Here’s  a Q&A from the Honolulu Weekly that I wanted to share with you. It’s in the current issue (Jan. 25-31) of the newspaper and I’ve  gotten a number of comments on it already.  Please let me know what you think.

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Points to Ponder for Lost Kingdom

• Whose story is Lost Kingdom and who should be telling it? Do you think Julia Flynn Siler, a haole or white foreigner to the islands, does a good job of showing all sides of this story about nineteenth century Hawaii?  Do you think it is an important story?

• Is there a hero/heroine or villain/villainess in this story?

• How do you feel about Lili’u?  Could she have done anything to alter the course of historical events?  Should she have?  Do you consider her a tragic figure?

• How do you feel about King David Kalakaua?  How responsible was he for the course of events?

• How do you feel about the way the United States handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Grover Cleveland claimed “Hawaii is ours…as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”  Do you agree/ disagree with him?

• How do you feel about the way the Hawaiians handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Did you get a good sense from the book as to how and why they behaved as they did?

• What surprised you about Claus Spreckels?  What about Dole?  Are there other characters in the book that you feel played a pivotal role and you’d like to know more about them?

• What were the motives of  the original missionaries in coming to Hawaii, and then how do you feel about their descendents?  Was everyone generally well-intentioned, or was self-interest paramount?

• What is the relevance of this history for us today?

• Can you imagine an alternate history?  Where would Hawaii be today if the US hadn’t annexed it?  Where would the US be today without Hawaii?

• This was our non-fiction selection for the season.  Do you think this particular history of Hawaii could be better told as ‘historical fiction’?

That coincidence gave me some pleasure, since surfing, known as he‘e nalu or surf riding in the Hawaiian language, is one of the few aspects of ancient Hawaiian culture that have thrived beyond the reef – with Hawaiians themselves bringing the sport at the turn of the twentieth century to America. And one of the parts of my book I loved researching the most was the history of Hawaiian surfing, which was known as the sport of kings, also known as the ali‘i, or high chiefs.

Because commoners worked in the fields and tended the fish ponds, the ali‘i could devote themselves to sports. Their favorite pastime was surfing and they rode the waves on enormous, carved wood boards—some more than eighteen feet long and weighing 150 pounds. Both male and female chiefs also excelled at related sports such as canoe-leaping, in which the surfer would jump from a canoe carrying his or her board into a cresting ocean swell, and then ride the wave to the shore.

When the surf was high, entire villages rushed to the beach. Men, women, and children would paddle out to ride the rolling waves. While Tahitians and other Pacific Islanders also surfed, the Hawaiians took the sport to a higher level—standing fearlessly on their massive boards, often three times as long as those used elsewhere in Polynesia.

The Hawaiians were magnificent athletes. Some excelled at cliff- diving into the sea, from heights of many hundreds of feet. Even young women would strip naked and leap from the summit of high cliffs, diving headlong into the foaming water and bobbing up afterward. One can only imagine their dark hair streaming down their shoulders and their faces beaming with delight.

One of my finds in digging through archives was an engraving of ancient surfers, as well as nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs of the sport. But for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to visit the State Archives of Hawaii in Honolulu but want to learn more about the history of surfing, I’d suggest a wonderful book called Surfing: A History of the Ancient Sport, which was co-authored by Ben R. Finney and the late James D. Houston. I found a copy in our local library.  I also loved DeSoto Brown’s Surfing: Historic Images from the Bishop Museum Archives.

As for getting out on the water, I’m more of an upright paddle or kayak girl myself – and maybe a boogie boarder if conditions are just right. But I’m heading to Honolulu later this spring and hope to finally take the surf lesson I’d been promising myself while I sat in darkened archives. Cowabunga!

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Attack on the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941 Photo courtesy of the National Park Service Archives

But nearly seven decades before “Remember Pearl Harbor” became a national rallying cry, the same waters were a battleground over Hawaiian sovereignty. In the 19th century, Hawaii was an independent nation — a constitutional monarchy modeled on Great Britain’s — as well as a reluctant bride in a contest among the era’s reigning and rising superpowers. In it, they saw the potential for a deep water port that would make Hawaii an ideal stopover for large ships traveling between North America and Asia.

