalists seek not sovereignty but recognition of Asian Americans' historical rights in America.

Whether or not it, like a movement for Native Hawaiian sovereignty, can also be called “nationalist,” this continental Asian American drive for recognition of these voices in American literature signifies the emergence of a literature out from under an Anglo-American colonialism. It is a burgeoning literature full of self-consciousness about individual and collective identities, still bearing marks of exploitation by and through inequalities of gender and race, even after class and class differences seem to have ceased to be an issue for now because of a predominance in it of middle-class assumptions and dreams. This would mean that the “nation” assumed in Asian American literature is an ideal of “America”—precisely as in Carlos Bulosan's classic Filipino American, migrant-labor novel of exile, America Is in the Heart—and it is an “America” where power or potentiality, citizenship, and equality are democratic rights not determined by race, gender, age, and other attributes that are ordinarily outside anyone's choice. I do not think Asian American literature is alone among “minority” literatures in assuming this cluster of ideals, a yet unrealized postcolonial “nation” to which, with their visions, certain authors of this and other literatures already belong.

But this affirmation of “America,” occurring even in works of Asian American literature most critical of acts of the United States, such as John Okada's No-No Boy, when combined with historical circumstances, also tends to set Asian American literature and communities apart from other “minority” literatures and communities in a way that has been divisive and should not be: among America's peoples of color, it is mainly Asian Americans who are generally distinguished by their having come to the United States by choosing to subject themselves to American rule and by passing the legacies of this choice down to the American-born generations. In this context, the idea that Asian American literature is emerging as a “postcolonial,” revolutionary or postrevolutionary phenomenon is inconceivable, for given a (mis)reading of the evidence, is it not the Asian's will and nature to be colonized, as the immigrant American by choice, despite the fact that David Henry Hwang tries to destroy this idea of the naturally yielding Asian in his M. Butterfly? All the more, then, to counteract this misreading, we have to understand how the “America” envisioned in some works of Asian American literature is not America as it is, but a utopian “postcolonial America” that may be seen, through fictions, as emerging from an actual, still colonial America. It used to be a prevalent stereotype about Asians in America that the opposite was the case—that Asians came willingly, but only to return home to Asia rich. That stereotype was used to condemn Asian immigrants, settlers, for not truly being committed and responsible to this land and for being unassimilable in any case. Now, however, the settlement of Asians in America and the growing awareness that these peoples are here to stay are sometimes taken as signs that they are sellouts, mimicking Europeans, the other racial group who supposedly followed the myth of the American Dream to these shores.

Even while opposing such generalizations, Asian American literature has gone quite far to promote identification with America, or with a better America. And this brings me back to particulars of the beginning of this chapter, to the questions that need to be addressed concerning indigenous peoples, expressly in connection with constructs of Asian American literature. How can the ideas of a “better America” be reconciled with concepts of postcolonial agency and its foundation—as I have been treating it in this instance—upon a liberation from colonization? In the main, whether in Hawai‘i or on the continent, is Asian American literature of the coming decades to support or perhaps improve the nation, the United States, at the expense of others colonized? Occasionally I have received responses to my comments about Asian American and Native Hawaiian relations that isolate these concerns out there in the middle of the Pacific—literally isolated incidents peripheral to Asian American concerns. My point, however, is that these concerns apply throughout America when the question asked of me and my colleagues about postcolonialism stir up questions about the nation or nations implicit or assumed in Asian American and other ethnic literary studies nationwide. The inquiry prompting this discussion of postcolonialism and ethnic literatures brings certain bases and contours of Asian American literature into prominence, and I find myself repeating a question. What liberation from colonialism—for anyone, from whatever sites of oppression—is there when indigenous peoples of these lands are still colonized?

Notes

1. Conversation with McGregor, October 1992. The original version of this chapter was presented at the annual convention of the American Studies Association, Costa Mesa, California, November 1992, in the session titled “American Literary History as a Postcolonial Phenomenon.” For a critique of the ongoing colonization of Hawai‘i by the United States, see Trask 1993.

