Hawaii arrival stories

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

Uh huh.

I am still interested in hearing people's Hawaiʻi arrival stories. What brought you to the islands, and what made you stay?

[Bard]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

Apologies for responding to the sub-thread Glen Didn't mean to help push it OT. I personally find the original topic interesting and hope it continues rather than devolving into another racial flame-war...

[Glen Miyashiro]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

Sigh. Go get your own thread, why don't you. But since that's probably not going to happen, I might as well respond...

There are several overlapping and conflicting definitions. Much heat can be caused by disagreements over them. Take your pick.

Malihini.
A recent newcomer to the islands, someone who came from elsewhere. There are differing opinions on how long one remains a malihini:
(1) You're a malihini until you learn the ways of the islands.
(2) Once a malihini, always a malihini. And that might even go for your kids too.

Haole.
(1) 18th century meaning: Stranger; outsider. Anyone who wasn't Native Hawaiian, with different modifiers depending on place of origin: Haole Pelekania (British), Haole Kepanī (Japanese), etc. Maybe even Haole Kahiki (Tahitian).
(2) 19th century meaning: Residents of Hawaiʻi of white descent. A term adopted by the children of the missionaries to refer to themselves. Does not include Portuguese field lunas.
(3) 20th century meaning: White people.

Local.
(1) Someone who is from the place you are at.
(2) Someone who identifies with the culture of the present-day residents of Hawaiʻi.
(3) A Hawaiʻi resident who is not a malihini.
(4) A Hawaiʻi resident who is not haole.
(5) A Hawaiʻi resident who is not haole, and who is not Native Hawaiian either.

[Bard]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

haole and local are synonymous.

So for example Japanese immigrants who came a few generations back are not "locals"? Or are they considered haole?

[Pua'i Mana'o]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

haole and local are synonymous.

haole and malihini are not.

Even though today people act as if the opposite is true, if you ask the kupuna, they would agree with what I wrote. And that would also agree that haole/local and "good" are not synonymous. Each must earn his/her own.

[Whitepoint3rchum]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

Those "locals" who weren't born there had to come from somewhere.

Just for some clarification, what is the word local being used for these days? I thought it was exclusively for someone born in Hawai'i who wasn't haole. Sorry for the tangent Glen, but I'd get a bit peeved if I heard a malihini refer to themself as local.

[Whitepoint3rchum]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

Gotta agree with you on the other stuff though. Ain't nowhere in the world a total paradise

Absolutely there is, you just gotta be in the right state of mind.

[timkona]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

I guess when anything is New...especially, FREE dey tink something is crooked.

That speaks directly to the xenophobia that is a pillar of the modern culture in Hawaii. New ideas, or better ideas, are frowned upon heavily in Hawaii. Of course, this is a modern development in the culture of the Islands, cuz everybody knows that Kamehameha was eager to learn about cannons, and tall ships, and many other items of "modern worldly knowledge" in the late 1700's.

I been here 14 years. I came on the recommendation of a good friend who knew how much I love ocean sports. It's rather cold in the SF Bay Area when fishing, diving, sailing, or surfing. Out of the 4 of us who came, I'm the only one who stayed. Employment was easy, even in 93, when the economy was tanked. All you had to do was arrive on time, everyday, sober, and do what you say you gonna do, and you stand out instantly.

I've said it before. It's the ocean for me.

[dana934]

Although it is FREE and would be an asset to the Recovering Agencies in State...I am being met with unopen arms. I guess when anything is New...especially, FREE dey tink something is crooked. Dey don't know me.

What a pity they won't just meet you and get a sense of your genuine compassion. And i wonder whether some of them are projecting--maybe they'd never give anything away, including their time. If you're on the Big Island, you could sure talk to Global HOPE, Global Hawai`i Organization for Peace and the Environment, at UHH. They're don't focus specifically on recovery, but they do understand that the war on the poor includes, e.g., cracking (to use an apt expression) down on pakalolo so people wind up using much more addictive drugs; there are some terrific people in that group.

In case you're interested, i'll tell you more about how a middle-aged womon with an IQ of 160 and a Texas A&M education comes to be living
in poverty. (And if you're not interested, you can always just scroll past the rest of this entry.) I've lived all my adult life on a non-taxable income because i don't want to go to prison and i WON'T give the Pentagon a dime. Yes, i know there are people who have had a decent income for many years without paying taxes on it and haven't gotten busted, but MOST pacifist tax resisters leave money in a bank account for the IRS to pillage so they don't get locked up. I absolutely won't give anyone anything to use to buy bombs, guns, tanks, &c., to chew up soldiers & civie men, womyn and little bitty keiki, so if the IRS ever came after me, i'd make my financial assets unavailable and end up in the hoosegow. Sometimes when i tell people about my years of hell in Hawai`i, they say, "So i bet now you're ready to go get a straight job and let the IRS take their blood money out of your check, just to be able to live in greater safety." To which i say, "Yeah, right." Now that i know first-hand exactly how it feels to have one's beloved dependents die untimely, i'm--if possible--even more determined not to put someone else through this kind of anguish. Lockheed, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, &c., can and have used poverty to wreck my back, starve me and kill my family; if i tried to make more money and still not pay taxes, they could have me put in a federal penitentiary; if the ol' doggie-doo ever really hits the fan politically here, they might kill me; but if they think they can intimidate me into giving them the money to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people, they can all line up and kiss my little pink `okole. And my thanks to Ehren Watada for reminding me that `aloha is alive and well in Hawai`i.

