Chapter 1 - The Connection

People always ask me, what is your connection to Hawaiʻi? Meaning: why do you love Hawaiʻi so much? I pause before I answer because the answer is not a simple one. I cannot say my ancestors are Hawaiian or that I was born there. What I can do is take them to my very first time meeting Hawaiʻi and show them what I felt & experienced.

Chapter One - The Connection

I woke with a start and a shiver as I sat upright in the airplane chair. Wrapping my arms around myself in an embrace against the air conditioned cabin, I remembered where I was now, although my moeʻuhane (dream) took me to another place entirely. A volcano. Vague visions of smoke rising and fire billowing flitted in my memory.

I put my hand against the window and gazed outside and down, disappointed. This was not what I had imagined. Giant rocks in the middle of the ocean. Really? This was paradise?

It was the summer of 1999 and my family and I hopped on a plane five hours earlier. I was thirteen and this was my first time leaving California and my first time on an airplane. As we were filing onto the plane and finding our seats so that we could depart San Francisco, a type of music I had never heard before was playing over the speakers. It was beautiful, gentle, and quite relaxing. Something about the calming nature of the sound put me at ease for this first plane ride. I later learned that the music was Hawaiian slack key guitar. To this day whenever I hear it, it always puts me back into that airplane seat, full of excited anticipation of the adventure ahead, my mom and dad by my side.

As the plane started its descent, I began to see more of the island of Maui: vast fields of green sugar cane stalks with beige-colored tops, all leaning one way due to the heavy trade winds; dark brownish-red land; a highway teeming with cars the size of the Matchbox kind; buildings clumped together; resorts dotting the coastline along the sandy beaches; the fronds on palm trees blowing wildly in the winds this way and that.

The palm trees were the only thing that felt like “Hawaiʻi” to me and how I thought Hawaiʻi should look like, from this vantage point.

I’d had visions of Hawaiʻi since I was a small child, and I loved drawing pictures of a tropical island. They were your typical little-kid-crayon drawings of a brown mound with a green palm tree surrounded by blue waves. This place was called Hawaiʻi and it was out in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean where I could trace my fingers around the islands with my finger on a globe in a classroom. I had only dreamed I’d ever get to visit. Hawaiʻi only existed in my mind and was so far away, with a dream-like quality. I had heard it was a place that was always warm, even at night where you wouldn’t need a lot of blankets to keep you cozy while you slept; and the water was just as warm, like bathwater, which you could swim in with all the colorful fish in full view.

Some of those things in my head about Hawaiʻi are true, but honestly, I had a false illusion about this magical place until I visited. This was my maiden voyage on an airplane and to Hawaiʻi, all in one trip, and there I was looking down at brown rocks in the ocean from high above.

These brown rocks were actually volcanos.

Haleakalā, the island’s most prominent mountain and dormant volcano, stood valiantly, a huge and powerful, sacred presence in the background, while the West Maui Mountains towered on the opposite end of the island in equally bold fashion with its lush dark-green peaks and shaded deep valleys.

In the middle of these two mountains was flat, checkerboard-style land, which were the cane fields.

And surrounding all of this was water of rich blues— colors I had never seen before. There wasn’t a color in my childhood box of crayons that could match these beauties of blues.

Leaving the air-conditioned cabin and walking off the plane, a mass of hot, humid air rushed against my face.

“Aloha,” a woman greeted me, with a purple and white orchid lei that she draped onto my shoulders. I had arrived at this magical place. 

For the next ten days we (my best friend, my mom, dad, and I) played the tourist role. We stayed at Papakea Resort in Honokōwai, which is just north of the famous sandy beaches of Kāʻanapali and historic Lahaina town with all its shops and restaurants. We sat atop Mt. Haleakalā and watched the sun rise, biked down into the cowboy town of Makawao for brunch, and ended our bike trip on the beach in the surfer town of Paia. We snorkeled. A lot. We saw honu (turtles), dolphins, whales, and the state fish, the Humuhumunukunukuāpuaʻa. I was mesmerized by the beautiful underwater world, along with the windy but warm air that enveloped me up on the surface. As soon as I’d leave the water, the dampness would evaporate from my skin and leave a salty residue behind. I licked my arm and could taste the salt. Hawaiʻi was a whole new world for me, all of my senses engaged and heightened. They were sensations I had never experienced before. Coming from California, with cold water, cold air, and an ocean where you couldn't even see the bottom, well, this was amazing.

The most amazing thing, though, was seeing a hula performance at a lūʻau (Hawaiian feast). I was captivated. The performers weren't anything like the grass-skirt-and-coconut-bra-wearing dancers I had seen on postcards— nothing at all. 

Dinner was served buffet-style with “local kine grinds” (local food), including macaroni salad, kālua pork (pork baked in a ground oven), poi (pounded sweet potato root), and P.O.G. – Pineapple-Orange-Guava fruit drink. However, it was the dancing that caught my attention.

The sun was setting as we were finishing dinner. Then the hula dancers came out. The stage, backed with bamboo and greenery, was lit with all sorts of colors and spotlights. Girls in beautiful costumes and real flower hairpieces, with glowing, mocha-colored skin, shouting things in the Hawaiian language (I assumed), were dancing as if they were floating on water, so effortlessly. Sometimes they wore grass skirts and coconuts, but most of the costumes were traditional from Hawaiʻi and other parts of the Pacific.

One of the costumes that caught my attention was skirts made of long cellophane, each dancer with a different colored skirt. They were dancing to a “hula hapa haole” number (a Hawaiian-type song with English words) from the booming Hollywood era of the 1940s and 50s when Hawaiʻi was recognized mainstream as a tropical tourist destination. The song was called “Sophisticated Hula,” and yes, they did look sophisticated! It was the perfect mix of showbiz glamour and style with traditional hula moves. I was focused on one hula dancer in particular, though, because she didn't “look” Hawaiian. She looked like me, with white skin. She danced beautifully. 

"I can do this. I can dance the hula,” I thought to myself in that moment.

Spoiler alert: it would be another fourteen years until I started learning hula, but the inspiration I felt from that dancer remained with me the entire time, and I still think about her to this day because I saw myself in her. My focus was on her whenever she graced the stage.

My dad being the type of dad who always video recorded everything from family vacations to Fourth of July fireworks to hot potato games at my birthday parties, also took a video recording of the lūʻau. I would watch “Sophisticated Hula” repeatedly after we had returned home from our trip. Over and over. Coincidentally, when I began hula dancing, one of the first few songs I learned a dance to was to "Sophisticated Hula." 

Experiencing this lūʻau and being exposed to hula for the first time opened up even more wonder in my young mind about Hawaiʻi. After that first trip, I knew that Hawaiʻi was much more than sandy beaches, swaying palm trees, and coconut bras. I felt an undeniable pull towards this fascinating place.

The hula, though. That was my connection. I fell in love with the hula.

And I never thought that when I started taking hula dance lessons many years later that it would send me on a journey that would literally change my life.