Native Hawaiians rightly feared that they would lose their nation if they ceded rights to the Pearl River area, which they called Pu‘uloa. They found an unlikely champion in a tall, blue-eyed American adventurer named Walter Murray Gibson. A Southerner with a murky past, he had arrived in the islands in 1861 as a Mormon missionary. With a genius for spotting opportunity, he took up the quixotic cause of saving the Pearl River basin.

Walter Murray Gibson, from the Honolulu Advertiser

He entered the seething and unstable political scene of the island nation’s capital of Honolulu in 1872, the year of King Kamehameha V’s death. Fluent in Hawaiian, he had renounced his U.S. citizenship to become a citizen of the Hawaiian Kingdom. When impassioned debates over the fate of the Pearl River basin, an area which was about a day-long carriage ride to the northwest from Honolulu, became front page news, Gibson started using the pages of his own Hawaiian-language newspaper to espouse the populist message of “Hawaii for Hawaiians.”

The basin had deep cultural resonance for Hawaiians, whose ancient ancestors believed that the shark goddess Ka‘ahupahau guarded the Pearl River’s treacherous entrance, a narrow channel through coral reefs where saltwater mingled with fresh. It was the wealth of oyster beds that gave the area its English name and native Hawaiians had long dived for these prizes in the harbor’s waters.

But the Pearl River basin lured a succession of British and American naval officers carrying magnetic compasses and surveyor’s chains, and in 1873 a military commission under secret instructions from the US secretary of war William W. Belknap examined various ports in the Hawaiian Islands for possible defensive and commercial purposes. That same year, King William Lunalilo became the first Hawaiian monarch to give serious consideration to a proposal from the US offering the harbor in exchange for allowing Hawaiian sugar (which planters began cultivating in the 1870s) to enter the American market duty-free. Trade and defense were becoming inextricably bound, and in neither case were native Hawaiians reaping the potential benefits: The vast majority of the Hawaiian planters who stood to benefit from the agreement were, in fact, white foreigners.

Aerial view of Pearl Harbor, prior to attack. Photo courtesy of National Park Service Archives

In his public statements, David Kalākaua, who ascended to the throne in early 1874, had long been opposed to ceding rights to the Pearl River basin. Likewise, Gibson argued against giving the estuary to the United States, and in November of 1873, he printed a traditional Hawaiian chant, or *mele*, expressing Hawaiian opposition to the deal, which would give the U.S. exclusive access to the estuary in exchange for trade benefits. It ended with the warning:

Be not deceived by the merchants,

They are not only enticing you,

Making fair their faces, they are evil within;

Truly desiring annexation,

For several more years the basin remained in Hawaiian possession. But Gibson and King Kalākaua could only hold off the diplomats, politicians, and powerful sugar planters for so long. In 1887, in the midst of an economic depression and intense pressure from the nation’s businessmen, a Reciprocity Treaty was signed which gave the United States exclusive rights to the area in exchange for trade benefits for exporters of Hawaiian goods to the states. The editorial writers of the kingdom’s Hawaiian language newspapers reacted with dismay, particularly Joseph Nāwahī, a respected native journalist and legislator. He had predicted in 1876 that reciprocity “would be the first step of annexation later on, and the Kingdom, its flag, its independence, and its people will be naught.”

The king’s sister, Lili‘uokalani, was likewise distressed by the deal with the Americans. On Monday, September 26, 1887, she wrote in her diary, “King signed a lease of Pearl river to U. States for eight years to get R. Treaty.” Seeing the lease as an unequal swap for a treaty that benefited the island kingdom’s sugar planters, she concluded darkly, “It should not have been done.”

Gibson, meanwhile, fled the country amidst corruption charges aboard a San Francisco bound steamer owned by the kingdom’s leading sugar planter, Claus Spreckels. He had barely escaped hanging by an angry mob. Ailing and exhausted, he sought to commit his version of events to paper, since he felt the “reformers” who had chased him out of Honolulu had ignored his years of faithful service to the Hawaiian people and his brave, but increasingly unpopular, defense of their interests. He died a few months later in San Francisco. According to the newspapers who reported his death, his last word was “Hawai‘i.”

