House of the Sun

by Marisa Mangani

“People should know that Hawai`i is a country and should be respected as such. Because it was forcibly annexed to the United States does not mean that it is the US, except by conquest.”
– Alice Walker 

I arrived on Maui from Oahu in 1971, an eleven-year-old sharing the back seat of my mom’s turquoise Maverick with my baby brother and cages full of yowling cats. Mom and Stepdad occupied the space up front, driving through the cane fields on the dusty, two-lane Mokulele Highway from the Kahului airport. They had bought us a house in a new subdivision in Kihei to start a new life away from the racial strife of Oahu, where haoles like me were being knifed in school bathrooms. (I had overheard Mom and Grandmother talking about this.)       

As the Maverick’s V-8 roared through the cane fields, Mount Haleakala loomed above us with mystery and doom. Naturally untrusting of the parents, I asked about living so close to a volcano like that. What would happen to us if it erupted? The mountains of my childhood Oahu had been worn and jagged, and striped with waterfalls. This mountain was an actual volcano, with smooth lavender and green slopes, and we were heading to the base of it.

“It’s dormant,” Mom’s voice cut through the whooshing of open windows, “it won’t erupt.”

Well, I knew what dormant meant. “What if it wakes up?” My words got lost in the wind rushing through the car. I never got my answer.

Later, I would learn Haleakala means “House of the Sun,” where, according to Hawaiian lore, the trickster demi-god Maui hiked up to at dawn and lassoed the sun to slow its progress across the sky, thus creating our seasons.

As life on Maui unfolded, there was much to displace my fear of Haleakala. I was the shunned minority at the dusty portables of Kihei School, parental arguments were a-plenty, and my brother wandered our neighborhood barefoot in his underwear, bringing pity on us from neighbors.  The volcano erupting in my preteen life was my embarrassment about who I was.

I also had nightmares about the threats of tsunamis, hurricanes, and volcanic earthquakes. The air would rain black ash when the cane fields were burning. The sinister, mustard-yellow tsunami sirens blasted on the first day of each month, filling the air with a piercing wail, filling my young soul with fear of all that could go wrong. The systematic military bombing of the nearby island Kahoolawe shook the ground of our new stucco house regularly, rattling its cheap windows.

The town of Kihei back then was rural, with lots of locals and a few tourists sprinkled in. It was obvious by the downward glares of my dark-skinned classmates that my white skin signified something negative for the generational poor in my sixth-grade class. At the time, I did not think this was fair, for we were poor too, and would get even poorer. Then I learned about missionaries and colonialism, how the haoles stole the islands from the indigenous, and how racism is an unfortunate part of humanity.

The summer I was fourteen, I got my first real job. Not babysitting or housecleaning or car washing for mere dollars, but working in the kitchen at The Sea Scoop, 27 miles away and a 45-minute drive along a thin stretch of beach, through the Pali cliffs, past Lahaina, to the resort town of Kaanapali. I rode with neighbors, and the freedom I felt getting away from Kihei and school, and parents was overwhelming. My goal was to save money and leave Maui because there was a big ole world out there, and I wanted to see it.

Despite the rush of my headstrong desire to leave, there were many memorable (I see now) moments of my Maui youth: the occasional dinner out at the Maui Lu where a Hawaiian trio sang and hula dancers mesmerized me; solitary bike rides up the hills of Kihei where I gazed out over the endless glistening water of the Pacific; the cool scent of Eucalyptus in the lush Upcountry; my small high school up on the actual slopes of Mount Haleakala surrounded by green carpets of grass, moo-ing cows, mango trees, and even magic mushrooms. Teen times came with Maui Wowie, a sputtering Volkswagen, surfing, camping in Hana, and partying on the beaches of Lahaina – this town was a magnet of my youth.

Like the sun snared by the god Maui’s rope, my heart was snared and became part of those lavender mountains of my island home.

