The last word: Obama’s aloha spirit

If you want to understand the new president, says Salon.com’s Gary Kamiya, you have to understand Hawaii, the state that endowed him with a unique attitude about race and a deep sense of self-confidence.

From where I am sitting I can see distant waves crashing on a spit of lava rock. Beyond that is endless ocean, part of the longest stretch of open water in the world. The rolling Pacific waves break on these shores 2,000 miles before they arrive on the West Coast.

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You could have chosen anywhere to celebrate the new president’s inauguration, and it would have been the right place. Obama won in regions of every description and among a dazzling variety of people. You could have been in Iowa, or New York, or New Mexico, or California, or in a state that didn’t go for Obama, and own this victory. You could be male or female, white, black, Latin, or Asian and claim it.

Some of this is personal. I’ve always loved Hawaii. These islands contain the mystery of the Far East, the soft languor of the South Seas, and the mighty power of Neptune—and they’re in the United States. I always have a slight, delirious feeling of successful sin when I’m in Hawaii: This much magic should not be available at the mall. I have been here with many of the important people in my life. I have watched my year-old daughter paddle in the surf. I came here with a pal to convalesce, drink, and play inappropriately violent beach sports right after I had surgery for colorectal cancer. Hawaii, for me, will always thus be the place where I not only survived, but partied in paradise while doing it. I’m still here, and now Obama—a native son, no less!—is president. So when Obama took the oath in the frozen capital city on the opposite end of the country, I was celebrating twice. And praying that just as I had been healed, a sea change will come upon America like a great wave.

This sea change must go beyond politics. Things rich and strange are not conjured solely out of tax policy and health plans. Beginnings are a time for generosity, for personal dedication. Forty-seven years ago, a young president touched the hearts of his countrymen when he said at his inauguration, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Today, another young president is calling for the same selfless commitment.

Abraham Lincoln spoke, in words Obama borrowed in his eloquent Jan. 18 speech in Philadelphia, of “the better angels of our nature.” Those angels have been slumbering, and to wake them, we must begin to bridge the divisions between us. For the first time in decades, that task seems possible. In fact, that’s one of the great and hopeful things about this moment in American history, whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat: A new consensus has appeared, one that could actually bring this split and still unformed country together. We can rediscover the things that once held us together, and still do.

This means understanding Hawaii’s unique and uniquely relaxed attitude toward race. Hawaii is the ultimate melting pot, a place where people are so casually familiar with the infinite mixtures of colors that they have special expressions to denote them. Like Obama, I am the child of a father of color (in my case a Japanese-American) and a white mother. Many years ago, the Nisei (second-generation Japanese-American) proprietress of the fleabag Waikiki hotel where I was staying, after staring intently at me, asked me, “Are you half-Japanese?” When I told her I was, she squinted at me one more time, then said in an offhand way, “You’re strong white.” There is no other place in the country where this particular expression would be used in this guileless way, a neutral statement of what one particular hapa looked like that didn’t cause everyone involved to put on their racial armor. That’s because white people are only one group here, and not in all ways the dominant one. Obama’s cheerful understanding of and comfort with the subtle minglings of his own, and America’s, ethnic and racial identities is purely Hawaiian.

I felt that spirit on the day my brother and sister, who have both lived on Hawaii for extended periods and visited it innumerable times, took me and our cousin to meet their old friend Poli. Poli is 81 years old, and they have known him for more than 30 years. A farmer, fisherman, and former lumber mill worker, he lives in a modest, almost ramshackle house he built himself on the beautiful south Kona coast. Like so many Hawaiians, his family is of mixed-up ancestry: His father was Chinese and Native Hawaiian, his mother Native Hawaiian, and his seven children, 30 grandchildren, and 40-plus great-grandchildren cover the racial-ethnic spectrum. He is an amazingly spry man, who clambered nimbly up a left-leaning 10-foot ladder to pick oranges for us from high branches in one of his overflowing trees. He is also, my brother and sister told me, one of the kindest and most generous human beings they have ever known.

We sat in Poli’s shabby but comfortable living room, open to a covered porch from which you could see the ignored ocean, and talked about his work in the mill, his late wife, his church, his children, why dark-grained mango wood is better for woodworking. We looked at the shrine-like wall of pictures of his family, and at his photo albums. From time to time he let loose with a wonderful little laugh, something like a high-pitched whinny. He looked at us with child-like innocence and impish curiosity, but mostly I remember him beaming at us, with the look of someone seeing his children after years of separation. When the conversation turned to our backgrounds, Poli said with a big smile, “It doesn’t matter where we come from—we all have the same blood!” When we left, he embraced each of us very firmly, pressing his ancient body, hard as a wire, against us. And when we got into the car, he leaned in, grasped our hands, and said, “I love you.”

But the American spirit is a vast tapestry, made up of many strands. The spiritual openness of Hawaii is one of those strands, but so is the tough friendliness of New York, and the solid neighborliness of the Midwest, and the clear-eyed optimism of California, and the graceful intelligence of the South. As an American, Obama can call upon a heritage that is made up of multitudes. And he will need them all.

In one of the climactic moments of his memoir Dreams From My Father, Obama describes an argument he had with his friend Regina, who was angered by his cynicism and selfishness. In a moral epiphany, Obama realizes she was right. Then he imagines Regina’s grandmother, “her back bent, the flesh of her arms shaking as she scrubs an endless floor. Slowly, the old woman lifted her head to look straight at me, and in her sagging face I saw that what bound us together went beyond anger or despair or pity. What was she asking of me, then? Determination, mostly. The determination to push ahead against whatever power kept her stooped instead of standing straight.”

Then Obama’s vision broadens. “The old woman’s face dissolved from my mind, only to be replaced by a series of others. The copper-skinned face of the Mexican maid, straining as she carries out the garbage. The face of Lolo’s mother [Lolo was Obama’s Indonesian stepfather] drawn with grief as she watches the Dutch burn down her house. The tight-lipped, chalk-colored face of Toot [Obama’s white grandmother] as she boards the 6:30 bus that will take her to work. Only a lack of imagination, a failure of nerve, had made me think that I had to choose between them. They all asked the same thing of me, all these grandmothers of mine.”