Cool Hot Summer Reads
Works by Tom Coffman, Susanna Moore, Joseph Stanton, Robin Hemley, Dan Kelin II and John Griffin, plus Korean-American writing
    
Chad Blair, Cindy K. Mackey, Ryan Senaga, Li Wang, Jerry Saviano and Robb Bonnell
    
June 11, 2003

The AJA parade
In Tom Coffman’s narrow view of Hawai‘i politics, Governors Burns and Ariyoshi walked on water.
    
THE ISLAND EDGE OF AMERICA: A POLITICAL HISTORY OF HAWAI‘I
Tom Coffman
UH Press, 2003; 420 pages, $16.95

By Chad Blair

     Former Honolulu Star-Bulletin reporter Tom Coffman’s 1973 book Catch A Wave was a knowing, insiders’ account of Tom Gill’s unsuccessful 1970 insurrection against Governor John Burns. That election resulted in Burns’ third and final term, and the ascension of George Ariyoshi, who replaced Gill as lieutenant governor.
     While there have been several important books about Hawai‘i politics published since then, Coffman’s voice has been largely absent from print; his second book, Nation Within, about Hawai‘i’s annexation, wasn’t published until 1998, timed for the occasion of that event’s centennial.
     The Island Edge of America: A Political History of Hawai‘i raises hopes that Coffman has returned to his beat and expanded his purview to critical events and personalities before and after 1970. But Island Edge, billed as “an entirely fresh approach” to interpreting Hawai‘i’s political history, breaks little new ground. Most disappointingly, Coffman’s “history” of Hawai‘i politics essentially ends with Ariyoshi passing the baton to John Waihe‘e in 1986.
     Ignoring the past 17 years frees Coffman up to write about what apparently interests him most: promoting the notions that Burns and Ariyoshi were gods among men, and that Americans of Japanese Ancestry (AJA) succeeded in fashioning Hawai‘i into a progressive, harmonious, multicultural society.
     “Japanese Americans played an even greater role in developing modern Hawai‘i than previously has been portrayed,” Coffman writes in his preface. “But,” he avers, “I nonetheless resist the idea that Hawai‘i’s contemporary history is mostly about Japanese Americans and the Democratic Party.”
     Yet, in Coffman’s hagiographic rehash, it is. “The mass migration of Japanese to Hawai‘i eventually was to become the single most important factor in the development of the State of Hawai‘i,” he writes, “and also the making of Hawai‘i’s unique contribution to America.” And so Coffman spends an inordinate amount of ink — and nearly half the book — retelling what has already been told many times: the history of Japanese migration, the fear of the newcomers’ large numbers in Hawai‘i, the war years and internment, the courage of the 442nd and 100th combat units, AJA centrality in the rise of labor and the Democratic Party, and the securing of statehood.
     “Sheer numbers and the Japanese encounters with adversity propelled them to act decisively,” Coffman explains. They avoided conflicts with other ethnic groups because of their “moderation and restraint.”
     In short, they were Hawai‘i’s greatest generation.
     George Ariyoshi? “He had strong, even teeth,” Coffman waxes. He was “handsome and athletic.” “Pleasant, polite, well groomed, and relatively Asian in manners and mannerisms.”
     In his first run for the Territorial Legislature, Ariyoshi was “fresh, energetic, well dressed, tall, photogenic, and in the terms of the time only modestly frustrated by the continued influence of the wealthy haole.” Running from a district that included farmers, dock and plantation workers, Ariyoshi “spoke better, dressed better, and was better educated than the mass of his constituents.”
     Jack Burns, the AJAs’ “Great White Father,” comes off best of all: Burns’ daughter Sheenagh tells how he quit alcoholism by attending Mass: “In a sense, he achieved his own priesthood.” Coffman uses Burns’ biographer Dan Boylan to say, without quoting him, that Burns was a priest. Coffman adds that Burns’ wife and mother were, of course, “saintly.”
     “One wondered if for Burns the issue of will was wrapped up not only in the people’s will, but also God’s will,” Coffman ponders. Burns would be “regarded as all but godlike.”
     Only Burns, and not haole interlopers like the arrogant Gill and Frank Fasi, knew what was best for Hawai‘i. “Who understood Hawai‘i’s story?” Coffman asks rhetorically. “Who really cared how much the people of Hawai‘i had suffered?” After all, Burns was “reputed to have an IQ in the genius range.”