Gibson’s embalmed body returned to the islands covered with a Hawaiian flag. Once it arrived, streams of visitors came to view the body, including some of Gibson’s fiercest critics: Judge Sanford B. Dole, his brother George Dole, and Lorrin Thurston, who would later lead the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The three men joined the crowd moving past his coffin. Thurston was shocked to see that the embalming fluid had turned Gibson’s skin very dark, eerily contrasting with his long white beard and silver locks. They left the reception room and stepped out onto the street.

“What do you think of it?,” Dole asked his brother and Thurston. After a few seconds’ pause, George answered, “Well, I think his complexion is approximating the color of his soul.”

Today, Gibson is nearly forgotten. Pearl Harbor, as it exists today, was created following massive dredging of the basins coral reefs in the 20^th century. The US naval base at Pearl Harbor is headquarters to the commander of the Pacific Fleet, the world’s largest, responsible for patrolling a hundred million square miles of ocean.

Julia Flynn Siler is the author “Lost Kingdom: Hawai‘i’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure,” published by Atlantic Monthly Press. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com.

Catherine Thorpe, who helped research both The House of Mondavi and Lost Kingdom, joined me at the opening reception, where we quickly spotted a bespectacled man wearing a lei, or garland, of green leaves. Making our way through the crowd, we introduced ourselves.

He was Jim Burke, the producer of that evening’s lead film, The Descendants. A down-to-earth and engaging man, he told us that author  Kaui Hart Hemmings had sent him her novel before it was published in 2007 and read it over a single weekend. As father himself, he was convinced that her dark comedy about a father struggling to cope with his two daughters following an accident that left their mother in a coma would make a great movie, with its themes of isolation, betrayal, and forgiveness.

Daws, the author of many very fine books about Hawaii, including Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian  Islands,  helped by reading the script and by providing his thoughts with the filmmakers on music, which is entirely by Hawaiian artists. Indeed, one of the songs on the soundtrack was written by Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last queen.

Roth, the co-author of Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust, provided guidance on trust law to the filmmakers, particularly on the somewhat arcane subject of the rule against perpetuities (which is important to the plot, which involves the descendants of a Hawaiian princess and haole (white or foreign) banker who’ve inherited a piece of land, which is held in trust. They must decide whether to sell it because the trust itself, under the rule against perpetuities, must be wound down by a set date.

The back-story of a trust with large land holding in Hawaii echoes the realities of land and power in Hawaii. Although Kaui told me that she did not base her novel on any one real family, she drew from a number of family trusts which were in the news around the time she was writing her book. Indeed, large amounts of land are still held in Hawaii by what are known as the Ali’i trusts – the charitable organizations set up, in most cases, more than a century ago to hold the land and other assets of Hawaiian royalty. The most prominent of these was known as the Bishop Estate, until the scandal revealed in Broken Estate hit it and it renamed itself Kamehameha Schools.

Perhaps the strongest echo of a situation facing the George Clooney character was faced in real life a few years back by the trustees of Hawaii’s Campbell Estate. Under the terms of the trust, the 107-year-old Campbell Estate was required to dissolve in January of 2007, twenty years after the last death of the direct descendants who had been alive at the time of the trust’s creation. Some of the heirs took large cash pay-outs, according to an account in the Honolulu Advertiser (now the Honolulu Star Advertiser), while others chose instead to roll their assets into a new national real estate entity, the San Francisco-based  James Campbell Co. LLC.

Professor Roth says there have been perhaps a half dozen family trusts in Hawaii in recent years that have faced this same situation. The rule against perpetuities only applies to trusts where the beneficiaries are individuals, rather than charities – as in the case of the Ali’i trusts. “It’s a very realistic scenario,” he says about the decision facing the fictional Matt King character, played by George Clooney, and his cousins. “I was impressed that Jim and Alexander were so concerned about getting the details right, even small details that most people wouldn’t be aware of.” The filmmakers credited both Professor Roth and author Gavan Daws at the end of the film.