Lahaina was the cool place, where Kihei was not. Kihei was a culture of resorts, angry locals, and old, rich mainlanders. Lahaina was Aloha spirit, hope, hippies, boats, art galleries, and open-air restaurants independent of hotel lobbies. The former capital of the Kingdom of Hawai`i, and a former whaling town lined with scrimshaw shops,  Lahaina sang with history, and I got chills thinking about so many who had walked before me on historical Front Street, looking out at the sailboats in the harbor and the vast, blue ocean.

So much of me belonged to Maui. Much of me did not.

At seventeen, I flew away to Oregon for college. The view of Haleakala receded into the clouds, and a hot lava rock flattened my heart while I cried myself to sleep in the uncomfortable seat. I had a life ahead of me, but as I flew away from my beautiful islands, I knew that Maui would always be Home.

After a rough freshman year in the Oregon cold, with no money, no car, no freedom, and peers as cold as the weather, Maui called me home for the summer. I got a job in Lahaina, shared an apartment in Napili with a waitress and a bartender, and had the most magical summer of my life, enjoying Maui away from the parents, with new friends and new experiences. Lahaina was the dream that summer of ’78, when Fleetwood Mac, Elton John, and Jackson Browne came to the island, performed impromptu concerts in the tiny bars, and ate at the restaurant, Longhis, on Front Street, where I toiled baking mango pies and wheat breads at the rear of the kitchen. Moonlit nights on the beach, afternoons at the Pioneer Inn, nights listening to bands at the Blue Maxx, working on my tan, falling in love, and honing my culinary skills all happened that summer. I wanted to stay in that life forever, but I had to move on.

My family had been in the islands for three generations. My great-grandfather, a 2nd Lieutenant in the Cavalry, was stationed at Schofield Barracks on Oahu in 1921, and later brought his family over to live in a small house in rural Wahiawa. My young grandmother and great-uncle attended the local schools in an area predominantly Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino, the descendants of Asians brought over to work the pineapple and sugar cane fields. My great-grandparents adored Hawai`i and became beloved in the community, without a hint of prejudice that could have stemmed from their Midwestern upbringing. And there my great-grandparents stayed. My great-grandmother taught school at Punahou, where, much later, I would get asked to leave for misbehavior, and later still, Obama would attend. My great-grandparents eventually retired, then passed, leaving their love for the islands to my grandmother, then to my mother, and then, of course, to me.

Maybe if the United States hadn’t annexed the islands, my great-grandfather would’ve been stationed elsewhere, and I’d be from “somewhere else.” This thought, as foreign to me as wondering what it would be like to have been born a boy. Besides, if the US hadn’t annexed the islands, the Japanese certainly would have, for Pearl Harbor was a coveted, strategic military location.

In 1985, I was back living on Maui to work for a year between World’s Fairs, where I had gotten established as a chef. The dirt road extension of Kihei Road that had led to the solitary Makena beaches of my youth had recently been paved, a new town called Wailea, and a Japanese-based developer called Seibu was building a 310-room hotel, seemingly, in the middle of nowhere. (My beautiful nowhere.) Sure, two other hotels had been built out there in the seventies, but the road had been dirt, and the scrubby area still perfect for youthful exploration. The beaches had been remote and pristine, for the tourists lounged mainly by their resort pools anyway. Makena Beach, the place of hibachi-grilling birthday parties, camping on the beach, and nude swimming, was mine!

I didn’t know at the time that Alexander and Baldwin, a longtime corporation born of the missionary takeover of the islands, owned that entire side of Haleakala and had platted its development back when Hawai`i was a struggling kingdom, ripe for the oligarchs of American business. Since that area was too arid for the plantations of sugar and pineapple like their other holdings in the central valley, development was their plan all along. And when the Seibu Corporation rolled in, Makena-now-Wailea property got developed, all of it.