     There is virtually no criticism of Burns, Ariyoshi or AJAs, even when Coffman indicates there could be. For example, he reports without comment that Burns’ State of the State in ’68 was devoted entirely to supporting his friend President Johnson’s conduct of the Vietnam War — though Johnson would decline to run for reelection only months later, essentially conceeding his failure to win the war.
     Coffman’s portrait of political operative Robert Oshiro reveals a racially motivated insider, but Coffman doesn’t criticize Oshiro’s rationale for why he helped Ariyoshi with his 1974 campaign to become the nation’s first elected Asian-American governor. “On a wider scale, [Oshiro] would talk about Okinawan, Japanese, and native Hawaiian cultures all placing a higher value on cooperation than did the intensely independent and competitive cultures of the West,” Coffman writes. Oshiro worried that “the WASP wave might engulf Hawai‘i, so that his children and others would lose the sense of diversity that was unique to Hawai‘i.”
     Coffman barely scratches the surface of race relations in Hawai‘i — truly the cornerstone of all that happens here — except to say that AJAs, by virtue of their oppression, were more sensitive than most and did more than most to make things better.
     Do we really need more uncritical analyses of AJA history? Local libraries and bookshelves are loaded with tomes of that ilk. Boylan’s Burns bio came out just three years ago, and Coffman himself helped Ariyoshi with his 1997 memoirs.
     Coffman’s book is all the more frustrating because there are hints of what it could have been, especially in terms of underreported local history, especially that of Hawaiians. Sketches of Waihe‘e, John Dominis Holt, Frenchy DeSoto and Walter Ritte are compelling. Coffman also has an eye for quirky factoids that enliven the text (e.g., Jackie Kennedy advised Burns to give the state Capitol’s fifth floor a high ceiling; Gill supporters included a number of followers of Werner Erhard and EST).
     But once the Office of Hawaiian Affairs is established in 1978, Coffman has little else to say about Hawaiians. Nor does he have much to say about other ethnic groups. Other winners of Coffman’s short-shrift award include Neil Abercrombie, Ben Cayetano, Mazie Hirono, Linda Lingle, Jeremy Harris, neighbor island politics, the Bishop Estate, and the Japanese investment bubble and the subsequent economic doldrums of the 1990s.
     For Coffman to come out in 2003 with a political history that ends in 1986 shows a surprisingly ahistorical disregard for the consequences of earlier events, especially concerning the economy. It was Ariyoshi, after all, who helped link the state’s economy closely to that of Japan’s. Coffman also dismisses George Cooper and Gavan Daws’ Land and Power and Noel Kent’s Hawai‘i: Islands Under the Influence, books that charged, respectively, that the AJA/Democrats cashed in on their power and that the state’s economy is controlled from afar.
     To conclude, as Coffman does, that Hawai‘i Democrats can lead the rest of the nation to “a new level of diversity” is laughable in the context of a nation that currently has a White House, Congress and a majority of governorships and legislatures controlled by white Republicans. Then there are statements that beg for support, like “probably no place in America was so affected by the Cold War as Hawai‘i” (he is referring to the Communist-influenced ILWU labor struggles); and ones that just sound silly, such as “When imagination soared, one could see with a nudge that Kaho‘olawe had the shape of a fetus” (apparently, the description underscores the birth of the Hawaiian Renaissance).
     Several factual errors suggest a carelessness on the part of Coffman and UH Press: Thalia Massie’s last name is misspelled as “Massey”; the landmark U.S. Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965, not two years later; Jimmy Carter’s presidency was from 1977-1981, not 1976-1980; Republican Pat Saiki ran for governor in 1994, not two years earlier; and internment for most AJAs lasted four years, not five.
     For an author and a book to promise so much, it had better deliver the goods. The Island Edge of America doesn’t cut it.

