Hawai'i One Summer

by Maxine Hong Kingston

  Joseph had a few quiet nights, and we thought the strangeness was over. But then I found him standing in the hallway shivering in the hot afternoon. He said that something had come out of the closet and was in the hallway. “The cold spot is here,” he said. “I’m standing in the middle of it. I’m fighting it.” That spot did not feel odd to me.

  We asked our friend from Thailand what to do, and she gave us a medallion of a saint for him to wear around his neck, and also a little stone Buddha that Thais wear in a gold box. She said he should put the Buddha by his head when he went to bed. It had been handed down in her family, which have been rulers and rebels of Thailand. Joseph has had no more supernatural disturbances.

  In a way it’s a shame to have him put his powers away, fold his wings, but those abilities are not needed in America in the twentieth century.

  The writers’ conference I went to ended with a kahuna who helped us perform ho‘oponopono; all animosities would be resolved. Fewer people stayed for that event than any other. Maybe in ancient Hawai‘i, a kahuna like this one would have trained Joseph, whose tendencies would have become useful. She asked us to shut our eyes and hold hands in a circle; she talked to us calmly, saying that a column of light was entering the circle. I opened my eyes to peek, to check out the reality of that column. There was indeed a column of light, but also a skylight in the roof that let it in. The way the world works now, Joseph needs to learn to see the skylight, too.

  August

  Lew Welch: An Appreciation

  Not everybody who writes poems knows what a poem is. Lew Welch knew. I’m glad I got to meet him before he disappeared. He’s often called a San Francisco poet or a California poet. He studied music in Stockton. He lived with his wife, Magda, in a house on a slope in Marin City, which is a Black city.

  They had been expecting Earll and me; Magda had made enough sandwiches for about ten people, then went outside to work in her garden. She probably fed lots of kid poets who came to see her husband. Being still young, we naturally expected food and attention from adults, and did not recognize largesse when we received it. Lew Welch then was working at the docks as a longshoremen’s clerk, and now that I’m a worker and a writer myself, I know better than to take up a man’s time on his day off.

  He had cut his red hair for the summer. He had written about that: “In summer I usually cut it all off. / I do it myself, with scissors and a / little Jim Beam.” He looked exactly as he said in his poem:

  Not yet 40, my beard is already white.

  Not yet awake, my eyes are puffy and red,

  like a child who has cried too much.

  Only, I think, he had reached forty already; he had lines in his face, but though his eyes were red, they opened wide. He looked at you out of bright blue eyes, but at a part of you that isn’t your appearance or even your personality; he addressed that part of you that is like everybody. I would like to learn to look at people that way.

  He went for his papers and books and got down to business. He read to us. He cried. He sang:

  She bared her bos’m

  I whupped out m’knife

  Carved my initials on her thin breast bone.

  “I invented putting a note before and after the parts that need to be sung,” he said. “The book has these fussy sixteenth notes because those were the only notes the printer had. They should have been quarter notes.” I admired his caring about detail, and have checked the editions of his work that were printed after he disappeared, to see if the notes had been changed. They had, and they do look better.

  He read a poem about driving, written by one of his students, and said, “Now, there’s a poem. There’s a poet. I phoned him to come do a reading with me, but he had to work on his car.” There was going to be a reading that weekend by the Bay Area’s best-known poets. “That’s cool. That’s right. He ought to be working on his car.”

  From the window, you could see down the hill to a round space filled with motorcycles and cars with their hoods up. Kids were repairing them. “Somebody ought to subsidize garages all over the country, stocked with automotive tools,” he said. “Kids can come work on their cars, something real, when they drop out of school.”

  He had many ideas for things for you to do. There is a poem accompanied by a circle drawn in one brushstroke. The poem is in his clear handwriting. He read it as if it were a friendly but imperative suggestion:

  Step out onto the planet

  Draw a circle a hundred feet round.

  Inside the circle are

  300 things nobody understands, and, maybe,

  nobody’s ever really seen.

  How many can you find?

  One of his ideas was to organize to feed poets “so poets could have babies and fix their wives’ teeth and the other things we need.” He planned a magazine to be called Bread that would discuss the economics of being a poet in America. Somebody still needs to carry out these plans.

  He talked about being one of the young poets who had driven William Carlos Williams from the airport to Reed College. I love the way that car ride has become a part of literary history. Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, and William Carlos Williams were the poets in the car. Today, Welch told us that he had felt

  Williams giving the power of poetry to him. The two of them had agreed on their dislike of T. S. Eliot.

  Then Lew Welch sang us “The Waste Land” to a jive beat, and it did not sound at all as if he disliked it.

