*WARNING: THIS BLOG MIGHT BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME, BUT EMPOWERING TO OTHERS*
I don't want to be racist toward my Asian ancestors or my good friends of Asian ancestry, but I need to vent some frustration today. I would also like to mahalo Chinatown for providing my ʻohana and myself a place to grow up in.
It is really frustrating that Hawaiians struggle to keep our language alive in our own land, our own birthplace with so many emigrated Asians flooding here. The predominant racial group are the Japanese, Chinese, and Filipino with the Vietnamese and Korean groups slowly rising as well. Everyday when I leave my house to catch my bus, I see an Asian person speaking their language with fluency. The Asian immigrant person is the store owner, the parking lot manager, the stranger at the bus stop, the student on the bus going to UH, and the person in the aloha shirt driving the Mercedes Benz next to my bus. The Hawaiians I see are the security guards, the houseless man sleeping on the sidewalk, the woman waiting in line at the soup kitchen, or the overweight person with gout asking for money at the bus stop. Majority of these Hawaiians are under represented, under educated, and definitely do not speak Hawaiian.
Many Chinese immigrants can come to "America"/Hawaiʻi and still be allowed to speak their ancestral language, or oppressor tribal language depending on how you look at it. Since so many of them are native speakers and they come in large groups, they have a population to speak with. Mun Lun School is a Chinese language school that has been in existence for nearly 100 years and this one school is helping hundreds of Chinese continue to speak their language.
Ka Pūnana Leo and Ke Kula Kaiapuni institutions are spread across 36 campuses throughout the State of Hawaiʻi. And I understand that we struggle because over 90% of the faculty & staff at these schools are second-language speakers. Will there be a day in my lifetime that I will run into a stranger, at least twice a week, that also speaks Hawaiian?
Some of the frustrations that I foresee in my career are how can I convince my students to speak Hawaiian day in and day out; how can I convince them that there is room for Hawaiian in the "real world"; how can I convince them that Hawaiian is not limited to just hula and music; and how can I convince them that everything they do from sports to grocery shopping, from family to coworkers they can use Hawaiian and Hawaiian World-View everyday?
I am really new to this world, I have a lot more to learn, and I have a lot of hard times coming up ahead, but I can see the abundant rewards just by affecting those twenty students everyday. I love my kūpuna, I love my ʻohana, I love my hoaaloha, I love my hālau hula, and I love ko Hawaiʻi.
Whether you found this offensive or not, think about this...what are you doing everyday that truly affects someone personally? Does this thing you do fulfill something important enough that this person can pay it forward and affect others? For all Hawaiians (people of native Hawaiian ancestry), really think about this because if we all felt this way and applied to our Hawaiian world view as our kūpuna did, we would go very far or move further than we haven't done in decades.
E mālama pono kākou a pau kekahi i kekahi.