Local, yobo-style
As screwed up as anyone
    
YOBO: KOREAN AMERICAN WRITING IN HAWAI‘I
Nora Okja Keller, Brenda Kwon, Sun Namkung, Gary Pak and Cathy Song, eds.
Bamboo Ridge Press, 2003; 381pages, $15
    
By Cindy K. Mackey

     In the not-too-distant past, “yobo” was a derogatory term for Koreans. It meant “bar girls wearing too much make-up,” vendors selling gold trinkets on the street and “kimchee-eating, kimchee-smelling” FOBs. A generation after the demise of the term comes a new anthology published by Bamboo Ridge Press, Yobo: Korean American Writing in Hawai‘i, which embraces yobo as an endearment, as part of the Korean-American identity in Hawai‘i. But just as Yobo benefits from the liberatory dimension of identity-politics literature, it also suffers from its limitations.
     The best moments in Yobo occur when some of its 40 writers forget Koreanness and use their characters to tell stories about our predicament as human beings, with all of life’s frailties, fears and ugly realities. That’s when the stories transcend ethnic myth. Don Lee’s Duncan Roh in “The Possible Husband,” surfs through life escaping the expectations of others. Only when he is confronted with his own mortality does it occur to him that other people should be understood as more than a mere cure for loneliness. Mindy Eun Soo Pennybacker’s “Obedient Son” is an unromantic portrait of a wretched, “good-for-nothing” father, punished in the bitter memories of his son. Ty Pak’s self-absorbed professor in “Contrition” is willing to risk the life of the woman he loves rather than have his life ruined by admitting his infidelities to her.
     Complexity appears when characters think out loud and articulate contradictions between who they are and who they want the world to see. The machismo of the main character in Chris McKinney’s Tattoo (the novel is excerpted in Yobo) is betrayed when, upon meeting Claudia — a smart, well-to-do woman he admires — he is suddenly, painfully embarrassed by his “kiss-ass Porsche.” McKinney’s piece stands out, because his edgy style goes beyond the calm, complacent tone that characterizes many of the pieces in Yobo — and much of Asian-American literature in Hawai‘i.
     Call it seeing things through rose-colored lenses. There is a great deal of romance going on in Yobo when the positive aspects of Korean identity, culture and history are addressed, but not enough reality. There are many references to Korea as a “homeland,” a place where blood and soil become one — but does anyone want to go back? In Gary Pak’s Ricepaper Airplane, excerpted in Yobo, he writes, “Every Korean gotta go back Korea and see one sunset. You know, dey say Korea is da Land of da Morning.”
     Like another Bamboo Ridge anthology of ethnic identity, Intersecting Circles: Voices of Hapa Women in Poetry (Marie Hara and Nora Okja Keller, eds; 2000), Yobo, in its efforts to express the beauty of being Korean, ends up simplifying dimensions of the Korean experience — both by what it does and does not say. For instance, although Yobo gives us a very candid look at Korean experience as victims of racism in Hawai‘i and elsewhere (Pak, Nora Okja Keller), there are no essays, stories or poems that illustrate, Lois-Ann Yamanaka style, the negative attitudes Koreans held/hold towards other groups. After all, like their haole, Hawaiian, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese and Filipino counterparts, Koreans in Hawai‘i developed their own order of race, which they used to judge and discriminate against others. Like the rest of the human race, they are just as “individual and different, as sexual, artsy, feisty, athletic, articulate, neurotic and screwed up as anyone else in America,” (Don Lee, in “Uncle Tong”).
     Yobo is worth reading for the moments when it is not afraid to reveal this.

Wah-wah-wah
Susanna Moore’s ambitious blend of history and memoir is a schizo read
    
I MYSELF HAVE SEEN IT: THE MYTH OF HAWAII
Susanna Moore
National Geographic, 2003; 192 pages, $20
    
