West of Then: A Mother, a Daughter, and a Journey Past Paradise - Softcover

Chapter One: The Bounty

Thanksgiving 2002 Honolulu

The first time I saw snow falling was on Thanksgiving. I was in the town of East Barnet, Vermont. It was 1987. I was seventeen. My ex-stepmother, Debbie, and I were the guests of two kindly gay innkeepers. We were in New England looking at colleges. I am from Hawaii. I had never seen snow before. And this wasn't even a real snow, the men informed me. This was a dusting.

"Won't stick." They shook their heads. "More pie, hon?"

It didn't matter. I walked outside and opened my mouth and tried to eat it. Debbie took a picture of me. I look ridiculous. My arms are outstretched. I am wearing yellow padded snowshoes and a stonewashed denim jacket my friend Kenji Nakano had brought me from Japan.

I felt exhilarated and disappointed both. Snow was supposed to do something. Cover you up, at least. This snow wasn't even cold.

A year later I went to college down the road from there -- Dartmouth. I felt I was in a J. Crew catalog. I got a boyfriend within a month. Scott had a good sense of humor, especially when it came to misfortune, and he was smart, so his stories were good. At Collis Cafe we ate hummus and discussed our classes over flavored coffee. That fall he was taking a course in colonial New England history.

When the Pilgrims came, Scott informed me, they made a mistake about the weather in America. They thought that because their new home was on the same latitude as Spain, winters would be mild. Like what they were familiar with, but better. North America is much colder than Europe, however. The first winter most of the Pilgrims froze and died. Which was why, that second year, when the Indians came with maize and turkey, they celebrated Thanksgiving.

"Ain't that shit-out-of-luck."

Scott was from Texas. I'd been to Texas.

I always remembered this story. How sad, to be so disappointed by a place you thought would change everything.

Fourteen years later to the month, I am in a park in downtown Honolulu, waiting for my homeless mother to reappear from wherever she's gone off to. In 1988 I did not think this is where I would end up. Scott liked to think I'd end up in a suit and high heels, at an advertising job. I encouraged the fantasy by joining a sorority. He said I would be the best dancer at the Christmas party. This flattered and depressed me. My own projections were less precise. When I thought of what I'd be doing in 2002 I imagined the reflection of lights on dark windows. I would be in an apartment high off the ground. It would be dark outside and light inside. My hair would be up. That's as far as I got: apartment, hair up, the reflection of light on windows.

In 1988 my mother had just gotten out of rehab. Though I didn't know how things would turn out for her, I was hopeful. I am usually hopeful.

There were men in jumpsuits here this morning, men whose job it is to clean up this park. They came with hoses and rakes and garbage bags. They cleared out the dead leaves; they emptied the wastebaskets. They picked up the human trash: greasy paper bags, empty beer bottles, toilet paper and Styrofoam plate-lunch containers and cigarette butts and feces. By now, by midmorning, Triangle Park feels sparkly again. The wind sweeps down from the mountains, making the leaves shiver. The sun is on the grass. Near a building hung with Chinese signs a woman crosses the street. She's approaching a car that has stopped and is now idling, waiting for her.

Her name is Serena. She is blond, fiftyish, drug-addict lean. She wears a denim miniskirt and a pale pink tank top. A tattoo wilts down her left bicep. She turns her head to let the wind from the ocean clear the hair from her eyes -- in Honolulu the trade winds are constant -- and for a moment I can see her face in full: wide high cheeks, bright brown eyes. It could be a pretty face but for the missing teeth. They deflate her jaw, giving her the look of an old baby, elongated and tattooed.

In the past I have seen Serena from a distance and mistaken her for my mother because she is skinny like my mother is, has dyed hair like my mother does, and at times looks hollow and vacant the way I think my mother might look when she's high, though this is largely speculation, because ever since she relapsed four years ago Karen is memorable to my sisters and me mostly for her absence. So really Serena is what I picture my mother might be, or what she might become, a toothless hag, if she stays in Triangle Park any longer.

Karen Morgan gave me up twenty-five years ago, when I was seven. She was a heroin addict and couldn't take care of me. My father and my stepmother raised me, educated me, sent me to college. I don't know why I think my mother is my responsibility, but I do.

She has been beaten up, raped. She's been arrested; she's prostituted. Add to this the long-term effects of opiate addiction, heavy smoking, bouts with pneumonia, and the constant threat of disease -- TB, staph, septicemia, hepatitis, and HIV -- and perhaps you can understand why I am afraid my mother is going to die out here. I do not know whether this is a real fear or not. But people die on the street, and this is why I am here.