  He said that poetry has to be useful. He was very proud that the No Name Bar in Sausalito pasted in its window his poem for protecting the town, and the “innkeeper” published that poem, “Sausalito Trash Prayer” by duplicating forty copies of it and giving it to people. It was “pasted in the florist’s window…carefully retyped and put right out there on Divisadero Street…that it might remind of love, that it might sell flowers…”

  He read “After Anacreon,” a poem about cab driving. He said that he had also read it to his fellow Yellow Cab drivers, and was happy when they told him that that was exactly what being a cabby is like.

  He didn’t say it that day, but there’s some practical advice of his that is told by one to another, a word-of-mouth poem: “Think Jewish, dress Black, drive Okie.”

  He was a wise and trustworthy man. He warned and comforted kid writers: “To become enamored of our powers is to lose them, at once!” “…full / full of my gift / I am only / left out and afraid.” He wrote two poems he called the first American koans, “The Riddle of Hands” and “The Riddle of Bowing.” He invited readers who solved these koans to have their answers confirmed by writing to him. There was flesh behind his words. I guess that’s why he was willing to see us, and also why he looked so worn.

  After about two hours, we had to go, a sense of urgency about the work to be done having come over us. We thanked him and Magda for the poems and the beer and sandwiches, and said goodbye.

  I haven’t told you much that you can’t read for yourself. He had spoken exactly like his writing.

  I encourage my own students to write in dialect, and give them Lew Welch’s instructions on how to do it: “Dialect is only a regional and personal voiceprint… You can easily separate structure and meaning from dialect, and still be dealing with sound, with music, with speech, with another’s Mind. Gertrude Stein perfectly mimicked the rhythms and structures of Baltimore Blacks in her story ‘Melanctha’ and she didn’t transcribe the dialect at all—that is, didn’t have to misspell a lot of words to get the work done. Nelson Algren has many many passages with no misspellings, but he catches the real flow of regional speech.”

  I keep some Lew Welch advice over my desk: “When I write, my only concern is accuracy. I try to write accurately from the poise of mind which lets us see that things are exactly what they seem. I never worry about beauty, if it is accurate there is always beauty. I never worry about form, if it is accurate there is always form.” I ditto this for my students at the beginnings of courses, and tell them I have not much
more to teach them, but they don’t believe me, and stay.

  In the spring of 1971, Lew Welch walked away into the woods of Nevada County, and has not come back. Those woods are in the northwest—the direction of leina-a-ka-‘uhane. I think there must be a jumping-off place in California, just as there is one on each of the islands in Hawai‘i. And Lew Welch’s soul leapt away.

  A Sea Worry

  This summer our son bodysurfs. He says it’s his “job” and rises each morning at 5:30 to catch the bus to Sandy Beach. I hope that by September he will have had enough of the ocean. Tall waves throw surfers against the shallow bottom. Undertows have snatched them away. Sharks prowl Sandy’s. Joseph told me that once he got out of the water because he saw an enormous shark. “Did you tell the life guard?” I asked. “No.” “Why not?” “I didn’t want to spoil the surfing.” The ocean pulls at the boys, who turn into surfing addicts. At sunset you can see surfers waiting for the last golden wave.

  “Why do you go surfing so often?” I ask my students.

  “It feels so good,” they say. “Inside the tube. I can’t describe it. There are no words for it.”

  “You can describe it,” I scold, and I am angry. “Everything can be described. Find the words for it, you lazy boy. Why don’t you stay home and read?” I am afraid that the boys give themselves up to the ocean’s mindlessness.

  When the waves are up, surfers all over Hawai‘i don’t do their homework. They cut school. They know how the surf is breaking at any moment because every fifteen minutes the reports come over the radio; in fact, one of my former students is the surf reporter.

  Some boys leave for mainland colleges, and write their parents heartrending letters. They beg to come home for Thanksgiving. “If I can just touch the ocean,” they write from Missouri and Kansas, “I’ll last for the rest of the semester.” Some come home for Christmas and don’t go back.

  Even when the assignment is about something else, the students write about surfing. They try to describe what it is to be inside the wave as it curls over them, making a tube or “chamber” or “green room” or “pipeline” or “time warp.” They write about the silence, the peace, “no hassles,” the feeling of being reborn as they shoot out the end. They’ve written about the voice of God, the “commandments” they hear. In the margins, they draw the perfect wave. Their writing is full of cliches. “The endless summer,” they say. “Unreal.”

  Surfing is like a religion. Among the martyrs are George Helm, Kimo Mitchell, and Eddie Aikau. Helm and Mitchell were lost at sea riding their surfboards from Kaho‘olawe, where they had gone to protest the Navy’s bombing of that island. Eddie Aikau was a champion surfer and lifeguard. A storm had capsized the Hōkūle‘a, the ship that traces the route that the Polynesian ancestors sailed from Tahiti, and Eddie Aikau had set out on his board to get help.

