Lisa Grandinetti

POLS 302
3/7/16
My own Percys story
Dear Ryan,
Its been five months (or eight depending on when you start counting) and I still
resent the shit out of you. Ive deleted all the pictures of us on my phone, but I secretly
have them saved deep in my computer, far away from anyone elses eyes. I dont think
about you everyday anymore, but your golden brown eyes framed by your thick, long
eyelashes still manage to pop into my head more often than Id like. At first, all I could
think about was the good things. Like how we met on Kahoolawe, and how our loud
laughter aligned, making people think that we had already been dating before we even
got on island. I could only envision your face as the one I told you resembled George
Helm as we were sitting on that huge piece of driftwood in Hakioawa in the middle of the
night, looking up at the stars and out to the sea. I was only able to remember how we
would go to live reggae music week after week, and you always skanked so hard that
once a band gave you their T-shirt for free.
But after going on and off with you for those three months and with five more
months to reflect, I realized we were never going to make it. We were constantly fighting
screaming, swearing, slamming doors, speeding away in cars. Time and again I
poured my heart out to you, bared my deepest inner thoughts and feelings and fears,
and never felt satisfied with the response. Struggling with thoroughly misunderstood
anxiety disorder, I would feel you trying to comfort me but never truly being able to
empathize. And even that shallow level of comfort I only ever got after enduring some of

the most anger Ive ever experienced definitely more than I ever thought Id put up
with in a relationship. At the worst times, you just chose to write me off as crazy or
overreacting, belittling my emotions so that you wouldnt have to deal with them at all.
It seemed like the only way we could communicate was through anger, and it just
became too exhausting to continue.
Now its been eight months since I packed up all of my things, wrote you a note
like in a cheesy (not so) romantic movie, and made the long drive back to my parents
house in Mililani hoping my mom would still be awake to unbolt the door. My healing
heart has allowed my memories to form more completely and compassionately than
before; allowed my understanding of your actions, attitudes, and behaviors to become
as nuanced as the average Ethnic Studies research paper. I can see now how your
identities and experiences of being a heterosexual, Hawaiian man with lighter skin and
other Haole features shaped you in ways that made it difficult to express your emotions
in a healthy way. Dont get me wrong, that definitely doesnt excuse the fucked up ways
you treated me, but it helps me decipher why a person who I know loved me would put
me through that bullshit. You probably just think Im getting all academic on you
because I read some article for a class and now its influenced my thinking; but I think
knowledge about systems of power and oppression are most useful, if not only useful
when theyre applied to our everyday lives, so Im gonna try my best.
It goes all the way back to colonization. Because your ancestors lost their land to
rich, white missionaries-turned-businessmen, your family was left without property in a
cruel capitalist system. Without land, which in a European sense is not ina but rather
understood purely as capital, your kupuna could not survive economically. When

tourism began to take hold of Hawaii in the 1960s, local people, especially Hawaiians,
were relegated to the menial, low-wage jobs of serving Haole tourists for the profit of
Haole investors. And into this climate, your parents were born.
All of this is a backdrop to why your parents were forced to look outside of Hawaii
for jobs when you were born; and why when you were two years old, your dad took that
job working for AT&T in Redondo Beach, California. Even though you stayed as
connected to your indigineity as you could through your dad who was always
passionate about being Hawaiian and made sure to teach you Pidgin when you came
back to Hawaii at the age of ten, you were the Haole boy, the wannabe Hawaiian. Its no
mystery why then you chose, consciously or unconsciously, to embrace a toxic and
colonized form of Hawaiian masculinity in order to survive the harsh conditions of
Mililani the epitome of settler colonialism. Being Hawaiian particularly in Mililani an
upper-middle class, Haole- and Japanese-dominated, fairly conservative community,
heavily influenced by the US military with Schofield Barracks just a ten minute drive
away I can understand why embodying the stereotype of the rascal, four-time-arrested
Hawaiian boy was your own form of subversive resistance to the cookie-cutter, Castle
and Cooke sponsored town and its All-American mentality. Not to mention the system
surrounding you that was and still is disciplining and incarcerating Hawaiians at twice
the rate of the general public. The hard masculinity you formed in response to your
erasure as kanaka through middle and high school was not helpful at all, though, when
it came to our relationship. And even more so, your denial of the problems of that
masculinity made it impossible to grow, to let down your pride and allow yourself to be
emotional and vulnerable.

Embracing your Hawaiian-ness in whatever way you wanted was, in itself, a

revolutionary act within a society that wants Hawaiians to simply disappear, but it wasnt
as simple as it seems. Being Hawaiian, English, Irish, Chinese, Filipino, Japanese,
Portuguese, and Spanish, you always joked about how your ethnic background was a
very literal reflection of the plantations. It serves as a symbol of different groups of Asian
immigrants and Hawaiians coming together to fight the Haole planter elite in an epic
demonstration of solidarity, especially represented by the 1946 interethnic strike that
created one big union from the fractured race-based unions. It exemplified the success
of working-class people coming together across divisive lines of race; however, the
subsequent Democratic Revolution of 1954 failed to include Native Hawaiians, and
instead marked the socioeconomic rise of Asian settlers on the backs of the indigenous
population. One betrayal led to the next, as Asian leaders who had gained significant
political power supported Statehood in 1959. So it turns out, your being all the colors of
the sugar plantation rainbow wasnt exactly the perfect symbol of Hawaiis multicultural
paradise.
As a mixed race person myself, and a devoted over-thinking Ethnic Studies
major, you know I can empathize with the difficulties of sorting out what it means to be
descended from both indigenous peoples and their colonizers. I dont think you
acknowledged the complexities as much though, especially not when you were drunk.
Like the one time your car got towed at Tropics and Mike had to give you a ride to pick
me up from work at Shokudo, and then pick up your car from Sand Island. Since your
mom just gave you her car, the title wasnt in your name yet, so after we drove 30
minutes to the tow lot at two in the morning, the guys working there wouldnt give us the

car back. You were pissed, and the fact that you were drinking since you went pau hana
at four in the afternoon didnt help. This guy working at Sand Island was a pretty big
dude at least five inches taller than you, and probably 100 pounds heavier. He was
local-looking, with typically Filipino features. With your masculinity on the line (also
your laau class grade because your notebook was in the car), I saw a side of you that I
really didnt like. First, you started talking shit loud enough so they could hear, and then
you started egging them on small kine, suggesting a scrap was about to go down. One
thing you said that made this incident undeniably connected to larger systems of power
and a history of being disenfranchised as a kanaka was something along the lines of,
This Filipino already came and took my land thats rightfully mine, now he wont even
give me back my car. Obviously this was about more than your 2001 Highlander. We
ended up talking you down and you got your car the next day, but the dynamics of race,
gender, sexuality, and class have stuck out in my mind for a while now. In just one
interaction, I saw the contrast between the full-of-aloha Ryan I and others knew so well,
and the intergenerational frustrations of a colonized people mixed with the
internalization of a toxic masculinity; the Hawaiian through-and-through Ryan resisting
the structure of Asian settler colonialism, and the son of a Maglasang; my boyfriend who
I loved, and the boy I spent a year with who I resented for never being able to selfreflect on his faults.
So here I am remembering a year and a half of love, passion, and chaos, tearing
up and giggling at the same time. Ultimately, Im glad I got the chance to experience
you and all your complexities, and I hope you enjoyed experiencing mine.
Love,
Lisa