At my somewhat ignorant twenty-five, I despised the Japanese from Japan and refused to go to that part of the island anymore. Bomb us during the war, rape our lands now, was my bitter mantra. I thought of the mean Japanese girls who teased me so bitterly in grade school. Yeah, I hated them too.

This seed of resentment planted in me in 1985 has very much softened over the years. With age (maturity?) I understand now how the world works. Nothing stays the same; we march toward the end in greed and quash the little people. We take, we’re selfish, we ruin this gift that is our planet.

I have spent my entire grown-up life identifying as a Maui girl. Although a professional, I am fairly casual in dress and thought. I love to be outside. My shoes are left by the front door. Nature is my goddess. I toil in my Florida yard to grow ginger, hibiscus, and plumeria. Hawaiian music makes me cry. I am always homesick.

I haven’t been to Maui since 2010, when I was turning fifty. It was still beautiful and verdant, though so much more built-up and very expensive. That ugly stucco house my blue-collar parents had bought in 1971 for 18 thousand dollars was now a fixer-upper way out of my price range. My heart fissured just a little on that trip, knowing I could never afford to live on Maui again, and those youthful days could only ever be visited in memory.

A few years later, my best high-school friend returned to Maui for her brother’s wedding. She said, “You wouldn’t believe it, Maui is so brown, it’s depressing.” The fissure in my heart cracked open a little more as I visualized the lavender-green slopes as dead brown. Was the island that raised me dying?

It was then I learned those great oligarchs, after 146 years of sugar and pineapple farming, had sold all 41,000 acres and left in their wake dry and fallow land, covered in dry invasive brush.

And you know what happened next. Lahaina is the vortex of all that has gone wrong in the takeover of the Hawaiian Islands, and of how greed manifests into horrible events. The once plentiful water from streams used for taro farming had been diverted to planned communities and golf courses for the wealthy. A for-profit electric company put money in shareholder pockets instead of safely burying ragged old power lines. As always, the cries of the native Hawaiians go unheard in the cacophony of capitalism.

Now my heart is cracked firmly in two. Despair courses through me as if I am an empath for every person affected. Without parents since my twenties, Maui was my parent and mentor, and those distant memories of youth are my strength. Sorrow fills me and hurts like the ear-piercing wail of the tsunami sirens.

Mount Haleakala, when measured from the ocean floor, is 675 feet taller than Mount Everest. Only 10,000 feet of the enormous mountain stands above the sea. The rest of the mountain, unseen, is the great foundation for the island of Maui.  Haleakala is young—under a million years old, and erupted mere centuries ago, unlike Mauna Kea on the Big Island, which last erupted five thousand years ago. The top peak of Haleakala rises nearly two miles into the sky and is considered the “quietest place on earth,” which I can attest to because once, sitting at the top of a cinder cone after a rigorous hike into the crater, and observing the stark, moonlike landscape, a solitary bird flew over me, and I swore I heard its wing flap.

An old Hawaiian Proverb says, “He aliʻi ka ʻāina; he kauwā ke kanaka.” “The land is a chief, man is its servant.” Perhaps when the great House of the Sun decides it will no longer be quiet, land will become chief again, and the island of Maui will have a new history. A history of those who cherished and cared for the land, and of those who overused and abused it.

Possibly, there will be a tiny spot in history for the haole girl in the backseat of the Maverick roaring through the cane fields, and looking up at the great mountain, the foundation of the island of Maui, with awe and fear and eventually, eternal love.

 

 

Marisa Mangani was born and raised in Hawai`i and now lives in Florida. Her memoir, Mise en Place: Memoir of a Girl Chef, won the 2023 gold medal for Women’s Biographies by the Global Book Awards, and the 2023 gold for Memoir and Biography by the Royal Palm Book Awards. Her essays and fiction have been published in Hippocampus, Aji, Borrowed Solace, Sleet Magazine, In Parenthesis, Sandhill Review, Adelaide Magazine, and others. https://marisamangani.com/miseenplace/