"Cool" Again

 17 – Hawaii, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Switzerland

It’s about an hour car drive from Waianai to the center of Honolulu. I didn’t have a car…or a license. I rode the bus. The bus takes considerably longer, including a transfer to a second bus. I would go on a Saturday by myself and sit in the back row by the window.

I thought I was very cool. Our hairdresser friend was cutting my hair in a hip, New Wave fashion with a swoop in the front. I had spied out and saved up for a navy blue fedora with a white band which I wore on my bus rides. By this time, I had also grown a caterpillar on my upper lip. Much to my mom’s displeasure, a guy on the ship had let me use his electric razor when I was 13, which only increased my natural hairiness. 

There is always a choice to make when you’re in a different culture - to keep yourself aloof from it or to embrace it. This is particularly true of speech. If you’re educated, do you keep your English correct or do you engage in the local jargon? And what are your reasons for doing so? If you engage, is it to fit in or to not look like a dork or is it to identify with the local culture? These are the choices you have to make when you move from culture to culture.

In Hawaii, the locals speak pidgin, a localized English with words thrown in from other languages. I immersed myself because I wanted to be cool. If you bought a single bus ticket you could get a piece of paper from the driver called a transfer that you use to transfer to another bus going in the same direction within a certain time limit. To be local, you don’t say, “May I please have a transfer”. You mumble, “Get transfer”.

Another pidgin phrase is da kine. It’s been made into a company name now but the phrase literally means “the kind” or “the thing”. But you can use it to mean anything you want. Usually you say it when you can’t think of a word or if you just don’t want to say the word. If you’re talking to someone you know well enough to speak in short-hand, you can use the phrase and the person you’re talking to will know what you’re talking about by the context. Nowadays, since I don’t live near anyone who knows pidgin I use it in place of words I can’t think of. It drives my family crazy because they rarely ever know what I’m referring to.

Sometimes I would go into Honolulu to go to the ship for the day but my usual destination was the mall called Ala Moana. The main reason I went there was to hang outside the music store. They had a semi-circular space cut into the wall outside the store with a pillar in the center. On the wall they had three television screens spaced out playing MTV. At the time, MTV was just a couple of years old and they actually played music videos. A lot of the videos I really shouldn’t have been watching but I was hooked. I would hang there for hours at a time.

This was when Michael Jackson came out with his album and music video, Thriller. The numbers of people watching would go up and down, usually ranging from about three to six. I was sometimes even by myself. But when “Thriller” came on, a huge crowd would form.

The closest movie theater from Waianai was down the coast in the small town of Nanakuli. I had been testing the content boundaries of my faith with music and movies and a movie came out that I was interested in. It was called Scarface and I definitely should not have seen it.

In most countries, there is usually a certain animosity among the original inhabitants, or locals, toward the invaders or colonialists or outsiders – usually white people. In Hawaii, they call white people haoles. It is a word that can be used as just descriptive but oftentimes it’s also used in a derogatory sense, as in stupid, naïve haole. If you’re so haole that you don’t even know it, you’re a Barney. That is definitely derogatory.

If you’re haole in Hawaii, you need to just be aware of your surroundings in a local situation. I took the bus down to the theater to see a night showing of Scarface. It is a very violent movie and as it continued to play I became very aware that I was in a small Hawaiian town, surrounded by young local guys and it was dark outside. I became more and more nervous. I almost expected to get hit on the back of the head at any moment.

The movie ended and as it was very late by now, the buses were few and far between. I had a little wait, all the while still keenly aware of my surroundings. I made it okay but determined to not get into that kind of situation again.

Hmmm