By Ryan Senaga

     Ex-islander and novelist Susanna Moore (The Whiteness of Bones) makes her first foray into non-fiction with the historical memoir I Myself Have Seen It: The Myth of Hawaii. Although the book teaches nothing new to those who grew up in Hawai‘i’s public school system, newcomers to Hawaiian history get a crash course.
     In the textbook-like first half, in addition to Hawaiian history, Moore examines how myth shapes societies, using Hawaiian traditions and beliefs as examples, hence the book’s subtitle, The Myth of Hawaii. While she doesn’t approach Joseph Campbell-like lucidity, she does bring up interesting theories on the subject. Unfortunately, most of what she comes up with is vague and generalized.
     She writes, “If we take for myth an exaltation of the primeval reality that satisfies moral cravings as well as practical needs, my assumption of the myths of a race not my own, a race nearly annihilated by my kind, possesses a romanticism full of irony, an identification of the past, and a self-delighting pride at being a liminal participant in an authentic culture that continues, despite attempts to the contrary, to fear the ghostly night marchers and to honor the goddess of fire and her terrifying relatives. Despite those influences that proved threatening to the myths, folk customs, and history of the Hawaiian people in the nineteenth century, as well as the endless, vivid flow of foreigners — Portuguese, Spanish, English, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Samoan, and others — the myths have survived.”
     This wordy riff on Hawaiian myth serves as her introduction — or apologia. It justifies a haole teaching Hawaiiana to her readers. Captain Cook, the kapu system, the coming of the missionaries, the Great Mahele, the overthrow of the monarchy ... it’s all here for the class to audit.
     The local, culturally aware reader will get more informational mileage out of Moore’s personal anecdotes, which occasionally pepper this Hawaiian Studies course. Her secondhand stories of the fearsome night marchers, of a friend who discovers a rare turtle, and of the possible final resting place of King Kamehameha are spellbinding and elucidative.
     “Five years ago, a friend of my earliest childhood, Nancy Johnson, was swimming at the Mauna Kea Hotel in Kawaihae, near the place of Kamehameha’s birth and rumored to be the place of his burial, when she saw at sea level the entrance to a cave, visible only at low tide. … In one of the intervals of light, she saw, to her astonishment, a long wooden canoe wedged onto a natural shelf near the dome of the cave. What appeared to be sticks wrapped in kapa were inside the canoe, as well as long spears. … A week later, after swearing me to secrecy, we swam along the coast at low tide, looking for the entrance to the cave, but we could not find it. ... The Hawaiians say, ‘The morning star alone knows where Kamehameha’s bones are guarded.”’
     More little asides like these would have been welcome to cut the blandness of her lessons.
     What is of local interest is the book’s last half, which recounts the author’s personal experiences growing up in 1950s and ’60s Honolulu. Once the 11th chapter comes around, the tone abruptly shifts from the academic Charlie Brown wah-wah-wah to pleasant, conversational autobiography. Scattered throughout the narrative are interesting factoids of Honolulu life, such as the expected population of the city (1 million in the year 2025) and the after-school habits of the younger members of the Punahou faculty in the sixties (“... it was rumored that in the upper school, known as the Academy, there was clandestine dating between some of the girls and the teachers — as a student in the Academy myself one day, I can confirm that there was ...”). There are recipes for ogo salad, mango chutney, a liliko‘i cocktail, and prune crack seed. She offers her own Caucasian perspective on Pidgin:
     “Although I would like to claim fluency in that most humorous and inventive of languages, pidgin English — like black street talk, it is always witty, always invigorated with imaginative new words — I and my haole friends only interspersed our conversation with words of pidgin English, as well as words of Hawaiian. We could speak pidgin, which I am pleased to say is considered by linguists to be a discrete language with a grammar and structure of its own, if required, and we could improvise, but it was not our native language.”
     One almost wishes that Moore decided to chuck the entire first half of her book and simply write a longer memoir instead of choosing to practice literary schizophrenia. Even her indulgences with the questions and examinations of the function of myth in Hawai‘i would have been much more useful had she any significant conclusions about the topic. The lyricism of her narrative passages and the powerful, memorable images of her Hawaiian childhood teach much more than her uninspired recap of island history.

PROFILE
The natural
UH professor Joseph Stanton turns baseball moments into poetry
    
