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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Saturday, April 14, 2001


Island-style short stories, written with a sure and knowing hand

By Ann M. Sato

 •  "Da word" by Lee A. Tonouchi, Bamboo Ridge Press, $15.
"You jus gotta feel da meaning."

This line, among the last in this short-story collection, could be the book's motto. There is a great deal of meaning here. And in the best tradition of the short story, much of the meaning is subtly and gently conveyed, despite author Lee Tonouchi's reputation as "Da Pidgin Guerrilla." This is a guerrilla who knows, as he should, how to sneak through the woods, hitting the target without being seen.

A pidgin short-story collection might seem like an affectation; it would certainly have been one for me to review the book in pidgin, as I at first thought I ought to do. Because, while I routinely speak pidgin with my brothers and sisters, and old friends, it isn't my first language, or the language in which I'm most comfortable writing.

(Ho! Some embarrassing, yeah?, fo admit dat. Wot kine local me I no talk pidgin alla time? But you don know my moddah. She catch me talkin' pidgin inna newspapa she goin' tell me I not too ol for likkins. Fo wot she sen me private school, Mainlan college? And, brah, I mo scaid my moddah dan Lee Tonouchi.)

All this is very much part of the point — though not the whole point — of Tonouchi's work here and elsewhere:

pidgin as a language that is legitimately some people's communication tool of preference; pidgin as a language of which some people are still ashamed and which many people are convinced stands in the way of an individual's ability to "get ahead"; pidgin as a delightful and very effective means of conveying the real-life experiences of many locals.

In the midst of the mission to legitimize pidgin, however, Tonouchi never forgets that this is a collection of short stories, not a linguistic manifesto. The forgiveable exception is the last story in the book, "pijin wawrz," which is written in the maddeningly hyperspelled Odo orthography (hint: read it aloud) and is a charming bit of propaganda that gets in some very good digs and ends with an inspired scene in which a pidgin speaker defeats a computer by using "da kine" for every noun in their debate.

The rest of the book reads almost as a novella. Although the key character changes names and situations, he seems all to be one voice — that of a local guy of indeterminate racial mix (though he clearly is at least part Japanese): smart, thoughtful and with lots of potential, exactly the kind of kid that teachers try to talk out of speaking pidgin. We see him as a boy, a teenager, as a college student and as a father to be — this last in "The Coming of Ku," a story that haunted me the first time I read it, in another collection.

Tonouchi's writing is knowing and sure-handed, his understanding of idiom and the local mind unerring, often bus-up hilarious. This is a book even my pidgin-speaking but pidgin-resistant mother will enjoy once I make her sit down with it. Because she'll recognize herself in some of the characters: an understanding mother sending her son off for a weekend alone with his father, who is dying, though the boy doesn't know it. A loving wife whose partner of several decades has had a stroke and must go into a nursing home.

And she'll recognize her family: the aunties at funerals who inevitably exclaim, "You came BIIIIIG!" to young relatives encountered for the first time in a while ("Yeah, Auntie, an you coming big, too," he fantasizes replying); the local girls who love that "House of Liberty" and shop the designer stores just to amass the logo shopping bags.