Hello there. Welcome to another installment of Misfortune Cookie. These chapters can be read on their own, but together they trace the slow work of becoming. I didn’t set out to answer the question ~ What is home? but it’s something I keep revisiting…
Moving helps me remember my life.
I’ve lived in about 40 different homes. And I’m not counting the places before I can remember, like Oklahoma and Kansas. Nor am I including when I hauled my junk around FLC’s campus, or those times we literally moved to the next apartment over in Chiang Rai, Thailand or Siem Reap, Cambodia.
Childhood homes in Hawaii feel brown. We lived in four different houses: one on Hickam AFB and three in Mililani. Oahu’s reddish brown dirt is not to be taken lightly. It gets everywhere, on your clothes, shoes, cars, and is tracked into your house.
Renters ruined one of my childhood homes. When we moved to California, we left our townhouse for rent. When we returned in the middle of my ninth grade year, our tan carpet had become browner, shittier, dirtier. We’re fairly confident they let their big dog run throughout the house even though we had a perfectly decent fence and wall surrounding our home, complete with a front lawn and shady backyard.
As I walked around, Tim pointed out the blood on the walls. I stood there trying to figure out how and why. My face mimicked the hole under the sink. Angry. Gaping. Pointless. I was confused by this landlord’s nightmare. I didn’t know that someone could live in our house and not care for it the same way we did.
So Mom, Larry, and I moved into a small apartment in the next town over, Waihawa, while Tim ripped out the carpet and tried to fix the house to sell. We’d never be able to live there again. Even after he ripped out the carpet, the house still reeked of dog and piss, and the concrete underneath had to be bleached, the stairs destroyed, and reconstructed again. The extent of the damage was mind-boggling and costly.
Because our apartment in Waihawa was temporary, we slept on a mattress on the floor. Mom didn’t bother to make the bed either, and since it was simply a mattress, it slid around. I felt poor living in Waihawa, a rough military-influenced town without the decency of sidewalks.
The contrast between Mililani and Waihawa is as striking as a before and after crack cocaine user. Mililani is a planned town. All of the telephone and electrical wires have been buried underground. There are large trees everywhere, parks, recreation centers, rarely are there potholes or problems with the pavement. It’s a walk/run-friendly town with hills and cool breezes.
Waihawa, just next door on the way to the beach, is between Wheeler and Schofield military bases. Pawn shops, bars, and fast food restaurants line the broken streets. Ugly wires dangle overhead. It’s thug-life meets military boys looking for fun and trouble. It’s the younger sister who never made anything of her life. When I went to high school there, I felt like I had entered a kind of Hunger Games arena.
At the time, I don’t think it even had a library. Maybe it was under construction. After attending prim and proper Barstow High, Leilehua felt wild, a mix of military kids and locals, with lots and lots of fights.
When I showed up for PE, one of the girls asked me where I was from and when I told her Mililani, I was surprised by their reactions.
“Oh, you’re a rich kid?”
“Mililani! That’s the rich place.”
“I’m not rich.”
Is that how they saw us?
After that, I felt like I was some sort of untouchable. Tanner, more confident girls didn’t bother to condescend to talk to me.
We didn’t really have to play sports. After the obligatory turn around the basketball courts, we could sit in the bleachers and wait it out, so eventually, my friend and I left to wander the school. We found Jenny (she wanted to kick my ass) in history class and made faces and flipped her the bird from the doorway. We also visited my boyfriend Willie and his friends. I don’t remember a single teacher from my time at Camp Leilehua.
But one day in the PE locker room, I brought in a Giorgio paper bag, you know the kind they give you when you buy their perfume. I thought it was nice, so I took it from Mom and brought it to school.
“I thought you said you weren’t rich.” The leader said.
“I’m not! I got it from my mom. It’s just the bag. I don’t have the perfume.”
She gave it a look. “It’s pretty.”
We looked at the bright yellow and white design.
“You want it?”
“Really?”
She could not have been more transfixed.
“Sure. Take it.”
“Thanks!”
She held it to her chest. “I love it.”
I smiled back.
Gym class got better.
Our next home in Mililani was the typically-built Hawaii home. One story, front lawn, and backyard modified to be more of a concrete or screened-in lanai back porch. Mom transplanted her gardening skills, as well. We had a lovely mango tree in the front, and at one point, I counted twelve papaya trees around the house. She had so many growing things that I took for granted.