So I wait, look around. Everything is so close on an island. Walk seven or eight blocks makai, oceanward, and you're at Aloha Tower, once the tallest building in Hawaii. The steamships used to come in here, the Lurline and the Matsonia. Members of my own family ate baked Alaska and tomato aspic on those boats, four and a half days out from San Francisco. They bought lei from the lei sellers at the docks -- pikake, plumeria, and double carnation, my great-grandmother's favorite. They threw coins off the decks. A half-dollar tossed might get six local boys to dive.

Two miles south is famously ruined Waikiki. A mile mauka, mountainward, is Nuuanu, the tony Honolulu suburb of gardenias and secret green pools and a queen's summer palace. My mother and her three siblings -- Margaret, Gail, and Brewster -- grew up in Nuuanu in a big house with its own Hawaiian name: Polihiwahiwa, "Nestling in the Bosom of the Hills."

To get from Polihiwahiwa to here you need only follow the Nuuanu Stream. It trickles by my mother's childhood home, ginger gracing its banks, flows through the Buddhist cemetery where Auntie Gail used to take me on walks, trolls inhabiting the underside of every bridge, and empties into Honolulu Harbor, just a few blocks away. Down here the bridges are wide enough for cars. Magenta bougainvillea lines the stream's stone banks and the water is slack, a dark bluish green.

On this side of the river -- that's what the stream is called here, despite its modest size -- is Chinatown, Honolulu's red-light district. On the other, Iwilei, where in the early 1900s Honolulu's prostitutes had their cribs. Somerset Maugham's Miss Sadie Thompson was imagined to have plied her trade here, in one of the one-room bungalows that lined these streets: remarkably clean, noted the observers of the day. Today the cottages are gone, but the whores remain. They've just moved down the block, to the river, where pimps stand along the banks talking into cell phones and johns prowl the bridges in SUVs. Though the names of the bars on Hotel Street allude to more innocent times -- Hubba Hubba Live Nude, Smith's Union Bar, Hana Hou Lounge, which means, loosely, "Do It Again" -- downtown bordering Chinatown has long been this way, seedy and sad, with bums and massage parlors and drug dealers in dark alleys. It's been this way since ships stuffed with Hawaiian sandalwood sailed for Canton back in the 1800s, when Fort Street really emptied into a fort -- built of coral for Kamehameha, the chief who united these islands and became Hawaii's first king -- and sailors sang:

Ship me somewhere west of 'Frisco,

Where the best is like the worst,

Where there ain't no ten commandments,

And a man can raise a thirst.

Foreigners started coming to Hawaii a few years after Cook. They wanted a paradise and here one was. They wanted prostitutes; those could be arranged. Booze, opium, marijuana, cocaine, crack, crystal meth (called batu here), Oxy -- these would have to be brought in, but there were boats, then steamers, eventually container ships and airplanes. So Chinatown and Iwilei went on like this, a bit salty, a bit squalid, sometimes cleaned up, more often ignored.

But my mother is here now, and everything is different.

Serena laughs at the person in the idling car. Then she waves her arms as if to say "No goal," crouching on her bandy legs. When she leans past the car's tinted window I can't see her face so I don't watch Serena anymore.

A man sitting next to me on the grass offers me a bite of turkey. "Want some?" he says, and extends to me a plastic plate. "No," I say at first, then, "Okay."

His name is Ron. Ron is also fiftyish, also lean, with thinning brown hair and a waxy, deeply grooved face. Ron is from California, where, according to him, the cops aren't as mellow as they are in Hawaii, and being homeless is harder.

Ron has been living on and off the street for a decade. He's a heroin addict, though last year he got his use down to just once a month. "Once a month and I was good," Ron says. "I got my disability on the first and that was it." Lately, though, it's been "real bad." He spends his check the first week he gets it.

But here it is the day after the day of plenty and Ron's plate is loaded with leftover food: ham, turkey, mashed potatoes, and, because we are in Hawaii, macaroni salad, two scoop rice, a slice of fried Spam. Ron got the food from Central Intermediate, a school down the block in whose breezeways he sleeps. (In Honolulu even the janitors are kind. They come by, shake him gently in the morning.) Nights are spent at Central Intermediate; days here, at Triangle Park, or along Fort Street Mall, the street-turned-pedestrian-alley where the bums of Honolulu hang out, dozing, chatting, smoking, scheming.

Mark Twain wrote about Fort Street in the 1860s. It was made of crushed white co...