Matt King is a descendant of a Hawaiian princess, who was a member of the powerful Kamehameha dynasty, and an American banker. It’s a fictional lineage similar to that of founder of what was formerly known as the Bishop Estate — the American banker Charles Reed Bishop, who married the Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi.

What producer Jim Burke calls the “link in the chain” scene in which Matt King looks at a series of black and white photos of his ancestors. He’s asking himself whether he’s doing the right thing by selling the land that had been entrusted to his family.  It’s a question that many of the descendants of Hawaii’s old families surely must have asked themselves in recent years, as much of what makes Hawaii so achingly beautiful has disappeared beneath resort developments and condominiums. These are the same people whose ancestors came to Hawaii to do good and ended up doing very well indeed.

After having spent the past four years examining Hawaii’s history of closely intertwined families and fortunes, this  movie resonates with me on many different levels. Go see it. It’s not only a very funny and moving family story, but also a very astute portrait of modern day Hawaii.

Prize-winning breadfruit tart at the inaugural Breadfruit Festival: Photo by Julia Flynn Siler

Beforehand, I’d talked to one of the world’s leading experts, the Breadfruit Institute’s Director, Diane Ragone PhD., who had told me she hadn’t cared for it when she first tried it. I’d learned from the Breadfruit Institute’s own website about the difficulties faced by Captain Bligh in fulfilling his mission of introducing breadfruit plants to the Caribbean (during the infamous mutiny on the bounty, the mutineers tossed the trees overboard.) I’d even found a discussion on the gardening website GardenWeb under lists of the “five WORST tropical fruits,” with one writer pronouncing breadfruit “nauseous.”

Diane Ragone, PhD., Director of the Breadfruit Institute, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

But when I arrived at the festival that day, my conversion began. Fragrant smoke rose from a fire circle where breadfruit roasted on burning coconut shells. (Watch video here) Women mashed the fruit with a pestle to make breadfruit poi, a traditional porridge-like food. The marvelously vivacious Chef Olelo pa’a Faith Ogawa, a Hawaii-born private chef, demonstrated several recipes to a rapt audience, passing out samples which were appreciatively wolfed down. A long line of people waited patiently that day to sample a special breadfruit lunch.

Chef Olelo pa’a Faith Ogawa, a Hawaii-born private chef, doing a cooking demonstration at the Breadfruit Festival, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

I’d bought a ticket to try a half dozen of the dishes entered into the cooking contest. To my surprise, several of them were delicious.

The one that comes immediately to mind was a recipe for Ulu Tart, (ulu is the Hawaiian word for breadfruit,)  which was made with two cups of cooked breadfruit, one cup of fresh coconut milk, Lehua honey, and a macadamia nut crust. It was superb – though the breadfruit itself was pretty much disguised by the coconut milk and honey.

I also tried a breadfruit casserole made with three different kinds of cheese as well as a very unusual ulu salad with cucumbers and dill, which, along with the tart, was also a prize-winner. I had the pleasure of meeting the person who came up with the salad recipe after he accepted his award for it.

His name was Nader “Nanoa” Parsia, who grew up in Persia before it became Iran. In the many years that he has lived on the islands, he told me he’d come to embrace the cooking and foods of his adopted home Hawaii. Smiling widely, he said “Some people have been baptized. Today, I’ve been ulu-cized!”

Nader “Nanoa” Parsia holding up his awards for breadfruit dishes, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

I felt the same way: I became a breadfruit believer that day too and greatly admire the work that Diane Ragone and her colleagues at the Breadfruit Institute as well as the Hawaii Homegrown Food Network are doing to introduce people to this nutritious food, particularly at a time when so many people are hungry. Mahalo for introducing me to it. I only wish I could have brought one of these beautiful trees home with me to California ~

Breadfruit tree sales at the inaugural Breadfruit Festival in Kona, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

Honolulu magazine’s October cover story on Hawaiian regional cuisine traces that  jibe about the Aloha State’s supposed lack of gourmet dining to Bon Appetit’s former editor-in-chief Barbara Fairchild, who advised readers to enjoy the meal on the plane, because it was the best food they’d get on a Hawai‘i vacation.

