Editor’s note:<\/strong> This essay is part of an ongoing series, produced by the\u00a0Daniel K. Inouye Institute<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Z\u00f3calo Public Square<\/a>, exploring Hawaii’s past, present and future.<\/em><\/p>\n
I was born in Honolulu in 1965 to parents who had recently emigrated from Korea for graduate studies at the university. My family then lived in a dingy apartment in the headquarters of the Korean National Association on Rooke Avenue. The Mediterranean Revival compound had once housed a prominent island Portuguese family, and some still knew it as the \u201cCanavarro Castle.\u201d<\/p>\n
The KNA\u2019s roots dated back to 1909, when exiled Koreans in Honolulu and San Francisco organized to raise funds and strategize for Korean independence from Japan. Following Japan\u2019s defeat in World War II, the KNA became a local community organization. By the time we were living there in the 1960s, the headquarters building had become a convening spot for occasional weekend festivities for local Koreans. Along with our family, a couple other units were rented to elderly former plantation laborers who had been among the first Korean immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s.<\/p>\n
By the time I started kindergarten in 1970, my parents had divorced, and my mother, brother, and I had moved to another modest apartment, this one a low-rise walk-up in the Moiliili area of Honolulu across the canal from the new high-rise hotels at Waikiki.<\/p>\n
I attended Ala Wai Elementary school, which was, then and now, a gateway for many families who had recently arrived from another country or state. I remember sometimes beginning our pickup football games with a raucous Samoan chant, and seeing new kids arrive from places like Taiwan and Texas.<\/p>\n
\nIn the early 1970s, there was an idealized view of Hawaii as a progressive, multicultural state that might be a model of a new, transpacific United States. At least, that was the pretty picture broadcast to millions on \u201cHawaii Five-0.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Yet the legacy of earlier agricultural immigrant waves from Japan, China, the Philippines, Portugal and Puerto Rico surrounded us. There was judo and sumo in the community center. For about a year, an ancient \u201cmanapua man\u201d sold steamed pork buns from pails suspended from a wooden pole slung across his shoulders. His industrial age competitor sold his treats from a white Volkswagen beetle. When the original manapua man no longer made his rounds, the kids swore they had seen the VW manapua man run him down; it was a childish tall tale, but contained some truths about the force of modernity.<\/p>\n
My walk home from school passed the Iolani School campus, where Sun Yat-sen, who eventually overthrew China\u2019s last imperial dynasty to become the country\u2019s first president, was graduated in 1882. (Sun had a brother in Honolulu who paid for his education.) My own brother and I liked to stop in at the 100th Infantry Battalion clubhouse to get a drink from their water fountain and gawk at the display case of World War II weapons, which, if my memory isn\u2019t too hazy, contained a German water-cooled machine gun. We would learn later of the heroics of the Japanese-American soldiers and the role of returning veterans in democratizing Hawaii\u2019s politics and breaking down the caste-like plantation economy.<\/p>\n
In the early 1970s, there was an idealized view of Hawaii as a progressive, multicultural state that might be a model of a new, transpacific United States. At least, that was the pretty picture broadcast to millions on \u201cHawaii Five-0.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cStar Trek\u201d creator Gene Roddenberry said the multiracial crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise was inspired by what he saw in Hawaii when he was based there as a pilot during the war. This \u201cParadise of the Pacific\u201d image was pushed by the tourism industry and taught to us in school.<\/p>\n
It was a flawed paradise. The rise of the upwardly mobile middle class was fueled by organized labor, federal defense and infrastructure spending, and the growth of tourism. But many Native Hawaiians were left behind economically, or actively displaced from their housing, by Americanization. Poverty and incarceration rates were alarming, and the indignity of suppressing the native language and culture would no longer be tolerated. Things fell apart.<\/p>\n
Open Revolt<\/h2>\n
By the mid-1970s, open revolt against Americanization and displacement had begun. The actions were both entirely peaceful and undeniably forceful. In Kalama Valley on Oahu, farmers refused to leave their leased lands to make way for residential real estate development. Activists began regular landings on Kahoolawe island to protest its use by the Navy as a bombing range. Hundreds of homeless Native Hawaiians cleaned up the land around the Sand Island garbage dump to build a fishing village.<\/p>\n
Kahoolawe was the focus of Native Hawaiian protests until the military ended using it for target practice. <\/span>PF Bentley\/Civil Beat<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The physical protests and reclamations of land produced mixed results. Kalama Valley was turned into an expensive suburb in spite of the farmers\u2019 protests. The Sand Island residents were evicted, their homes bulldozed. But military use of Kahoolawe ceased.<\/p>\n
More important, these actions raised Hawaiian consciousness and galvanized a sophisticated critical mass of native leadership well-versed in law and public organizing. On a parallel course, a Hawaiian renaissance in language, culture and the arts largely succeeded in establishing a distinctive regional identity.<\/p>\n
By the late \u201970s, as I entered my teens, there was growing talk of Hawaiian sovereignty<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Oahu shares its stratospheric housing costs with cities from Vancouver to Tokyo to Auckland, all of which have seen backlashes from locals displaced by wealthy new arrivals. Mass homelessness and stubborn wage stagnation are fueling frustration and reassessment in Honolulu and in other U.S. cities. Will Hawaii\u2019s still-distinctive culture yield homegrown solutions, like its current and innovative homeless project<\/a>? Or will Hawaii be the first to act on a Brexit-like rejection of the American status quo?<\/p>\n