Waikiki weekend

The Royal Hawaiian Hotel had 3 white weddings in progress at high noon on Saturday. Couples in formal white and black posed for professional photographers on the bright beach only a few feet away from crowds of sweaty, sandy, slathered sunbathers. Most beachgoers were oddly incurious, oblivious and self-absorbed, yet Mark and I laughed at the same moment, simultaneously struck by the look on one young woman’s face as she stared at the bride from her beach towel. No sisterhood in those eyes, she seemed to be performing a thorough critique of person and packaging. The scene reminded me of Shrines in Paradise, a multi-media show we saw staged at Honolulu Hale. A spoof on Hawaii’s tourist industry, the show featured, among other things, multiple brides continuously entering and exiting, including one elegant mahu who calmly turned cartwheels in her white wedding gown. We don’t spend much time in the heart (or is it the liver) of the tourist industry, so we were a bit surprised to find life imitating art, and so closely too.

Thanks to Mark’s cousin and the many years she’s put into the legendary industry, we had a lovely room on the 19^th floor of the Waikiki Sheraton where we gazed down at the stately Royal Hawaiian, “the Pink Lady”, one of the two original Waikiki hotels still standing, with salmon pink fresco walls, green shutters and aqua tile roof, its large grassy lawns fully utilized for events for first one demographic and then another, from the weddings, to jumping houses and organized games for kids, to a Bacardi Pool Party for the young drinking set. Entitled “Skin”, the event featured a giant inflatable Bicardi bottle bobbing in the breeze surrounded by red, green and black tents like some African American solidarity gathering co-opted by www.booze.com.

A breathtaking view from our hotel lanai featured a sensational sandy coastline cutting a wide curve eastward around the large protected peaceful turquoise bay of Waikiki and heading towards Leahi, the exploded volcanic crater better known as Diamond Head. Peaceful, however, does not mean quiet. This ocean is nothing like the ornery old gray-green Atlantic of my childhood. It is vibrant, young and high energy, swarming with flocks of fellow humanity, pumping out set after set of waves which head inexorably towards shore carrying hundreds of surfers and thousands of swimmers and floaters in tow and enthralled.

Mark and I brainstormed ideas for our future, schemes and dreams of creative entrepreneurial ventures to gain independence from The Man before we die. We tried out window seats at a coffee emporium or two, ate overpriced food delicious and otherwise, imbibed drinks of demon rum, checked out a hot new nightclub where we were absolutely the only ones over 29, walked Waikiki’s bacchanalian streets at midnight, and yes, I’ll say it, had great you-know-what. Normally futon-on-the-floor sleepers, we now know why people like beds.

Along with 50,000 others, we visited the Okinawan festival at Kapiolani Park. Bring that many people known for their longevity to a park at the end of summer, and anyone our age has a hard time finding a spot of shade. In the cultural tent, we found his mother’s family name, Arakaki, on the genealogy trees and listened to kimono-clad samisen players. Mark wandered off to watch a martial arts performance, as I laboriously folded a crane to be sent to the Okinawan Peace Center. A patient young woman by the last name of Tamashiro guided me through each step. Tall poster boards featured stories of wartime oral histories of Uchinanchu, the indigenous name for Okinawans. I read one of these oral histories in full, the recollections of an 8-year-old-girl. She is the one shown in a famous classic photo of a skinny young girl waving a white flag at the conclusion of the Battle of Okinawa. Her family became refuges in the final months of this battle, living in caves. She describes a litany of horrors: Her parents were killed; she saw a mother exiting a cave with a child in her arms only to be shot dead by a Japanese soldier. Shrapnel killed her brother as they slept in a hole in the ground one night. She and her sisters buried him and moved on. She describes her panic when she somehow became separated from her sisters; then how one crazed Japanese soldier with a machete chased her, and later by another who said he must kill her “because it is too dangerous”. She escaped, but only by falling off a cliff and landing in a bush. She recalls seeing a Japanese soldier commit seppuku and his commander decapitate him. Amazingly, she had the good fortune to find a cave where she was able to live with a “grandpa and grandma”. It was they who gave her the white flag she carried as they emerged from the cave after being told it was safe to come out by an American of Okinawan ancestry.

“Had my mother stayed in Okinawa”, says Mark’s mom, “she probably would have died in the war”. Lately, she has been telling more stories about her family and childhood. Mark’s father passed away 7 months ago, and it seems as though she is calling up and sifting through these memories, re-integrating them into her identity, a self that must of necessity re-form itself in light of changing circumstance. She speaks often now of her mother, born in Okinawa, who insisted upon coming to Hawaii as a picture bride, something “all the girls were doing”. This was how she met and married Peter’s grandfather, with whom she had a difficult relationship. She even left him at one point because he kept a mistress, returning with the two oldest children to Okinawa, where she lived with her husband’s family. She was eventually convinced by the family to return to Hawaii and her marriage, which she did, but without the children, who followed years later. Hearing this, we are left wondering those butterfly questions: who and where would we be had her mother taken a different turn at any bend in her life.

Yet, against all odds, here we are, Mark and I, children of fortune, spending a peaceful empty nest weekend together perched on this hotel lanai flying high above our hometown Waikiki jungle.