I have this completely half-baked hypothesis that the reason American men are more nearly reasonable toward womyn is the influence of the way Euro-American expansion into the western states took place. Here i'm talking not about the genocide but about the very long period of gender imbalance. When whites first started moving past the Mississippi, almost only men could get away from their parents to brave deserts, grizzlies and some enraged survivors of the mass murders whites had carried out against them. Extremely few womyn moved west for a long time--just the handful whose lives had had some complete disaster, whose parents were dead or would let them go and who would dare to live in a camp all of whose other residents were men. So if a man wanted to marry, he had lots of competition, and i think white men in the American New West had to learn to behave somewhat better toward womyn than their ancestors had in millenia, to have any chance at all. Womyn in Hawai`i could consciously construct that kind of situation by getting together and agreeing among themselves which signs of normal adult psycho-social development to call for first from men.

I have a somewhat firmer basis for believing that it was the Holocaust perpetrated on the Hawaiian people by the first several waves of Europeans to arrive there that started the trend to puerility among men in Hawai`i. When one or more particular age group in a society is killed, the society is disrupted much worse than if the same number of deaths is even distributed among ages, and disease heavily targets the elderly and the very young. And (something the first-contact Hawaiians couldn't have known) sailors of that era were the very sweepings of European society. If a young man couldn't get along with anyone well enough to run a farm or a business, he had to "shape up or ship out." So the first many Europeans the early Hawaiians met were the dregs of Europe and accordingly brought with them the very worst social attitudes and behaviors from their homelands. I've read a journal entry by one of Cook's crew in which the sailor brags about having given syphillis to a young Hawaiian womon--along the lines of, "Serves her right, the slut."

No wonder Hawaiians figured whites had no souls--we're just lucky Hawaiian didn't have a word for demon.

Living in a tent with her "cat sisters". Has to be Puna.

Yep, you pegged it.

[sinjin]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

"Cat sisters"?

Living in a tent with her "cat sisters". Has to be Puna.

[Leo Lakio]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

What I found out about the islands.... is that mosquitos loved me.

I'm with you there, Manoa. I swear, when I'm in Kane`ohe, I can hear their buzzing as saying "Yes! Fresh white meat, just in from the mainland!" before their feast begins.

[tikiyaki]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

My haole-ness and NY-ness are fodder for humor, sometimes, but I laugh along with it. I really don't think it is done with a mean spirit. Trust me---I would know. And the jokes are on EVERYONE---many ethnic groups are represented where I work, and we all get hit at one time or another.

I can't tell you how many times I get the "Hey are you from NY ?" question from people here in LA, or even worse, "are you from Jersey?", and then some folks who try to do a NY accent. I never take offense to it. As a matter of fact, I use it to be humorous.

Cos' if you're not from NY, you CAN'T fake a NY accent, and sound silly trying....same as faking Pidgin I suppose.
Still, turning it on thick has made me much more of a funny guy out here in Cali than I ever was in NY...I use it to make people laugh, and it works....especially my godawful Robert DiNiro impersonations...always get a laugh.

I say use it if it helps make people laugh. People can always use a good laugh, and they can't really hurt you if you are making fun of yourself.


BTW...that Mark Twain quote is beautiful.

[tutusue]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

[...]"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."[...]

I love this quote! It reminds me of my daughter who, as I type, is beginning her ascent of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Africa. When I asked her why she would choose such an adventure (she's my 5 star hotel kid!) she said, "It's so far out of my comfort zone I figured why not."!! I give her so much credit for sailing away from her safe harbor.

[damontucker]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

Being born and raised in Hawaii, and never having seriously considered living (permanently) anywhere else, I am always curious about the stories behind people who have made the decision to move to Hawaii from elsewhere. What made you decide to move? Why did you pick Hawaii? Once you got here, what did you find out about the islands, good or bad, that you hadn't expected? And why did you decide to stay, when so many other would-be migrants have turned tail and headed back home?

I never saw this thread until recently. I will answer the questions as asked.

1. I decided to follow my mom to Hawaii when I was given an opportunity to go back to college after living on the mainlnad. My grandpa was a doctor that moved to the Big Island for a time in the 60's...
2. My mom just wanted to return to where she grew up for a majority of her life... (I just wanted to stay close to my mom.... know matter where she chose to live)
3. I found out that everyone thought I looked local until I opened my mouth and sounded like I was from the Mainland. What I found out about the islands.... is that mosquitos loved me.
4. I stayed because I met my beautiful "local" wife and I have already discussed with her that there is no job paying no matter how much that would make us leave Hawaii.

[WindwardOahuRN]

Re: Hawaii arrival stories

I'd be interested to see some real statistics on that but probably no one's done the right surveys to gather them. I know a lot do move and then leave in a year or two, enough to make for some great garage sale bargains for everyone else.

I've heard more than a few about Portland too. They had an article about it in one of the papers here once. People doing crazy things like moving to Portland, buying a "cheap" $300-400K condo, then commuting to California! As in buying plane tickets to San Fran and staying in their new condo on weekends. Because they felt the vibe and just had to be here. Kinda funny. (It was probably cheaper still!) I can understand though, despite all of the problems here it's a fun place to live. Hawai'i seems to attract more than most places though.

TBD, maybe some time next year. I'll probably have some stories for this thread then. I'm looking forward to meeting who I can from here. If I get there and it just doesn't work out for me one way or another, I'm planning to say cool, didn't work out, I had an experience. You guys can hold me to that if you want!

Like I said, you'll never know if you don't give it a try.

There's another thread about quotes. Here's a nice one that you might like, from Mark Twain (who also loved Hawaii):

"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Addendum to quote: Keep enough money in the bank to bail if you have to.