By Li Wang

     UH professor Joseph Stanton sits in his tiny office on the second floor of the Art Building while a small fan struggles to disperse the room’s still, hot air. A professor of both art history and American studies, Stanton has crammed his office with haphazard stacks of books, books on visual art, sports and history. Amid the chaos, Stanton reads aloud from his poem “The Space-Time Continuum and the Slow Eye of Stan ‘The Man.’” His voice, coming out a of snowy beard, resonates.
     The poem is about the innate ability of great hitters to lock into the endlessly shifting path of a pitched baseball. The bat connects with the ball “dead-on through the line of fire.” The poem ends with the ball “snatched of a sudden by death’s / harvesting swing, which must be seen though, / in this case at least, as just another life / arising in what eyes have come to know.”
     This dissection of the batter’s psyche is from Stanton’s latest collection of poetry, Cardinal Points: Poems on St. Louis Cardinals Baseball (McFarland & Company, 2002; 118 pages, $24.95). Organized by baseball decades, the book starts with the 1920s and 1930s and ends with the Cardinals in 2002. Timely and up-to-date, the collection has poems addressing the game’s restart after 9/11 and the sudden death of pitcher Darryl Kile last June.
     “When I wrote the elegy to Darryl Kile, I also wanted to tie in with that famous elegy on the death of Babe Ruth by Grantland Rice,” says Stanton. “Rice was from a time when lines between sportswriter and poet weren’t drawn. ... In my view, the only way poetry survives in newspapers now is through the headlines.”
     A St. Louis native who grew up near Busch Stadium, the widely published Stanton said he submitted a handful of his baseball poems to several literary journals. Scholarly publisher McFarland showed the most interest, but wanted a more substantial body of work. Stanton told McFarland that he could write more poems on the Cardinals. It took him two years.
     “It’s the contemplative and philosophical nature of baseball that makes it poetic,” the poet says. “Take Robert Francis’ poem on a game of catch. He equates it to a matter of communication.”
     Stanton, who also has a volume of poetry on visual art called Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, is very methodical with his research, immersing himself in the topic before putting pen to paper. He pored through volumes on Cézanne for one poem, and used UH research for a poem on termites. “Even if I don’t use any of the background material, the information acts as a substratum beneath the tip of the iceberg,” he says.
     The professor’s excavations of baseball are a joy to read and shine new light on the subtleties of America’s pastime:
     “There are a lot of intrinsically philosophical things about baseball,” Stanton says, “because of the individual nature of the encounter between pitcher and batter.
     “Theoretically, a baseball game can go on forever. And there’s no actual limit to how far a ball can go. That notion of the limitlessness of baseball — and the fact that it is not a game that imitates war — lends itself to poetry.”

Fantasy or conspiracy?
Digging into the Tasaday legend

INVENTED EDEN: THE ELUSIVE, DISPUTED HISTORY OF THE TASADAY
Robin Hemley
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003; 352 pages, $25
    
By Jerry Saviano

     On July 16, 1971, NBC Nightly News, momentarily putting aside coverage of the routine horror of the Vietnam War, announced the discovery of a group of people still living in the “Stone Age.” The people were the Tasaday, living on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines. For a 1970’s American society informed by a countercultural fascination with nature, the Tasaday seemed the ideal fit — they foraged for wild yams, they wore hand-fashioned grass skirts and G-strings, and their language had no word for war. It is easy to understand the appeal of the Tasaday — the idea of a pre-modern people living according to romantic notions of the hunter-gatherer provided comfort after scenes of carnage in Southeast Asia. Subsequently The Gentle Tasaday became a bestseller, and National Geographic featured a cover photograph of a longhaired Tasaday boy holding a rain-forest bird. The Tasaday seemed to speak to contemporary society across time. If the evolution of modern society left us violent, materialistic and degraded, the Tasaday were living proof that this hadn’t always been the case.
     Or perhaps not. In the 1980s, news stories appeared claiming the Tasaday were an elaborate hoax. These reports culminated in ABC’s 20/20 airing of a documentary called “The Tribe That Never Was.” In his book Invented Eden: The Elusive, Disputed History of the Tasaday, Robin Hemley attempts to discover whether the Tasaday were “the anthropological find of the century or were they in fact the anthropological fraud of the century?”
     Hemley, a novelist, may be uniquely qualified to tell the story of the Tasaday, in that the controversy is inherently dramatic. There are unsavory characters like Manuel Elizalde, a Marcos crony who comes across as an unholy synthesis of Conrad’s Kurtz and Colonel Tom Parker. There are tragic heroes, like John Nance, who selflessly dedicated himself to the Tasaday only to lose his career and credibility, and even celebrity cameos: Charles Lindbergh and Gina Lollobrigida, the latter who authored a coffee-table book on the Tasaday at the urging of Imelda Marcos.
     Using the research of several University of Hawai‘i faculty members including ethnobotanist Douglas Yen, linguist Lawrence Reid, and anthropologists Bion Griffin and Leslie Sponsel, Hemley makes a powerful case for the legitimacy of the Tasaday. It is Hemley’s thesis that the real outrage was the unprincipled behavior of proponents of the theory that the Tasaday were a hoax.
     Hemley’s strongest argument may be that what we believe about the Tasaday may tell us more about ourselves than the Tasaday. If early researchers were perhaps too trusting in the romantic idea of a modern day “Stone Age” people, the debunkers’ obsession with proving the Tasaday a hoax reveals a cynicism that is ruthlessly contemporary. Ultimately, the story of the Tasaday, as Hemley says, is about how “our imaginations combust with events to create fantasies and conspiracies, the ways in which we can be manipulated by our own expectations as much as by the machinations of others.”

