In the early hours of Sunday, December 7, 1941, seventy years ago, Japanese bombers launched a surprise attack against the US military base at Pearl Harbor. The devastating attack on Hawaii, which was then an American territory, profoundly shook the nation and hastened its entry into World War II.
Attack on the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941 Photo courtesy of the National Park Service Archives
Opening night at the inaugural Napa Valley Film Festival began with a walk along a red carpet into the city’s refurbished Napa Valley Opera House, a grand name for a frontier theater dating back to 1880. Screen actors, a few industry executives, and a good sampling of Napa locals (some dressed glamorously in boas and satin evening gowns, others in work boots and down vests) sipped on wine and nibbled ice cream lollipops from Napa’s Eiko restaurant.
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.
When I arrived at a garden near the town of Captain Cook, on the big island of Hawaii, to attend a Breadfruit Festival in late September, I was a skeptic.
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.”
“Be sure to eat on the flight” the oft-repeated joke goes, “because the airplane meal is likely to be the best you’ll have on your trip to Hawai‘i.”
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.
The statistics are daunting: less than two percent of all the books optioned for the screen ever enter production. Far fewer make it into theaters. My first book, The House of Mondavi was optioned twice, but never came close to becoming a movie.
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.”
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.
As a long-time reporter, I’ve met a lot of people. Perhaps the most inspiring was our recent U.S. Poet Laureate, William S. Merwin.
For decades, Merwin has lived off the grid in Hawai‘i. To reach his home, I turned off Maui’s fabled Hana Highway, down a single lane edged with red volcanic soil. About a quarter of a mile from steep cliffs dropping to the sea, the foliage began to grow thick. Rustic wire fencing strained to hold back arching fronds and tropical blooms. His 19-acre palm forest seemed like it was trying to swallow the lane.
Early on in my search to understand the last queen of Hawai‘i, I met with Corinne Chun Fujimoto, curator of Washington Place, the gracious, white-columned home in downtown Honolulu where Queen Lili‘uokalanis had spent the last years of her life.
Corinne suggested that the best place to look for the queen was not through the places she lived, nor even through the words she wrote in official documents, diaries or correspondence, but in Lili‘uokalani’s music. So I began with The Queen’s Songbook, a monumental, decades-long effort to collect and publish the queen’s compositions. The task began in 1969 and took more than twenty-five years to come to fruition.
I knew I’d found a soul sister who also loved research when I clicked onto Amy Stillman’s blog and found her posting, “Adventures in Archives.”
For the past three years, I’ve been making trips to the treasure trove of Hawaiian historical archives located in Honolulu. Amy Ku‘uleialoha Stillman, a Harvard-educated associate professor of music and American culture at the University of Michigan, likewise had just arrived on the islands and couldn’t resist making a trek to the Hawaii State Archives, with a long list of things just to “spot check.”
Amy Stillman (photo: Honolulu Magazine)
I first came across the word kaukau in a note that the Hawaiian Princess Ka‘iulani wrote to Robert Louis Stevenson more than a century ago.
The Scottish novelist and his family had arrived in Honolulu in the afternoon of January 24, 1889, and the beautiful princess dropped them a short note, inviting them to her family’s estate and adding that “Papa promises “good Scotch kaukau….”
To try to track down the word’s meaning, I went to the Hawaiian Electronic Library Web site, which searches several Hawaiian dictionaries simultaneously. But because Hawaiian words can have multiple meanings depending on their diacritical marks (which weren’t used in the 19th century) the modern Web site offered an array of possible spellings and definitions.
