Collected Essays

by Joan Didion

  To buy a house anywhere on the island of Oahu in the spring of 1980 cost approximately what a similar property would have cost in Los Angeles. Three bed­rooms and a bath-and-a-half in the tracts near Pearl Harbor were running over $100,000 (“$138,000” was a figure I kept noticing in advertisements, once under the headline “This Is Your Lucky Day”), although the occasional bungalow with one bath was offered in the nineties. At the top end of the scale (where “life is somehow bigger and disappointment blunted”, as one advertisement put it), not quite two-thirds of an acre with a main house, guesthouse, gatehouse, and salt­water pool on the beach at Diamond Head was offered —”fee simple”, which was how a piece of property available for actual sale was described in Honolulu— at $3,750,000.

  “Fee simple” was a magical phrase in Honolulu, since one of the peculiarities of the local arrangement had been that not much property actually changed hands. The island of Oahu was, at its longest and widest points, forty-five miles long and thirty miles wide, a total land mass—much of it vertical, unbuildable, the sheer volcanic precipices of the Koolau and Waianae ranges—of 380,000 acres. Almost 15 percent of this land was owned by the federal government and an equal amount by the State of Hawaii. Of the re­maining privately owned land, more than 70 percent was owned by major landholders, by holders of more than five thousand acres, most notably, on Oahu, by the Campbell Estate, the Damon Estate, Castle and Cooke, and, in the most densely populated areas of Honolulu, the Bishop Estate. The Bishop Estate owned a good part of Waikiki, and the Kahala and Waialae districts, and, farther out, Hawaii Kai, which was a Kaiser development but a Bishop holding. The purchaser of a house on Bishop land bought not title to the property itself but a “leasehold”, a land lease, transferred from buyer to buyer, that might be within a few years of expiration or might be (the preferred situation) recently renegotiated, fixed for a long term. An advertisement in the spring of 1980 for a three-bedroom, two-bath, $230,000 house in Hawaii Kai emphasized its “long, low lease”, as did an advertise­ment for a similar house in the Kahala district offered at $489,000. One Sunday that spring, the Dolman office, a big residential realtor in Honolulu, ran an advertisement in the Star-Bulletin & Advertiser featur­ing forty-seven listings, of which thirty-nine were leasehold. The Earl Thacker office, the same day, fea­tured eighteen listings, ten of which were leasehold, including an oceanfront lease for a house on Kahala Avenue at $1,250,000.

  This situation, in which a few owners held most of the land, was relatively unique in the developed world (under 30 percent of the private land in California was held by owners of more than five thousand acres, com­pared to the more than 70 percent of Oahu) and lent a rather feudal and capricious uncertainty, a note of cosmic transience, to what was in other places a straightforward transaction, a direct assertion of ter­ritory, the purchase of a place to live. In some areas the Bishop Estate had offered “conversions”, or the opportunity to convert leasehold to fee-simple prop­erty at prices then averaging $5.62 a square foot. This was regarded as a kind of land reform, but it worked adversely on the householder who had already in­vested all he or she could afford in the leasehold. Someone I know whose Bishop lease came up recently was forced to sell the house in which she had lived for some years because she could afford neither the price of the conversion nor the raised payments of what would have been her new lease. I went with another friend in 1980 to look at a house on the “other”, or non-oceanfront, side of Kahala Avenue, listed at $695,000. The Bishop lease was fixed for thirty years and graduated: $490 a month until 1989, $735 until 1999, and $979 until 2009. The woman showing the house suggested that a conversion might be obtained. No one could promise it, of course, nor could anyone say what price might be set, if indeed a price were set at all. It was true that nothing on Kahala Avenue itself had at that time been converted. It was also true that the Bishop Estate was talking about Kahala Avenue as a logical place for hotel development. Still, the woman and my friend seemed to agree, it was a pretty house, and a problematic stretch to 2009.

