Aloha

Honolulu – Alan Brennert

            Regret is named for the feeling her parents had at her birth, as they had hoped for a boy instead of a girl.  Living in a small village Japanese-controlled Korea in the early 1910s, Regret’s life changes one day when she happens upon a torn page from a book blowing in the wind.  Illiterate since to girls traditionally are not educated, she has one of her elder brothers read the page for her.  After discovering that the page was authored by a Korean woman, she realizes there may be more to life than just being a traditional Korean wife and decides that one day she wants to become an educated women.

            She eventually secretly learns the basics of reading from a family friend, which sparks her desire for yet more education.  Hearing of the tropical paradise of the Territory of Hawai’i and seeing her own future in that of her youngest brother’s future wife, a very young girl who is sent to live with her family in exchange for an eventual planned marriage, Regret takes it upon herself to change the course of her life: leaving her family and beloved sister-in-law behind to become a “picture-bride” to a Korean man she has never met.

   

            On her arrival in Honolulu, Hawai’i, Regret realizes that the islands aren’t the tropical paradise she had hoped for: the streets of Honolulu are not paved with gold and her new husband is not exactly what she imagined.  Instead of the youngish-look, well-off Korea, she quickly discovers he's a bit older than in his photo and works at in the fields at a plantation.  Regret eventually adopts the name Jin and tries to make her way in the young, multi-cultural Honolulu: a city surrounded by plantations and canneries where it seems the city abruptly turns into fields of crops with little notice.  Combined with this is an uneasiness with what is happening back home to her family under Japanese occupation and her feelings towards the Japanese living in Hawai’i and, to a point, racism in general.

 If it has to be this hot outside, couldn't it at least look like this, too...

            What I love about this book is the location and Brennert’s description of it.  This is the Hawai’i and Honolulu more gone than not, replaced by the tourist cosmopolitan city.  The descriptions of work on plantations and canneries come to life along with the insights of the Korean-born Regret/Jin and her observations of the people and culture of her adopted homeland.

Being set in pre-statehood Hawai’i, Brennert includes historical characters of the period, like Hawai'i's last queen, Queen Lili’okalani and Olympic medalist Duke Kahanamoku.  While there was a risk that adding these kinds of famous historical figures as characters could turn the book into a Forrest Gump-like cavalcade of Jin meeting one famous character after another, Brennert uses these historical figures fairly sparingly and often they are obscure enough that a reader may not realize that Brennert had added a non-fictional character into the story until well later in the book.

          
           I really enjoyed the story, though it felt that the supporting characters sometimes weren’t as well drawn as Jin.  Even with Jin, the novel’s protagonist, at times felt like there really wasn’t much in the way of internal conflict (at times) and that she was just a tool to weave a tale of historical Honolulu.  Nevertheless, this is a colorful, well researched, and very enjoyable book about one of my favorite locations on earth as much as it’s about Jin.

Rating: 3 out of 5.