This is paradise.
This is Paradise: Stories, a beautifully written debut collection of short stories by Kristiana Kahakauwila, is one the books of fiction that I read last year and reviewed, posted on March 2, 2018. My partner recommended the book after a friend of his reviewed it for a periodical, and I was dreading a preachy social justice piece, so it sat on my dresser for a time. Then I picked it up one night, when I sat soaking in the tub to ease some muscle aches and foot pain and loved it. It was an easy read and I highly recommend it if you’re looking to understand Hawai’i from a local perspective, beyond grass skirts and piña coladas.
"They should stop whining," the agent rolled her light blue eyes, in her barely masked Ontarian accent, and laughed. "They're in paradise, for Christ's sake."
She and her husband are wealthy, savvy technocrats from Toronto, a couple who would mix in well with the libertarians of Silicon Valley. They have in the last few years been building a growing luxury property management company in the sprouting Kona resorts in the Big Island. I have only met them on a couple of occasions. They have been managing my partner’s high-end condominium as a short-term rental. Next door, I heard, was the chief executive officer of Pandora. They're nice, in the agnostic way I describe people I don't know. Her glib remark struck me, though, as a character in This is Paradise: Stories said almost exactly the same thing.
"Everyone talks about aloha here, but it's like Hawaiians are all pissed off. They live in paradise. What is there to be mad about?" a white woman, a tourist from the mainland, says in the titular short story, “This is Paradise”. It was about a group of local women who worked in the hotel industry, resentful of the encroaching visitors that was changing the face of Waikiki in Honolulu. They rebuffed her at first, treated her as an outsider, but also warned her not to pursue a man they instinctively knew was unsavory. She may had been foreign, but as a woman they ultimately felt an immediate kinship and responsibility for her in a world of predatory men. That is, she was family, or 'ohana, in more ways than she accepted in the end.
"Wanle" is not just about cockfighting and one young woman's need to forge and continue a father's legacy but discovering the layers of betrayal that built that legacy. Was she willing to commit the same?
My favorite of the collection is "Portrait of a Good Father", depicting with compassion a troubled marriage, an infidelity (or is it?), and the devastating impact of a child’s death.
Ms. Kahakauwila's stories illuminate the complexities of relationships in a changing Hawai’i. They are stories that touch the nuanced intersection of race, class, geography, gender, identity, and sexuality. They touch on history and the vestiges of colonial aggression. Who gets to claim Hawaiian-ness? Natives who are leaving in droves for Las Vegas? A non-native, born and raised in the islands, more local than local? Is it paradise when your people are continually being displaced by developers, by self-entitled mainlanders with their fat wallets and yoga mats?
Life in Hawai'i is not built on glossy travel magazines. It is paradise, but you need to understand it, know it, and respect it.