  When I first began visiting Honolulu, in 1966, I read in a tourist guidebook that the conventional points of the compass—north, south, east, west—were never employed locally, that one gave directions by saying that a place was either makai, toward the sea, or mauka, toward the mountains, and, in the city, usually either “diamond head” or “ewa”, depending on whether the place in question lay, from where one stood, toward Diamond Head or Ewa Plantation. The Royal Hawaiian Hotel, for example, was diamond head of Ewa, but ewa of Diamond Head. The Kahala Hilton Hotel, since it was situated between Diamond Head and Koko Head, was said to be koko head of Diamond Head, and diamond head of Koko Head. There was about this a resolute colorfulness that did not seem entirely plausible to me at the time, particu­larly since the federally funded signs on the Lunalilo Freeway read east and west, but as time passed I came to see not only the chimerical compass but the attitude it seemed to reflect as intrinsic to the local accommodation, a way of maintaining fluidity in the rigid structure and isolation of an island society.

  This system of bearings is entirely relative (nothing is absolutely ewa, for instance; the Waianae coast is makaha of Ewa, or toward Makaha, and beyond Makaha the known world metamorphoses again), is used at all levels of Honolulu life, and is common even in courtrooms. I recall spending several days at a murder trial during which the HPD evidence specialist, a quite beautiful young woman who looked as if she had walked off “Hawaii Five-O”, spoke of “picking up latents ewa of the sink”. The police sergeant with whom she had fingerprinted the site said that he had “dusted the koko head bedroom and the koko head bathroom, also the ewa bedroom and the kitchen floor”. The defendant was said to have placed his briefcase, dur­ing a visit to the victim’s apartment, “toward the ewa-makai corner of the couch”. This was a trial, in­cidentally, during which one of the witnesses, a young woman who had worked a number of call dates with the victim (the victim was a call girl who had been strangled with her own telephone cord in her apart­ment near Ala Moana), gave her occupation as “full-time student at the University of Hawaii, carrying sixteen units”. Another witness, also a call girl, said, when asked her occupation, that she was engaged in “part-time construction”.

  The way to get to Ewa was to go beyond Pearl Harbor and down Fort Weaver Road, past the weath­ered frame building that was once the hospital for Ewa Plantation and past the Japanese graveyard, and turn right. (Going straight instead of turning right would take the driver directly to Ewa Beach, a different proposition. I remember being advised when I first visited Honolulu that if I left the keys in a car in Waikiki I could look for it stripped down in Ewa Beach.) There was no particular reason to go to Ewa, no shops, no businesses, no famous views, no place to eat or even walk far (walk, and you walked right into the cane and the kapu, or keep out, signs of the Oahu Sugar Company); there was only the fact that the place was there, intact, operational, a plantation town from another period. There was a school, a post office, a grocery. There were cane tools for sale in the gro­cery, and the pint bottles of liquor were kept in the office, a kind of wire-mesh cage with a counter. There was the Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church, there was the Ewa Hongwanji Mission. On the telephone poles there were torn and rain-stained posters for some revolution past or future, some May Day, a rally, a caucus, a “Mao Tse-tung Memorial Meeting”.

  Ewa was a company town, and its identical frame houses were arranged down a single street, the street that led to the sugar mill. Just one house on this street stood out: a house built of the same frame as the others but not exactly a bungalow, a house transliterated from the New England style, a haole house, a manag­er’s house, a house larger than any other house for miles around. A Honolulu psychiatrist once told me, when I asked if he saw any characteristic island syn­drome, that, yes, among the children of the planter families, children raised among the memories of the island’s colonial past, he did. These patients shared the conviction tha
t they were being watched, being observed, and not living up to what was expected of them. In Ewa one understood how that conviction might take hold. In Ewa one watched the larger house.

  On my desk I used to keep a clock on Honolulu time, and around five o’clock by that clock I would sometimes think of Ewa. I would imagine driving through Ewa at that time of day, when the mill and the frame bungalows swim in the softened light like amber, and I would imagine driving on down through Ewa Beach and onto the tract of military housing at Iroquois Point, a place as rigidly structured and cul­turally isolated in one way as Ewa was in another. From the shoreline at Iroquois Point one looks across the curve of the coast at Waikiki, a circumstance so poignant, suggesting as it does each of the tensions in Honolulu life, that it stops discussion.

