A dumb haole responds to Ms. Cataluna
Dear Ms Cataluna,
I came to Hawai’i not long ago—last July, actually—for graduate school. UH Manoa offered me a modest scholarship and has a good reputation in my field of study, so with no particular prior interest in or knowledge of Hawai’i, The Place, I moved across an ocean to an environment radically unlike any I’d ever experienced before.
Before making the hop, I did a little bit of research, and it turns out that, hey, there’s some cultural tension in Hawai’i. I was tempted to call it “racial tension,” but that’s not really the right term, is it? I was somewhat concerned.
Anyway, I moved out here, lucked into finding an apartment with some fellow students, and it turns out people are pretty nice. Took me a couple of days to figure out what things like “da kine” and so on meant, but it’s not really rocket science, is it? Things were going well.
Except then the Island Weekly started showing up in my mailbox, and with it, your column.
The first one was classic, a shrill screed decrying the use of the shaka hand gesture by… I don’t know, exactly—people you didn’t like, I guess. You started out by mocking people who didn’t do it right, and then moved into complaining that the “secret” of a well-formed shaka had gotten out, and now everybody was doing it, so it was “all pau.” Clearly, if someone didn’t meet some imagined criteria of local-ness, it didn’t matter to you whether or not they made a “good” shaka, they were messing it with their dirty (pilau?) mainland hands.
So, that was pretty irritating. I wondered how I could possibly please this Cataluna person, shaka-wise. I decided I’d better refrain entirely, or she’d find me and punch me in the mouth or something. I had feverish nightmares about angry local women, shouting at me in pidgin, bludgeoning me into bloody submission with their shakas. I took this as an omen, and swore never to make the gesture.
But then you devoted an entire column to an amazing new method of telling a mainlander from a local: Whether they use “in” or “on” to describe the state of being on an island. Because, you maintained, all mainlanders would say “in,” as in, “I lived in Maui for 2 years.” Sadly, you overlooked the utter stupidity of that contention. Most people would not say “in an island” except to misspeak—which happens, but is hardly a reason to start the kind of self-satisfied sniggering you conveyed in the article. So in the shaka column, you suggested that non-locals had ruined a local tradition by committing the unforgivable crime of adoption—those colonizing bastards!—and now you were sneeringly pointing out how dumb the mainlanders were for failing to do something in a way you considered correctly “local.” The fact that the “in vs on” column was based on a laughably flimsy observation is beside the point; you still jumped at the chance to rip on non-locals.
So then I was left thinking, “Damn, if I try to adopt a more local style of doing something, them I’m somehow ruining it for the locals, but if I don’t, I prove I’m just a dumb haole mainlander.” That’s a rough situation, Ms Cataluna. I couldn’t really figure a way out of it.
The sockdolager came with your most recent Island Weekly column, a nearly incoherent rant that I had to read twice just to extract the thesis. It said, essentially, that it doesn’t matter what laws are passed, mainlanders are always going to be disadvantaged by the hiring practices of local authorities, because they’re dumb mainlanders and they deserve it, end of story. Oh sure, you tossed in some lipservice about how privileging locals in employment is done everywhere, not just Hawai’i, and I won’t deny that in positions that require working closely with a particular small community, a local is probably a better choice. But I’ll tell you what—a competent non-local can learn a lot in a few months.
Take me, for example. I’ve learned that most locals are actually pretty cool. Most of them don’t have a chip on their shoulder. Most of them aren’t like you.
Thank god.
Sincerely,
Paul T. Starr