‘… the history of the Hawaiian islands, like ours, is a history of occupation and annexation by the United States for its imperial adventures.’
I WAS walking out of the male washroom at the Daniel K. Inouye Airport in Honolulu yesterday when my ears picked up a familiar sound that I could not immediately place.
There were two women, apparently airport staff, walking ahead of me and chatting. I could pick up English words like “baggage” and “airport” but otherwise the rest of their sentences were Greek to me.
And then it hit me — Ilocano! These two ladies in their late 50s or early 60s were speaking in a Filipino dialect that has long been a staple of the Fil-Am community in Hawaii. And now that the biggest non-American/non-white community in Hawaii is (I am told) Filipino, then I suppose there are even more Ilocano speaking locals now than ever before.
Of course, if the succeeding generations of Filipino-Americans do not pick it up, it will eventually die away. But not in the immediate future.
The dialect was everywhere if your ears were tuned in. The cashiers of the Polo Ralph Lauren outlet in Waikele were Filipino and two of them (both female) would exchange words that I (or their co-workers) couldn’t understand.
The two cashiers at the ABC store on the corner of Kuhio and Lewers Street also clearly had Ilocano roots. I suspect so did the immigration officer who quickly moved me along when I first arrived — and who didn’t stamp my passport with the usual “allowed to stay until….” that I am so used to seeing. But that’s a different matter altogether.
It’s no wonder that other than English or Japanese (the Japanese, I am told, are now the second biggest Asian American ethnic group after being displaced by Filipinos), the most common sound your ear will pick up on the street sidewalks and shops of Hawaii is Filipino or Ilocano.
Which will sound Greek to most others.
But here’s a fact I only picked up on this visit — the Hawaiian islands (or Kingdom) were forcibly annexed by the United States in the closing years of the 19th Century to provide her a springboard to the Philippines just as the Spanish-American war was about to erupt.
So the history of the Hawaiian islands, like ours, is a history of occupation and annexation by the United States for its imperial adventures.
But it let go of the Philippines while Hawaii was eventually given the status of a State.
Who do you think is better off as a result?
Next time I get to visit Hawaii I’ll try to dig deeper into what clearly are old and deep links between these islands and ours.