  6

  On the December morning in 1979 when I visited Kai Tak East, the Caritas transit camp for Vietnamese refugees near Kai Tak airport, Kowloon, Hong Kong, a woman of indeterminate age was crouched on the pavement near the washing pumps bleeding out a live chicken. She worked at the chick­en’s neck with a small paring knife, opening and re­opening the cut and massaging the blood into a tin cup, and periodically she would let the bird run free. The chicken did not exactly run but stumbled, stag­gered, and finally lurched toward one of the trickles of milky waste water that drained the compound. A flock of small children with bright scarlet rashes on their cheeks giggled and staggered, mimicking the chicken. The woman retrieved the dying chicken and, with what began to seem an almost narcoleptic lan­guor, resumed working the blood from the cut, strok­ing rhythmically along the matted and stained feathers of the chicken’s neck. The chicken had been limp a long time before she finally laid it on the dusty pave­ment. The children, bored, drifted away. The woman still crouched beside her chicken in the thin December sunlight. When I think of Hong Kong I remember a particular smell in close places, a smell I construed as jasmine and excrement and sesame oil in varying proportions, and at Kai Tak East, where there were too many peo­ple and too few places for them to sleep and cook and eat and wash, this smell pervaded even the wide and dusty exercise yard that was the center of the camp. The smell was in fact what I noticed first, the smell and the dustiness and a certain immediate sense of physical dislocation, a sense of people who had come empty-handed and been assigned odd articles of cast-off clothing, which they wore uneasily: a grave little girl in a faded but still garish metallic bolero, an old man in a Wellesley sweatshirt, a wizened woman in a preteen sweater embroidered with dancing cats. In December in Hong Kong the sun lacked real warmth, and the children in the yard seemed bundled in the unfamiliar fragments of other people’s habits. Men talking rubbed their hands as if to generate heat. Women cooking warmed their hands over the electric woks. In the corrugated-metal barracks, each with tiers of 144 metal and plywood bunks on which whole families spread their clothes and eating utensils and straw sleeping mats, mothers and children sat huddled in thin blankets. Outside one barrack a little boy about four years old pressed me to take a taste from his rice bowl. Another urinated against the side of the build­ing.

  After a few hours at Kai Tak East the intrinsic in­ertia and tedium of the camp day became vivid. Con­versations in one part of the yard gave way only to conversations in another part of the yard. Preparations for one meal melted into preparations for the next. At the time I was in Hong Kong there were some three hundred thousand Vietnamese refugees, the largest number of whom were “ethnic Chinese”, or Vietnam­ese of Chinese ancestry, waiting to be processed in improvised camps in the various countries around the South China Sea, in Hong Kong and Thailand and Malaysia and Macao and Indonesia and the Philip­pines. More than nine thousand of these were at Kai Tak East, and another fifteen thousand at Kai Tak North, the adjoining Red Cross camp. The details of any given passage from Vietnam to Hong Kong dif­fered, but, in the case of the ethnic Chinese, the jour­ney seemed typically to have begun with the payment of gold and the covert collusion of Vietnamese officials and Chinese syndicates outside Vietnam. The ques­tion was shadowy. Refugees were a business in this part of the world. Once in Hong Kong, any refugee who claimed to be Vietnamese underwent, before as­signment to Kai Tak East or Kai Tak North or one of the other transit camps in the colony, an initial pro­cessing and screening by the Hong Kong police, mostly to establish that he or she was not an illegal immigrant from China looking to be relocated instead of repatriated, or, as they said in Hong Kong, “sent north”. Only after this initial screening did refugees receive the yellow photographic identification cards that let them pass freely through the transit camp gates. The Vietnamese at Kai Tak East came and went all day, going out to work and out to market and out just to get out, but the perimeter of the camp was marked by high chain-link fencing, and in some places by concertina wire. The gates were manned by private security officers. The yellow cards were scrutinized closely. “This way we know,” a camp ad­ministrator told me, “that what we have here is a gen­uine case of refugee.”

  They were all waiting, these genuine cases of refu­gee, for the consular interview that might eventually mean a visa out, and the inert tension of life at Kai Tak East derived mainly from this aspect of waiting, of limbo, of suspended hopes and plans and relation­ships. Of the 11,573 Vietnamese who had passed through Kai Tak East since the camp opened, in June 1979, only some 2,000 had been, by December, relo­cated, the largest number of them to the United States and Canada. The rest waited, filled out forms, pre­tended fluency in languages they had barely heard spoken, and looked in vain for their names on the day’s list of interviews. Every week or so a few more would be chosen to go, cut loose from the group and put on the truck and taken to the airport for a flight to a country they had never seen.