These days, visitors with low culinary expectations about the islands are in for a surprise. I took a dozen or so trips to the Hawai‘i over the past four years to research Lost Kingdom and, each time,  enjoyed some terrific food, usually at hole-in-the-walls near downtown Honolulu, within easy walking distance of the Hawai‘i State Archives.

Chef Alan Wong wins an award for his second cookbook, The Blue Tomato

But my most memorable meals required short drives from downtown Honolulu: grilled garlic ahi at Irifune on Kapahulu Ave., a pork noodle soup at a Hawai‘ian Vietnamese restaurant called Hale Vietnam, off Waialae Ave., and lemon pepper shrimp from Macky’s Sweet Shrimp Truck on Oahu’s north shore. I generally ate at modestly priced places, but did splash out once for the Sunday brunch at the Halekulani in Waikiki, where both the food and the ocean view were spectacular.

I’d heard of Alan Wong, who has cooked for President Obama on a number of occasions, as well as his Pineapple Room in Honolulu’s Ala Moana Center, but had never made it there during one of my trips. But recently the James Beard Award-winning chef made it to San Francisco, courtesy of Watermark Publishing and the Hawai‘i Visitors & Convention bureau as part of a Taste Hawai‘i Tour of big west coast cities.

On one evening of his tour, a group of writers from the San Francisco Bay Area were invited to meet Chef Wong, who prepared a tasting menu for us. A broad shouldered man wearing chef’s whites, he was in fine form and sipping towards the end of the evening on a Napa cabernet. Accompanying him on the tour were a shrimp farmer from Kauai, a tomato grower from Ho Farms in Kahuku, and an agriculturalist working for the Dole Food Company, which is now experimenting with growing cacao in former pineapple fields.

Two decades ago, Alan Wong was one of twelve chefs who banded together to create a locavore movement they called Hawai’i Regional Cuisine, focusing on using locally-grown vegetables, milk and dairy products from local dairies, and seafood and beef from the islands. In recent years, he — like Chez Panisse‘s Alice Waters — has thrown his support behind the islands’  local producers and helped teach school children about food.

Regional cuisine was a movement catching on around the country at the time (in the early 1990s, I wrote a story about Midwestern chefs doing the same thing and, of course, the Berkeley’s own Alice Waters helped kick it off in the San Francisco Bay Area decades earlier.) The efforts of these pioneering Hawaiian chefs come at a time when the state is grappling with the question of how to reduce its dependence on foods imports.

That, in turn, is the sad legacy of the islands’ economic transformation from a time when native Hawaiians supported themselves by planting taro patches and building fish ponds. With the arrival of enterprising foreigners, these were subsumed during the nineteenth century by vast sugar plantations.

Now, the sugar industry is almost gone and more than a century of planting vast swaths of the islands with a single crop have taken a heavy environmental toll. As a result, Hawai‘i is left with an alarming dependence on imported food. Encouraging local farmers is a step in the right direction. Yet, many islanders simply can’t afford $3 tomatoes and $12.50 a pound frozen shrimp. Hence, much of the local food ends up in expensive restaurants catering to tourists.

Chef Wong, who attended a government hosted conference on food security for Hawai‘i recently, told me that if a natural or man-made disaster occurred and both container shipments and air cargo were halted, the Hawaiian islands would last just six days before running out of food. Apec Leaders meeting in November in Hawai‘i are likely to discuss this and other food security issues.

No doubt, the food at the Apec meeting, hosted by the East-West Center at the University of Hawai‘i will be delicious. And despite talk of potential food shortages in the case of an emergency, the evening with Chef Wong in San Francisco in late October was one of abundance, with tastes of more than a dozen of dishes from his new cookbook, The Blue Tomato.

Some highlights: a Hanaoka Farms ahi cerviche with pickled jalapeno and purple sweet potato, “Char Siu” lamb chops with hoisin-sriracha-five-spice greek yogurt, and a dish chef calls “Da Bag” – Kalua pig and steamed clams with shrimp, and lobster. Click here to watch the video of Chef Wong preparing “Da Bag.”

The chocolate crunch bars made from Dole’s Waialua Estate on the north shore of Oahu were memorable, too (the chocolate is available at Whole Foods stores in Hawai‘i) as was his pineapple shave ice. A lovely evening that raised some thought-provoking questions about the growing movement in Hawai‘i to support local agriculture and talented home-grown chefs.