  Since the ocean captivates our son, we decided to go with him to see Sandy’s.

  We got up before dawn, picked up his friend, Marty, and drove out of Honolulu. Almost all the traffic was going in the opposite direction, the freeway coned to make more lanes into the city. We came to a place where raw mountains rose on our left and the sea fell on our right, smashing against the cliffs. The strip of cliff pulverized into sand is Sandy’s. “Dangerous Current Exist,” said the ungrammatical sign.

  Earll and I sat on the shore with our blankets and thermos of coffee. Joseph and Marty put on their fins and stood at the edge of the sea for a moment, touching the water with their fingers and crossing their hearts before going in. There were fifteen boys out there, all about the same age, fourteen to twenty, all with the same kind of lean, v-shaped build, most of them with black hair that made their wet heads look like sea lions. It was hard to tell whether our kid was one of those who popped up after a big wave. A few had surfboards, which are against the rules at a bodysurfing beach, but the lifeguard wasn’t on duty that early.

  As they watched for the next wave, the boys turned toward the ocean. They gazed slightly upward; I thought of altar boys before a great god. When a good wave arrived, they turned, faced shore, and came shooting in, some taking the wave to the right and some to the left, their bodies fishlike, one arm out in front, the hand and fingers pointed before them, like a swordfish’s beak. A few held credit card trays, and some slid in on trays from MacDonald’s.

  “That is no country for middle-aged women,” I said. We had on bathing suits underneath our clothes in case we felt moved to participate. There were no older men either.

  Even from the shore, we could see inside the tubes. Sometimes, when they came at an angle, we saw into them a long way. When the wave dug into the sand, it formed a brown tube or a gold one. The magic ones, though, were made out of just water, green and turquoise rooms, translucent walls and ceilings. I saw one that was powder-blue, perfect, thin; the sun filled it with sky blue and white light. The best thing, the kids say, is when you are in the middle of the tube, and there is water all around you but you’re dry.

  The waves came in sets; the boys passed up the smaller ones. Inside a big one, you could see their bodies hanging upright, knees bent, duckfeet fins paddling, bodies dangling there in the wave.

  Once in a while, we heard a boy yell, “Aa-whoo!” “Poon-tah!” “Aaroo!” And then we noticed how rare human voice was here; the surfers did not talk, but silently, silently rode the waves.

  Since Joseph and Marty were considerate of us, they stopped after two hours, and we took them out for breakfast. We kept asking them how it felt, so that they would not lose language.

  “Like a stairwell in an apartment building,” said Joseph, which I liked immensely. He hasn’t been in very many apartment buildings, so had to reach a bit to get the simile. “I saw somebody I knew coming toward me in the tube, and I shouted, ‘Jeff. Hey, Jeff,’ and my voice echoed like a stairwell in an apartment building. Jeff and I came straight at each other—mirror tube.”

  “Are there ever girls out there?” Earll asked.

  “There’s a few women who come at about eleven,” said Marty.

  “How old are they?”

  “About twenty.”

  “Why do you cross your heart with water?”

  “So the ocean doesn’t kill us.”

  I described the powder-blue tube I had seen. “That part of Sandy’s is called Chambers,” they said.

  I have gotten some surfing magazines, the ones kids steal from the school library, to see if the professionals try to describe the tube. Bradford Baker writes:

  …Round and pregnant in Emptiness

  I slide,

  Laughing,

  into the sun,

  into the night.

  Frank Miller calls the surfer

  …mother’s fumbling

  curly-haired

  tubey-laired

  son.

  “Ooh, offshores—,” writes Reno Abbellira, “where wind and wave most often form that terminal rendezvous of love—when the wave can reveal her deepest longings, her crest caressed, cannily covered to form those peeling concavities we know, perhaps a bit irreverently, as tubes. Here we strive to spend every second—enclosed, encased, sometimes fatefully entombed, and hopefully, gleefully, ejected—Whoosh!”

  “An iridescent ride through the entrails of God,” says Gary L. Crandall.

  I am relieved that the surfers keep asking one another for descriptions. I also find some comfort in the stream of commuter traffic, cars filled with men over twenty, passing Sandy Beach on their way to work.

  About the Author

  Maxine Hong Kingston was born in Stockton, California in 1940. She taught high school in California and Hawai‘i for twelve years, and is now at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first novel, The Woman Warrior, was published in 1976 and received the National Book Critics Circle Award. China Men, published in 1980, received the National Book Award. She is a Living Treasure of Hawai‘i, and won the Hawai‘i Award for Literature in 1983. Tripmaster Monkey—His Fake Book was given the Inter
national PEN West Award in Fiction in 1989. In 1998 President Clinton presented her with the National Humanities Medal.

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