Abrupt endings
The netherworld of island storytelling

MARSHALL ISLANDS LEGENDS AND STORIES
Collected and edited by Daniel A. Kelin II
illustrated by Nashton T. Nashon
Bess Press, 2003; 272 pages, $14.95
    
By Robb Bonnell

     ‘Etto im etto … Long and long time past …”
     Daniel A. Kelin II first visited the Marshall Islands in 1991. An actor, director and playwright, Kelin is also the director of drama education for the Honolulu Theatre for Youth. He returned to the Marshalls in 1993 after HTY commissioned him to write a play based on the folklore there. The interviews and research that began that summer continued for Kelin during extended annual visits over the next 10 years, culminating in a new anthology published by Bess Press, Marshall Islands Legends and Stories.
     The book consists of 50 stories as told to Kelin by 18 men and women from across the sprawling archipelago. All stories are grouped, first by the person who told them, then by the island from which the storyteller comes. Kelin and his translators worked to preserve, in English, the stories as they were told when recorded. This means that the reader will encounter the same informal introductions and the same occasional asides, as in “The Foolish Iroij [chief]”:
     “He would shake until his old man skin came completely off. He would shake until he was a handsome young man.
     “Jorju paused and looked at me. He laughed, saying, ‘The same like you … handsome!’”
     Sometimes, the stories are a little jarring if one expects the pacing of Western tales. Even with the meticulous inclusion of repeated chants, songs and rhymes, the stories feel like they end rather abruptly, especially when compared to their drawn out cousins from overseas.
     In “Aküt Woman”: “One day she went to the rock so very, very hungry. As she did her aküt [looking for lice], she died.” The end. Or in “The Flying Wife”: “The woman flew home. She was so sad she wouldn’t eat, she wouldn’t feed her children, wouldn’t talk or anything. The flying woman was so sad she died.” The end.
     Sometimes a moral follows, but these sudden stops occur throughout the collection, revealing this quality to be common to the storytelling traditions throughout the region.
     Kelin, as editor, acknowledges in his preface that the stories are best not when read but when heard “to the background music of the ocean, under an open night sky or with the flicker of a lamp playing shadows on the walls.” As such, Marshall Islands Legends and Stories is more fascinating than entertaining. The greatest value of the book is as a record of a disappearing resource. Biographical information of each storyteller precedes the stories they tell, and too often the reader learns that one has since died, with few people interested in their stories anymore but Kelin.
     Kelin mentions that although a few storytellers were reluctant to talk to him, most were happy that this anthology “would not only preserve their tales, but also pass them on to future generations.” Kelin’s work has done this, in a volume accessible enough for people of all ages.
     “Jidip inoñ jidim jedu. That’s the end of the story.”

Up periscope
     Naked in the moonlight, she looked to Tony like a full-breasted Polynesian goddess in a black-velvet painting. She dived into an incoming wave. Tony followed and they swam out through a gap in the coral to a clear area with a sandy bottom.
     Loke floated on her back, her breasts and pubic hair glistening in the moonlight.
     “It’s so much nicer than Waikiki,” she said. “Sometimes I come here alone.”
     “Thanks for including me tonight,” Tony answered.
     He floated beside her for a moment, then reached to let his hand touch her thigh. She hummed and moved her hand to his thigh and on toward his growing erection.
     “Up periscope,” she said laughing. “And you haven’t even kissed me.”
     She stood then, nipple-deep in the water. “Come here, you handsome boy.”
     As they kissed, she wrapped her arms around his neck and her legs around his thighs. After a minute of thrusting foreplay, he was in her, hot and slippery in the cool water, with her moaning to the moon. When he came, she said, “Oh, Tony, it’s too good to waste in the ocean. I want to taste you on the beach.”
     Back amid the palm trees, they lay on beach towels looking up at the moonlight.
     “I’ve read books about South Seas girls like you,” Tony said. “But I never thought I’d be the one.”
     —from Halfway to Asia: A Hawaii-Pacific Novel by John Griffin, former editorial page editor of The Honolulu Advertiser (Xlibris, 2002; 252 pages, $21.99)