I didn’t grow up in a Sears or Liberty House department store catalog home. I grew up in an Asian Americanized home. Mom kept it tidy, and no cans of Toasted Grain, Wishful Blue, or Aspen Mist dared show their colors on our walls. I don’t think I saw wallpaper until I was in my late-20s while in Connecticut visiting my then-boyfriend’s family. I brushed my fingers over the smooth patterns and stared at the endless quantity and coverage like some slack-jaw yokel.
We had a couple of oil paintings to look at, thanks to my father. One was large and hung over the couch. He bought it in Thailand, and it depicted wheat farmers in a field. I loved to study the colors and brush strokes. The other one was a still life of a jug and scroll. It was boring, but Mom kept it for a while. Other things that were hanging in our house were enormous oriental fans hung in the master bedroom, and paintings of traditional wooden houses that she brought back from Thailand. I liked looking at them as well.
Of course, what Thai home wouldn’t be complete without a calendar of the King and Queen and/or some celebrity? That was in the kitchen. We had a variety of Asian decor like embroidered silk pillows, the large heavy carved wooden chest from Thailand, and Mom’s peculiar collection of little Chinese vases and figures in the entertainment center.
We had a few high school photos of Larry and me in the living room as well, but not like when you go into other people’s homes and their walls are dedicated to a gazillion family photos going up and down the staircase, sitting on end tables, fireplace mantels, and breathing down your eyes at every turn.
If there’s a photo of somebody hanging up in a Thai home, chances are it’s a graduation or they’re dead. Growing up, I had to go through the family photo albums to see a picture of all of us together, or of my dad, but I was reminded of his absence every day. The US Air Force gave us the American flag that was folded during Dad’s military funeral, along with his metals, and rank insignias in a glass case. It seems wrong to call it decor, but it was part of the stuff in our home.
Mom’s Thai newspapers and magazines were always around in a pile or two on the living room carpet. At one point, we had an encyclopedia set. The TV wasn’t always on like other people’s homes. We didn’t grow up with books and stories being read to us. But I think because we saw our mom reading often, and Tim with his fiction paperbacks, Larry and I became readers, too.
I was also acutely aware of any Asian-ness when visiting Mom’s friends’ homes. Some houses lacked anything ethnic other than the incessant jabbering of Thai being spoken or the rich aroma of something rotting (aka Thai cooking). Others looked like a Chinese furniture store with more lacquer than the lipstick counter at Macy’s. Some homes were messy, while others were picture perfect neat.
I’m not ready to see this generation of Thais who made it to America during the Vietnam War pass away. I grew up in their homes as much as I grew up in mine. I’m not sure how it all worked, but errands always involved stopping over one of their houses, or stores, or workplaces. We called them auntie or uncle and spent a lot of time hanging out while Mom did what she did.
Home is where you are, Lani! Sometimes home is just the space within the four walls where you feel safe to let down your guards and free to be yourself. ❤️
Oh my goodness Lani, what a powerful, layered chapter! And what a great answer to that question "What is home?" I felt every shift: the moves, the colours, the shock, the blood, the reek (eek!) and that vivid texture of growing up between cultures. I love how you hold these memories with such clarity and tenderness ... even the painful ones.
What struck me most was how deeply attuned you were, even as a young girl … to the feel of each neighbourhood, to have to quickly learn the codes of belonging, the quiet humiliations, the Hunger Games (side note: I loved those films!), the small triumphs and the way a paper bag with a designer's name on it ... could change the emotional weather in a room.
And then your portrait of your mother’s world … the Thai aunties and uncles, the décor, the food, the errands that were really a kind of community making. There’s so much love threaded through those details, even when times were hard. You literally shine on the page, for there’s so much joy, laughter and vitality that just bursts through ... even during those shitty, piss-y moments.
It's incredible how you hold both the wound and the wonder of those years. Your writing, as always, is intimate, honest, beautifully observed and funny, of course ... because well, as I'm learning ... you just can’t help yourself!
Thank you so much for inviting us into the living room of your childhood and sit with all the textures and contradictions that shaped you. Bravo! 🙏💖