East Coast Kahuna

Hot Weather

We've been having near record high temperatures this week - although the temperature is in the 90s, the humidity makes the heat index well above 100. It's times like this I don't regret leaving Hawaii. There, the heat is always present - no relief at summer's end, because there aren't really seasons there. Now that I live on the east coast, I look forward to the fall - the nicest time of the year for me. Temperatures are cool and the bugs are dying, leaves are changing colors. I still get excited when the first snows come - a result of not having any winters when I was growing up.

In the hot weather, I think about my issei grandparents - how they emigrated from Hiroshima and Okinawa, looking for a better life. Having to work in the heat on the sugar and pineapple plantations - working in the fields with no way out. Two books come to mind which I've read long ago...Kodomo no tame ni - For the sake of the children: The Japanese-American Experience in Hawaii by Dennis Ogawa and Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii by Ronald Takaki. Since they didn't have a good life for themselves, everything was channeled into providing a better future for the children. This frame of mind carried over to the next generation, that of my parents, the nisei. Education became a very high priority and was seen as a way out of the situation.

It's probably a good time for me to reread these books. I remember how they helped me create an image what my issei grandparents and my nisei parents had to go through in the times before World War II. And then things would get worse before they got better.

I was fortunate to meet Prof. Ronald Takaki who also wrote Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. He came up to Cornell University back in the late 80's to present some guest lectures for the Asian-American studies program (I was a grad student in a different field of study). It turns out that he was also an alumnus of my high school, Iolani in Honolulu, HI - another topic to be discussed later (not to be confused with Punahou School).

posted by tjh14850 @ 10:17 PM