1.28.21 :: Aloha, My Hawaii

I have been dipped in Hawaii like a Dairy Queen cone and I never want to crack the sugar shell. From my sea-green toenails, to my skin that’s been baked to a sand-colored crisp, to my darkening hair that’s been waved and salt-cured like a piece of driftwood...I feel like Wednesday Adams, painted into the wallpaper; if I close my eyes I could blend into my surroundings and never come home.

But, to home I must go. To save and reflect and continue onward.

I’ve been playing around with the idea of staying here. As Joy says, it’s not expensive—it’s expansive. I agree, but I also paid my bills today and vacation Hawaii has sapped my non-expansive savings. Also, I don’t think vacation Hawaii and remote work Hawaii will be one in the same. However, this was a beautiful reset. The much-needed better half of my first solo trek. And, as Liz says, a step in my ongoing migration.

I realized the other day that what I love so much about Hawaii beyond the ocean are the mountains she’s built on. They’re lush and large and full of life—and they echo photos I’ve seen of China, a place I have never been, but has always been a forgone destination.

My Asian homecoming has taken half my lifetime. Until I was in college, I was, frankly, ashamed to be Chinese. The word itself was embarrassing to hear, like your name being called over the school loudspeaker. I was one of the minorities growing up, the chink and dumpling who could never find my way out of the unwanted spotlight of other. But at Tufts, there were hundreds of me. Proud and loud and speaking languages I’d never bothered to investigate before beyond Chinatown. Many of my best friends I met there are first-generation Asian- or Haitian- or Mexican-American women I’m in awe of for their strength of spirit and seemingly seamless duality—though I know they, too, have gone through their own assimilation and self-discovery journeys.

All that to say, over the past few years—especially after traveling to Japan and Taiwan last summer—I have had yellow fever for myself. (And I’m reclaiming that shitty term from online dating app messages sent to me over the years.) I want to know more about where we come from. If any of the assumptions I’ve made about why I am the way I am—giant calves and an insatiable wanderlust, for instance—harbor any ounce of genetic truth.

Because, like the peaks of this island, the luckiest sun-soaked layers of long-dormant volcanoes, we, too, are standing upon the generations that built us.

I know so much about the white side of myself, down to a 15th-century Swiss lord, a Greek sculptor, and a War of 1812 survivor who had 17 children (5 of whom were named after himself!). It’s time to explore the other half, the one I’ve slowly been honoring and celebrating and taking to the mountain top.

It’s time to go home and begin plotting the next chapter.

Because, as Moana sings (and I in the car!):

I'm a girl who loves my island
And the girl who loves the sea
It calls me

I am the daughter of the village chief
We are descended from voyagers
Who found their way across the world
They call me

I've delivered us to where we are
I have journeyed farther
I am everything I've learned and more
Still, it calls me

And the call isn't out there at all, it's inside me
It's like the tide
Always falling and rising
I will carry you here in my heart, you'll remind me
That come what may
I know the way

P.S. Also of note: The other day I saw a black piglet being walked along Kailua Beach, and met the Kaliua Birdman who, when he outstretched his arms, was quickly covered in about 50 pigeons, gray, white, speckled, you name it. And I not only listened to the Moana soundtrack in the car, but in the ocean, because, my life is amazing like that. Aloha xo