Hawaii and movies: the pineapple principle

As I walked from the ship to Waikiki so I could get to a bus that would get me to Hanauma Bay, I didn’t have much expectations that may have derived from the movies seen in class. In part, I think this had to do with the fact that I already knew in a pretty detailed way what I wanted to do in Hawaii, so my expectations were more or less set. I imagined the posh high buildings and the aquamarine beaches that I did found there. It was pretty much my conception of Hawaii, a very smiley beach paradise. Yet, late in the night when I was about to leave, there were two events which more or less relate to the movies seen in class. The first one is an expectation that I had reinforced while seeing Blue Hawaii (with Elvis Presley), even when I didn’t realized it while seeing it; this had to do with the association of Hawaii and pineapples. I say that the expectation was reinforced since I think I actually developed it with yet another “happy go lucky” movie: Johnny Tsunami, from the Disney Channel. In both of them pineapples are the Thing in Hawaii; they are that incredibly great and fresh product that you could eat anywhere, but not really eaten until you get to Hawaii. I hadn’t realized this until I got to an ABC store (they are a plague: think of Walgreens in Porto Rico) to buy some snacks and I said: “Hey, let me buy traditional stuff from Hawaii, you know, continue with the intercultural education intended for this trip” and voila! the dry pineapples are there, colorfully screaming in plastic bags: “Hawaiian pineapple”. However, by some weird impulse I decided to check the back of the bag to see were it actually was produced, since being from Puerto Rico I know that lots of “Porto Rican this or that” is actually made in China, and ja!, the “Hawaiian Pineapples” were not made in Hawaii, nor in China, but in Thailand. So I started looking at all things Hawaiian and found stuff from all around Asia, specially Korea, which made Hawaii feel much more like Porto Rico (that imports practically everything) than I had expected before. I did found some food made in Hawaii, but they were fried pork skins, let me translate this for you: CHICHARRONES!!!!... I almost die laughing, I think I have never bonded so much with a country’s culinary traditions… at least not since eating moros con cristianos in Cuba. Chicharrones. In Hawaii. Let’s just say that I bought two bags and have got the perfect snack for the rest of the trip.

The second experience relating to a movie occurred when I went to pay for my made in Hawaii food and it was the fact that the cashier spoke Japanese to all Asian looking tourists and well, all the time they were, indeed, Japanese. This brought me back to Picture Bride and the Japanese immigrants it showed. Probably without this movie I wouldn’t have expected any kind of Japanese influence in Hawaii. I knew about immigrants going to Hawaii as cheap labor because Porto Ricans were part of the group, but I had no idea about Japanese or Chinese being some of them for that matter, which shows quite a lot of ignorance from my part, since from what I could see their presence is very significant. I found it very interesting that Japanese, who started as a cheap work force, now are all around Hawaii as economically powerful tourists, so much, that lots of signs are in both English and Japanese and cashiers speak Japanese to them, making their lives easier. I don’t know much about the locals dynamics in Hawaii between its diverse population, but its interesting that people who started as poor immigrants having to accommodate to Hawaii, now are the ones for whom Hawaii has to accommodate to.