“How did you dare?”
After talking with students at Kealakehe Intermediate over the internet for a bit, I read chapter one from ONE BOY, NO WATER, and looked up. Most of the kids seemed stunned. “I’ve never heard anyone read a story that had Pidgin in it before,” one student said.
Another raised his hand. “How did you dare? How did you know you could do that?” Lots of kids nodded. They wanted to know this, too.
I blinked hard. “I just did,” I said. “And if I did, you can too. Don’t be scared. Just do it.”
I’ve been thinking about this exchange a lot this afternoon. It’s why real representation in literature is so important. All kids deserve–need–to see themselves as the center of stories that affirm their lived experiences. Sometimes all it takes is someone telling them it’s okay; they can do this; permission granted.
Here’s da ting: according to Lee A. Tonouchi, “People BORN Pidgin, gotta be free for LIVE Pidgin.”
He’s not wrong.
In this short treatise derived from his real world experiences in mastering and teaching English in Hawaii, Lee Tonouchi—Da Pidgin Guerrilla—demonstrates that not only Pidgin speakers CAN, they CAN with eloquence, intellectual rigor, and knuckles bruised in schoolyard scraps, call out the biases endemic in anti-Pidgin rhetoric and the cultural erasure politics of the myth of Standard English.
But da buggah wen tell ‘em more bettah in Pidgin, yeah? More easy for unnastand without all da haolified words and phrases.
Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture by Lee A. Tonouchi and published by Tinfish Press is a scholarly dive into what makes a language, who are its guardians and keepers, and how language is identity. Don’t let the size of this book fool you—the thoughts and ideas run wide and deep in this collection of talks and concrete poems.
Like Lee, I learned early on that Pidgin speakers were more defined by perceptions of what they couldn’t do than the realities of what was possible. I’m passionate about islanders telling their own stories in their own words. And as any Hawaiian islander will tell you, when it comes from the heart, it’s in Pidgin.
Fo’real.
Living Pidgin: Contemplations on Pidgin Culture by Lee A. Tonouchi is available in paperback from Amazon.
From the first page, I felt like I was back on Maui.
When I was a kid, my mom used to work for Longs Drug, a store with a pharmacy and a little bit of everything from snacks and groceries to cosmetics and fishing lures. Mom was an accountant, usually in her office upstairs and behind the one-way mirrors that ringed the back of the store and looked out at the shoppers below. My sister and I waved at ourselves in the mirrors like idiots every time we walked in.
Occasionally, when they were having a big sale or short-handed, Mom used to cashier. Back in the ’70s, people worried less about titles and job descriptions and more about keeping a job. On big sales weeks when she knew she was going to cashier on Saturday, she’d make us quiz her on the items and prices as we cleaned house, folded laundry, did the dishes. She had to know the ads cold because back then there were no scanners or bar codes.
And planny people get huhu if the haole lady cashier no can remembah if Spam was 32 cents or 43.
I loved it when Mom brought home foreign coins mistakenly spent by tourists and accepted by cashiers. (Really? This one has a hole in it, five sides, and is bigger than a quarter. How did someone not see this?) I kept them in an old mason jar on a shelf in my room. But my fondest memories of the years she worked at Longs are about Easter. Every Easter Sunday, the whole store had a potluck picnic at the beach. The store managers–half-baked from too many Primos and not enough pupus–had all the kids run relay races, and the winners got baskets with chocolate Easter bunnies bigger than their heads. I never won the big baskets, but I can still taste melty, waxy chocolate and the hard yellow sugar eye from the Palmer’s runner-ups.
So I feel like I know a little bit about the kinds of folks who shop and work at Longs.
But not as well as Lee Cataluna.
In the pages of Lee’s collection of flash fiction stories, you’ll find neighbors, friends, aunties, uncles, and even local, ahem, collection workers and former disco queens. They’re all there, shopping for unmentionables, looking for love, and just trying to get through one more day. Lee’s gift is the complete picture she draws with minimalist brush strokes. We fill in the details, the backstories, the motivations, and the ultimate consequences and conclusions to her stories because these people are us. Lee has a fine ear for Pidgin and she uses it to bring to life people that we immediately recognize as prep school kids, tutus, popos, thugs, cops, and everything in between.
And the stories are bus’ laugh hilarious, poignant, and true. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.
Folks You Meet in Longs and Other Stories by Lee Cataluna is published by Bamboo Ridge Press and is available as a paperback and eBook from Amazon. Click on Lee Cataluna to find out more about her and her amazing stories on her website.
lānai(LAH-naheye)
(n) Hawaiian for porch, patio.
Example
English: They like to set those kinds of glass balls on their coffee tables, but I’m only going to sell the small ones. The big ones are for us. They’ll ;ook nice on the patio.
Pidgin: They like those popo aniani for put on the coffee table. But I only going sell the small kine. The big kine’s for us. Look nice on the lānai.
Note: ‘Ōlelo is a Hawaiian word meaning language, speech, word, etc. To see the current list of Hawaiian and Pidgin words, definitions, and usage please click on
kolohe(koh-LOH-heh)
(v) Hawaiian for mischievous, naughty, a rascal.
Example
English: Mitsy laughed. “Oh, Kahana! How I delight in your rascally nature! You haven’t changed a bit!”
Pidgin: Mitsy laughed. “Oh, Kahana, you still kolohe, ah you!”
Note: ‘Ōlelo is a Hawaiian word meaning language, speech, word, etc. To see the current list of Hawaiian and Pidgin words, definitions, and usage please click on