Looking Down (Honolulu to LAX) 08.19.10
The islands float together, each unique but inextricably related, ancient sisters in the blue Hawaiian sea.
For years, whenever I flew to Hawaii and got that first glimpse from the air of Ala Moana and Diamond Head and the dreamlike blue waters around them, my eyes would fill with tears. I’m not really sure what emotion I was feeling; I would just cry.
***
When our family moved from Honolulu to New York City, it seemed as if someone had played a terrible trick on us. New York was not at all as we had pictured it. There were no sleighs and snowmen inhabiting a magical white landscape. The door of the taxi from the airport swung open – I remember that moment clearly, although I was only five – revealing a chilly gray street, bare trees, and looming red brick apartment buildings inhabited, we soon found out, by tough, foul-mouthed haole kids who would bully us constantly, until we learned to be exactly like them.
A few months after we arrived, my oldest sister, J, held a meeting with me and K, and announced that henceforth, we would no longer call each other by our Japanese names.
I was struck by how formal it seemed. We stood in a circle under the wintry sky of Queens, New York, three small, anxious Asian girls from Hawaii conspiring to blend in. K and I promised J we would start using our American names, Lori and Tracy. We agreed to stop speaking Japanese to each other.
Hawaii began to feel like a dream, a vision receding day by day. Even then, I knew that we had left behind something rare and unspeakably beautiful.
***
For K, shoes and socks were the final insult. She would toss them off in department stores and run around barefooted, our mother chasing after her. As we grew older, her drawings and stories were wildly idealized fantasies of two teen-age girls who take a trip to tropical islands and lounge around on the beach eating shave ice and saimin.
Even as an adult, K always had a problematic relationship with shoes. We would walk around Manhattan attempting to be soignee and chic, when she would begin to groan dramatically. “These shoes were so comfortable when I tried them on…” she would say, with a crestfallen, dispirited look that always made me anxious. She had created an image of this evening in New York, of going to a museum or restaurant or Broadway show, wearing these new and perfect shoes. And the vision had disintegrated, yet again. Everything would come to a halt while we wandered around looking for a cheap shoe store. In Chinatown, she emerged from a store wearing rubber flip flops, sighing with relief, her dressy shoes stuffed into a little paper bag. She asked if I could carry the bag for a while, since she had just gone through so much. I took the bag.
On another outing, she ended up wearing black-and-white cloth kung fu slippers. Once, in Washington Square Park, she asked if we could try switching shoes, to see if mine were more comfortable, but then loudly rejected them as being too grossly sweaty.
When I later told her how mortified I had been, she was amazed. “Why do you care so much?” she asked, not unkindly, her brow furrowed like a sit-com psychiatrist. It was an expression she used a lot with me, and I found it enormously irritating. “Who cares if someone heard us?”
She was happiest in the water, swimming with the turtles off Ala Moana and Kaimana Beach. After landing at the Honolulu airport and picking up her rented car, she would drive straight to the ocean for a swim. She attributed her aquatic tendencies to being a “double Pisces,” and I know my aversion to swimming in deep water mystified her. She urged me to get over my Virgo earthiness, but I didn’t agree. I was content to keep watch from shore, reading and eating musubi and reapplying sunscreen, while she swam her endless laps in the ocean.
My mother, too, was a dreamy Pisces. She told us stories of swimming far offshore when she was growing up in Waianae, body surfing for hours. I found that difficult to picture, since I recalled seeing her in a bathing suit exactly once when we were growing up.
I asked her why, if she loved the water so much, did she never go in? I don’t remember how she replied. But her typical answer to my over-ambitious questions was often to shrug slightly and say, in a playful singsong, “I…don’t know…”