  Six Vietnamese happened to be leaving Kai Tak East the day I was there, two sisters and their younger brother for Australia, and a father and his two sons for France. The three going to Australia were the old­est children of a family that had lost its home and business in the Cholon district of Saigon and been ordered to a “new economic zone”, one of the super­vised wastelands in the Vietnamese countryside where large numbers of ethnic Chinese were sent to live off the land and correct their thinking. The par­ents had paid gold, the equivalent of six ounces, to get these three children out of Saigon via Haiphong, and now the children hoped to earn enough money in Aus­tralia to get out their parents and younger siblings. The sisters, who were twenty-three and twenty-four, had no idea how long this would take or if it would be possible. They knew only that they were leaving Hong Kong with their brother on the evening Qantas. They were uncertain in what Australian city the eve­ning Qantas landed, nor did it seem to matter.

  I talked to the two girls for a while, and then to the man who was taking his sons to France. This man had paid the equivalent of twelve or thirteen ounces of gold to buy his family out of Hanoi. Because his wife and daughters had left Hanoi on a different day, and been assigned to a different Hong Kong camp, the family was to be, on this day, reunited for the first time in months. The wife and daughters would al­ready be on the truck when it reached Kai Tak East. The truck would take them all to the airport and they would fly together to Nice, “toute la famille”. Toward noon, when the truck pulled up to the gate, the man rushed past the guards and leapt up to embrace a pretty woman. “Ma femme!” he cried out again and again to those of us watching from the yard. He pointed wildly, and maneuvered the woman and little girls into better view. “Ma femme, mes filles!”

  I stood in the sun and waved until the truck left, then turned back to the yard. In many ways refugees had become an entrenched fact of Hong Kong life.

  “They’ve got to go, there’s no room for them here,” a young Frenchwoman, Saigon born, had said to me at dinner the night before. Beside me in the yard a man sat motionless while a young woman patiently picked the nits from his hair. Across the yard a group of men and women watched without expression as the admin­istrator posted the names of those
selected for the next day’s consular interviews. A few days later the South China Morning Post carried reports from intelligence sources that hundreds of boats were being assembled in Vietnamese ports to carry out more ethnic Chinese. The headline read, “HK Alert to New Invasion.” It was believed that weather would not be favorable for passage to Hong Kong until the advent of the summer monsoon. Almost a dozen years later, the British gov­ernment, which had agreed to relinquish Hong Kong to the Chinese in 1997, reached an accord with the government of Vietnam providing for the forcible re­patriation of Hong Kong’s remaining Vietnamese ref­ugees. The flights back to Vietnam began in the fall of 1991. Some Vietnamese were photographed crying and resisting as they were taken to the Hong Kong airport. Hong Kong authorities stressed that the guards escorting the refugees were unarmed.

  — 1979-1991

  Los Angeles Days

  * * *

  1

  During one of the summer weeks I spent in Los Angeles in 1988 there was a cluster of small earthquakes, the most noticeable of which, on the Garlock Fault, a major lateral-slip fracture that intersects the San Andreas in the Tehachapi range north of Los Angeles, occurred at six minutes after four on a Friday afternoon when I happened to be driving in Wilshire Boulevard from the beach. People brought up to believe that the phrase “terra firma” has real meaning often find it hard to understand the apparent equa­nimity with which earthquakes are accommodated in California, and tend to write it off as regional spaciness. In fact it is less equanimity than protective de­tachment, the useful adjustment commonly made in circumstances so unthinkable that psychic survival precludes preparation. I know very few people in Cal­ifornia who actually set aside, as instructed, a week’s supply of water and food. I know fewer still who could actually lay hands on the wrench required to turn off, as instructed, the main gas valve; the scenario in which this wrench will be needed is a catastrophe, and something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe. I once interviewed, in the late sixties, someone who did prepare: a Pentecos­tal minister who had received a kind of heavenly earthquake advisory, and on its quite specific in­structions was moving his congregation from Port Hueneme, north of Los Angeles, to Murfreesboro, Tennessee. A few months later, when a small earth­quake was felt not in Port Hueneme but in Murfrees­boro, an event so novel that it was reported nationally, I was, I recall, mildly gratified.