2. The term “Asian/Pacific American” configures many differing ethnic groups into a political entity, a conceptualized coalition. Political agendas of constituent groups in the category continually merge and diverge, changing the category, so that currently, what two decades ago was envisioned—hopefully—to be an alliance of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders does not hold. My discussion reflects this divergence and certain comparisons it opens among Native Hawaiian, Hawaii's Asian American, and continental Asian American literatures. For a treatment of the development of the panethnic concept “Asian American,” see Espiritu 1992.

3. These changes, both distinctive to and resulting from the social and natural environments of American settings (of time, place, history) have often been considered central to defining and promoting America and the United States' strength and position in the world, under theories and practices of “American exceptionalism” especially in the four decades of the Cold War. The concept of “exceptionalism” in this sense, although not for purposes of promoting the power of the American nation in the world, may be basic to current images of Hawai‘i and of Asian Americans, the former promoted as a special destination and the latter characterized as a model minority.

4. For another case where the category of an Asian American “literature of immigration” is critiqued, see Campomanes (1992), who, against the predominance of this category, contrasts a Filipino American “literature of exile.” Also, Rafael (1993) details some of the colonial cultural and hegemonic strategies the United States employed in taking over the Philippines from which the “old-timers” departed.

5. Hawaiian historical and genealogical chants narrate and record some aspects of culture that pass on the empowering knowledge of descent, which both identifies particular individuals, each standing in unique relation to others, and narrates those relationships tieing individuals, by acts and events, to one another. In the twentieth century, it was a genre of seemingly ahistorical love lyric that selectively came to symbolize Hawai‘i in a tourist's ears. This is one of the aspects of what I call a suppression of narrative, historical chants.

6. See Lili‘uokalani, Hawaii's Story by Hawaii's Queen. See also John Dominis Holt's drama, Kaulana Na Pua (1974), and his historically based long poem, Hanai (1986); and Aldyth Morris's drama, Lili‘uokalani (1993), for treatments of the life and illegal overthrow of Hawaii's last monarch.

7. When orally delivering this paper, I presented “Kaulana nā Pua” by first playing some stanzas of Genoa Keawe's singing of it with her group at the Waimea Music Festival. Her performance, its vocal exuberance, its pitches, instrumentals, tempo, and style (called “chalangalang” in echo of the lively strumming of the ukulele) epitomize the presentation of “Kaulana nā Pua” in the subversive guise of a party song. I next read translated stanzas, one of which I quote here, of lyrics that many in my audience found quite unexpected.

8. The United States Census Bureau recorded 211,014 Native Hawaiians in 1990. The figure includes “pure Hawaiians” and “part Hawaiians” who identified themselves as Hawaiian in the census. In that census the total population of Hawai‘i was 1,108,229.

9. In her novel, Ota narrates the plantation owner's rape of a Japanese housemaid, chosen for her duties and victimization because of her looks (46). Theories and rationalizations of physique and physical abilities in connection with race supported the selection of laborers imported to Hawai‘i and its plantations.

10. Chin's comments about the value of Hawaii's pidgin and Creole occur for me in a long-standing conversation with him, speaking with Hawai‘i Creole writers such as Milton Murayama and Darrell H. Y. Lum in mind, going back to 1976.

11. See Hamasaki, whose thesis and literary activities offer materials and analyses related to postcolonial studies of Pacific Island literatures, distinct from immigrant-based approaches.

12. For comparisons that highlight, by contrast, a concern with this dual “Asian American” identity, consider the popular novel, Kitchen, by Banana Yoshimoto, a Japanese woman—that is, a member of the racial and ethnic majority group in her nation. In Kitchen here is no emphasis on matters of racial and ethnic hierarchies or resistance against them. The fact that the characters cook and eat foods of different international derivations does not signify that their identities are fragmented. See, too, Sara Suleri's autobiography, Meatless Days (1989), for what is simultaneously a high degree of consciousness of constructs of race and ethnicity and a high awareness and questioning of how her multiplicity of identities relates to the postcolonial forging of a new nation, Pakistan.

13. I have never been able to find the poem in print, so I paraphrase it from where I have heard it, on the soundtrack of Dupont Guy: The Schiz of Grant Avenue, a film by Curtis Choy about Chinatown in San Francisco.

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