There were always clues.
When I visited Hawai'i for the first time, a bartender asked me if I was hapa. He said it was my eyes. My hapa eyes.
When my sister visited years later, she had the same revelation I had: the people here talked like our grandmother.
Our grandmother was buried in a pink casket. Her daughter brought fresh lei.
As a kid, I tried to memorize whole pages of the Hawaiian-English dictionary, a gift from my dad who I hadn't seen for years. The name of one of its architects, Mary Kawena Pukui of Ka'u, meant little to me then. In time, I would seek out more of her works, devour her words: a sign that my childhood hunger never eased.
Sometimes people ask me if I'm part Asian. They tend to be Asian.
After wealthy White planters overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom with the support of the U.S. military, Prince Kūhiō argued that Hawai'i should always be home to those with a Hawaiian ancestor: Kānaka Maoli.
(Instead, Congress passed legislation requiring a blood quantum of 50% for rights to Native land. The fewer Hawaiians that were eligible for homesteads, the more land that could be sold off to buyers without any Native ancestry at all.)
My grandmother's grandparents spoke different languages, Apo arguing in 'ōlelo Hawai'i and Akung answering in Chinese. By all accounts, they understood each other perfectly.
When my grandparents came to my dad's house for dinner and cards, they always brought sushi. When my sister and I visited them for Christmas, we ate AlohaMacs. The rest of the year, my grandma fed us Toaster Strudels and buttermints.
My dad named a dog after Maui, where his mother was born and raised until high school, when she joined her older siblings on O'ahu. He named another dog Waikiki long before I learned that my great-great-grandfather grew rice there, in paddies later drained to make way for hotels.
When an old surfer in Venice heard my grandmother's first married name, he said it was a real Hawaiian name. He asked me if I knew Hawaiian, testing me and my pale skin, my blue eyes. Like a parrot, I recited a phrase I had memorized: He ho'okele wa'a no ka la 'ino. I had found it online, unaware of its source: a book of sayings compiled by Mary Kawena Pukui.
A rack of aloha shirts stood in the room where I used to sleep at my grandparents' California home, which was submerged in all the relics of their life. In my memories, I wake up staring at a painting of a woman in a tropical forest. In my memories, my grandmother is always wearing an aloha shirt.