That’s why it’s been a vicarious thrill to watch Kaui Hart Hemmings’ first novel, The Descendants, approach its release date of Nov. 18th as a  movie from Fox Searchlight.

Novelist Kaui Hart Hemmings, author of "The Descendants"

The Descendants was Kaui’s debut novel. A dark comedy about a dysfunctional family, it was first published in 2007 to critical acclaim. The New York Times called it “refreshingly wry.”

Around the time her book came out, Kaui was working out of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and writing a hilarious blog called “How to Party with an Infant.” (Check out her excruciatingly funny post on bikini waxing, if you dare!) Her collection of short stories, House of Thieves, is stunning, particularly the title story.

I first met Kaui when I moderated a panel at Book Group Expo in San Jose. The theme of our panel was fractured families (under the title “Tales of Ruin and Renewal, even Triumph!“) I had just come out with my book on the Mondavis, and the panel also included Rich Cohen, who wrote the 2006 book on his family, Sweet and Low.

The Descendants was optioned by Alexander Payne, the director of the unexpected hit, “Sideways.”  Originally, Payne had not planned to direct the film. But, in chatting with Kaui by phone last week, she told me he’d emailed her sometime in 2008 to let her know he’d decided to direct it himself. He also offered to meet her in Hawaii that coming weekend.

“I was nervous about what wine to order,” Kaui told me. Sideways was the 2004 movie about a troubled oenophile, played by Paul Giamatti, who takes a road trip through Santa Barbara’s wine country involving too much wine and some romantic misadventures.

Kaui and her husband were headed to a birthday party the next day for Kaui’s aunt, held at her grandmother’s house. She invited Payne as well as set designer Jane Ann Stewart along “to hang out and see how these particular locals party.” That was the start of a friendship, as Kaui helped Payne scout locations, particularly after he decided to rent a home in the lush Manoa Valley, a few miles inland of downtown Honolulu, for about eight months.

“He almost approached it as if he were making a documentary,” she says. He met with the island’s big landowners, visited the Outrigger Club, a key setting in the novel, and met Kaui’s famous step-father, the champion surfer-turned-politician Fred Hemmings, Jr. (Kaui was adopted by him when she was 11 years old.)

“I had expected someone to just parachute in and write the screenplay,” she says, but found that Payne took his task of translating her novel, set in contemporary Hawaii, seriously — allowing him to add such details as the sounds of the geckos chirping in the background. Payne talks about this in a Q&A following a screening at the recent Hawaii International Film Festival.

The novelist and director struck up a friendship and Kaui ended up reading the screenplay and reviewing the casting videos, as well as discussing details down to the wardrobes that key characters would wear.

“I felt like I haven’t had the typical experience” of a novelist whose book becomes a movie, Kaui told me. She was free to visit the set every day, if she wanted to, and she ended up landing a bit part as the secretary of Matt King, the character descended from Hawaiian royalty and sugar plantation owners that George Clooney plays.

Her big moment?  “Matt, your cousins are here.” Thinking back on it, she recalls that she needed to work on her intonation and deliver the line more naturally. “It took a long time to say a few lines,” she says.

To play the part, the film’s hairdresser styled her hair and its makeup artist brushed rouge onto her cheeks and mascara onto her eyelashes. Someone from the wardrobe department picked her outfit for her. It felt “surreal” to her to be a non-actor playing a role in a movie modeled after her real world.

“It was just me and George in this room. What am I doing here with George Clooney, I kept asking myself, I’m not supposed to be here, but thanks!”

She, her husband, and her mother were hired as extras for a party scene in the movie, playing themselves. Scenes that took place at the Outrigger were moved to the Elks Club next door, since the Outrigger wouldn’t permit Payne’s crew to film there, Kaui says.

But aside from not having the party at the club itself, other details were spot on – including party-goers dressed in aloha attire and the food including poke (a raw tuna salad, usually made with soy sauce, green onions, and sesame oil) and chicken long rice, a dish brought to the islands by Chinese workers contracted to work in the sugar fields and a Hawaiian luau staple.

