Despite 19 cumulative years on-island and one parental line that is firmly rooted in West O'ahu, people time and time again think I am from the Mainland.

Last Wednesday, I was helping some Kamehameha Schools seventh-graders with a research project when one of them asked me where I was from.

"Pearl City," I said.

"For real?" she asked, an incredulous look on her face.

"For real," I replied.

"That's cool," she said, smirking and looking away.

I am all too familiar with being mistaken for a Mainlander.

While I was living on the Mainland, I would return to Honolulu for Christmas break, and would regularly head out on the town with friends. At nearly every bar I went to, even with the aloha shirt, the doorman would stare a hole through my driver's license, pausing only to shoot me the "brah-you-gotta-be-kidding-me" look.

And occasionally, getting into a bar would entail answering a series of questions.

"Oh, you live Pearl City? That's by Ala Moana, right?" the not-buying-it bouncer would ask.

"No, I live on Komo Mai Drive in Palisades, right after the first stoplight on the right-hand side," I would say, frustrated and thirsty.

By my own admission, I am not what you'd call the stereotypical local boy. How am I not supposed to bring something home after seven years in Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Washington, D.C.?

But there are other reasons I'm viewed as an outsider on my own rock.

For starters, I'm rather tall, my surname is Boylan, and ... I can't speak pidgin — not well, that is.

As a kid, my efforts were ridiculed by friends and relatives. It's an art form: You either can speak it or you can't.

I cannot.

At a high school party in Kahuku, I tried to fit in with a group of big guys sitting in a field by walking up to them and shouting, "Howzit braddahs!" Of course they thought I called them Buddhas in reference to their girth and immediately moved to beat me.

Thankfully, I was with my friend Thad, a fluent pidgin speaker. That and I immediately lapsed into my golly-gee-don't kill-me routine, earning laughs from the crowd that had gathered to watch my demise.

But come on — I'm still local. I love the land as much as the next guy. And I dare anyone, save for my godbrother Koa, to challenge me to a plate-lunch-eating contest.

No judge one guy just by the way he talks.

Reach Peter Boylan at pboylan@honoluluadvertiser.com.