Epoch Times Blog

From April 17 through 22, I was in Hawai’i, spending time on the island of O’ahu. There are six main islands in Hawai’i, a small jewel of an archipelago in the south Pacific seas. O’ahu, called the “gathering place”, houses the majority of the islands inhabitants, and is home to the state of Hawai’i’s capitol city, Honolulu.

One of the most distinct features of the Hawai’ian Islands are the locals. Because of Hawai’i’s unique history and geographical location, the locals of the islands are an amazing, rare blend of nearly every possible racial combination. Some of the most common races or ethnicities are Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Samoan, and of course Hawai’ian. It is likely the only state in America that is not ethnically dominated by the Caucasian race, and the immense diversity of the place, coupled with its isolation from the mainland United States, also makes for a unique dialect that locals simply call “pidgin”. The dialect is as much about the accent it embodies as it is about the unique blend of vocabulary and vernacular it draws on. The roots of Hawai’ian pidgin come from the blending of nationalities that originally came to the islands to work in the sugar cane fields and settle as immigrants. It is a lilting, lyrical and soft blend of English and words from many other languages, as well as some pure slang and abbreviated versions of phrases and unique blending of sentence syntax that developed to aid in the ease of communication among people of many different languages.

Not being an linguistic expert, it is impossible for me to accurately explain pidgin beyond this rough idea. However, having lived and worked in Hawai’i, I can say with all certainty that it is difficult to communicate with locals as anything but an outsider if unable to understand and converse in the local pidgin. It has always meant, to me, the difference between being treated like a guest in the home and being treated like a member of the family.

As a journalist traveling in Hawai’i, I drew heavily on my previous experiences living and working there to connect with locals and maneuver through getting locals to agree to interviews. One aspect of Hawai’ian hospitality, or Aloha, is knowing how to give and receive gracefully. Locals on the island of O’ahu are extremely generous hosts and will often offer small gifts. For one story I am working on about the beach boys of Waikiki beach, a manager of a surf shack (surfboard rentals and lessons, among other things), asked if I wanted to take a board out after we had finished our interview. Normally, an interview would not end with an invitation to go surfing. But in Hawai’i, this is not only normal, but it is an expression of the spirit of Aloha that locals extend not only to guests but to one another. According to local custom, it would have been impolite to refuse the offer, and so I found myself out in the gentle surfbreak of Waikiki trying to catch a wave.

The interview subject who offered me a chance to get out in the water and go surfing was later the instrument by which I obtained a second interview with an “old timer” beach boy who would have been otherwise impossible for me to connect with. I couldn’t help feeling, as my digital recorder marked the minutes during that second interview, that I was recording the voice of history and doing something that will eventually contribute to the record of Hawai’i’s history. The man I was interviewing, Gabby Kanahele, is a full-blooded Hawai’ian who has been surfing his entire life and who spent an entire summer (at age 14) around the legendary and world-famous Duke Kahanamoku. There are a rare few alive today who are in a similar situation as this man.