The movie’s production designer, Jane Stewart, credits Kaui for helping her get the local details just right. One example was that Kaui introduced her to the pune’e, the casual Hawaiian daybeds often used as sprawling sofas.

Much of The Descendants’ soundtrack is by local musicians, including slack key guitarist Gabby Pahinui, Keola Beamer,  Ozzie Kotani and Daniel Ho, as well as many others. There’s even a song in it written by the last queen of Hawaii, Lili’uokalani, the central character in my next book, Lost Kingdom.

Kaui’s six-year-old daughter made it into the film, too, as an extra in a beach scene in Hanalei Bay. “She was very proud of the $100 she made,” Kaui recalls. But that’s nothing compared to what her talented mom might earn from sales of her book following the film release.

Random House has published a new edition of the book, with none other than George Clooney himself on the cover, looking thoughtfully towards his character Matt King’s daughters on the beach. The word is that they’ve printed 80,000 copies of the paperback for their initial print run. Kaui must be getting chicken skin!

The 'Awa plant, also known as Kava

I caught a glimpse of the sign out of the corner of my eye: “Ma’s Nic Nats & Kava Stop.” I made a quick U-turn on the Mamalahao Highway in South Kona and headed back, pulling across from a laundromat where children chased each other outside as their parents waited for clothes to dry.

From the outside, the kava bar didn’t look like much. But it was starting to rain and I had another hour before I could check into my hotel room. So I climbed out of my car and walked in.

It was a tiny place, with perhaps 10 seats. Tending bar was Ma, the kava stop’s namesake. A Hawaiian woman with a broad smile, she welcomed me in. The bar itself was made of carved mango wood, salvaged from trees cut down to make way for a new coffee plantation.

A young woman from Northern California sat on a bar stool. Her two friends, refugees from Colorado who’d moved to the islands five years ago, sat at a small table. They all held coconut shells with long straws sticking out. Sipping kava mixed with pineapple and coconut juice, they all had relaxed smiles on their faces.

“Try this” Ma told them, as she handed them a long slice of dried fish. “It real ono.”

She made me the same $5.00 kava drink. It tasted good, though I later realized she’d given me a beginner’s draw, nice and sweet. Within a couple of minutes, my mouth began to tingle and I started to feel light-headed. I drank more. (Kava, like coffee, is not regulated.)

I’d seen an awa plant, which the drink is made from, that morning at the Bishop Museum’s Amy B. H. Greenwell Ethnobotanical Garden in South Kona,.  A member of the black pepper family, roots of the kava (which is the name for it in Tonga and the Marquesas – Hawaiians call it ‘awa) were traditionally chewed. Then the chewed mass was put into a bowl, mixed with water, and strained.

When the first European visitors came to the Hawaiian islands in the late eighteenth century, Polynesians would offer their drink made from the kava root to these honored guests. It also played a part in religious ceremonies as an offering to the gods.

Nowadays, machines macerate the dry roots into a fine powder which is then mixed with water. The drink’s allure comes from kavalactone, a compound which acts as a relaxant or sedative, with a mild numbing effect. It doesn’t seem to effect mental clarity.

When I told a new friend about my experiment with kava later that night, he laughed and described it as being “sort of like a mud Novocain drink.” He and his wife had tried it in Samoa, where — to hear him tell it — the roots are ground up along with a lot of dirt, making drinking it an experience not unlike sipping from a mud puddle.

Oddly, kava bars are starting to pop up on the mainland, including one called the “Kahuna ‘Awa Kava Bar” in Deerfield Beach Florida. The Yelp reviews of this place are probably more fun to read than the experience of drinking kava itself.

Rony, from Miami, was shocked by the price:  “$25 a bowl! Is this stuff harvested by Swiss financial planners?” Another described it as tasting like “pistachio nut shells covered in dirt.”

Mine actually tasted pretty good. Maybe Ma just has a better recipe. She offered my kava up with sweet aloha, giving me a warm hug goodbye. But I don’t think I’ll empty another coconut shell of the stuff anytime soon. I’d love to visit Ma again, but next time will just order a smoothie — hold the kava.