When I returned to Hawai‘i last summer, I began a routine of dragging my feet out the door of my mother’s apartment. I didn’t have any end destination in mind—I just knew I needed to stop counting the tinted jalousies of my bedroom windowsill, or the friends I missed from spring semester, and walk away from this seasonal loneliness. I headed down the single flight of stairs, winding past the bulletin board with old construction notices, past the rusted section of the railing, past the hydrant. A Waikiki summer breeze traced down my back, a May breeze thin as the beginning of summer and thick as the beginning of tourism.
My mother’s low-rise apartment sits on the border of Waikiki and downtown Honolulu, at the fork of Kūhio and Kalākaua Avenue, popular streets fortressed with luxury hotels, restaurants, and shopping centers. These two avenues alone are the engines of the tourist industry of my island, O‘ahu. During a typical Sunday morning on my street, young tourists flock southbound to buy alcohol or a lychee-flavored vape at the corner ABC store, and old locals flock northbound to attend weekly services at the Waikiki Baptist Church. The pigeons flock away. It’s the only place you’ll see a pastor next to sunburnt skin in a bikini, devout to tanning oil instead of biblical scripture or sunscreen.
If I could, I’d avoid both the religious and tourist traffic, but I turn right at my apartment, heading southbound toward the least of two evils. At the ABC storefront, advertisements for cheap Heineken beer plaster the windows, which had embarrassed me when I first moved here during my junior year of high school. My mother insisted on downsizing from my grandmother’s house on the west side of O‘ahu to an apartment downtown, in order to shorten the commute between home and my high school. The move added nearly three hours to my days, but even then it was difficult to accept that my backyard was no longer green, and instead a convenience store littered around Waikiki—nearly forty can be found within the three-mile radius of town. I cross my street and head onto Kūhio Avenue, toward the fork in the road, passing a hotel, The Ambassador, on my left. The morning sounds of the tourists I pass on my walks linger—attempts at bossa nova, cheers for flamethrowers, and hula seep through my walls into the late hours of the night. I used to feel ashamed by this lack of privacy, believing my family couldn’t afford silence. Eventually, that embarrassment dissipated to the jadedness of a local.
To cross from Kūhio Avenue onto Kalākaua Avenue, I have to first walk through a crosswalk, a median with a small lawn and park benches that fork the avenues, and then another crosswalk. Areas of pedestrian inconvenience reveal the urban imperfections of Waikiki: Kūhio Avenue and Kalākaua Avenue aren’t parallel and the park accounts for this small angle error. New Haven made me too comfortable with jaywalking, and attuned me to the rhythm of cars and beat of my own footsteps instead of traffic lights. This overgrowth of impatience followed me back to Hawai‘i, where, even in my leisure, I wanted to be somewhere else faster. And faster. By June, I measured the luck of my route by the time it took me to cross the fork of the road. Some mornings it would take me over a song to cross. Others, just a sprinting chorus.
On the other side of Kalākaua Avenue, is the Aloha Petroleum gas station, where my mother would sometimes buy me a seltzer or tea. When tourists rush out of the Luana Waikiki Hotel, in front of the gas station, I lean into music. I tune into the lyrics of the song I’m listening to, focus on the rhythm of my steps, asserting the space I’m occupying. Here on out, the avenue heading east is a list of hotels: The Ritz Carlton, Polynesian Residences, Aqua Oasis, and the Hilton Grand Vacations Club. I know them as: the tall high-rise with cerulean windows that imitate the Pacific, the one with two lonely palm trees in front, with the white gates, the opposite of serenity, and of course, the hotel that is also a country club. Here, the architecture is temporary: not the island itself, but a simulacrum. Not paradise itself, but a facsimile.
The fifth hotel along Kalākaua Avenue is the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, known as “the pink palace of the Pacific” for its Portuguese-inspired design. One Sunday morning, when the sweat that trickled down my back became an adhesive to my tank top, I took a chance on the sugar cane juice stand outside of the hotel instead of my usual at the gas station. I ordered a small cup of juice blended with guava—the tang of guava nectar cut through the sweetness of the sugar cane, and the seeds always sank to the bottom of the cup, but were annoyingly just small enough to fit through the straw. Waikiki has a temporary architecture, so I tried to add rituals along the way. Perhaps it was the hotel walls that were the same shade of guava flesh from the trees in my grandparents’ backyard, or the koi pond in the hotel courtyard with stepping stones that convinced me to trust that where I am could be home again. Or perhaps it was the local in me ending and the tourist beginning, coming to Waikiki partially anew, reconstructed by Connecticut. By July, I began to understand Waikiki as both a temporary architecture and a home—still, Kūhio Avenue and Kalākaua Avenue were my chosen route.
After buying my juice, I stopped by a small shop called Iyasume, at the border between the Royal Hawaiian Hotel courtyard and shopping center to buy a musubi. In the last weeks of summer, I concluded that my favorite musubi was a plain one with an ume, a pickled plum, in the middle. When we’d cook together in her home, my grandma always framed musubis as an exercise of restraint with reward: to take small bites into the plain rice, trusting the savoriness of the nori, the seaweed, wrapped on the outside to carry flavor. As a child, I used to think that the plum in the middle was a small treasure I was burying, hidden from eaters, known only to those who make it. She tells me to look for the rice grains stained pink as I take the last few bites—that’s when I’ll hit the pickled plum buried in the middle. Now, I save my last few bites for the ocean view just a minute’s walk from Iyasume, where across the street from the storefront there is an access path hidden between the Halekulani and Outrigger Reef Beach Hotel. I take off my slippers to feel the rocky grains of sand between my toes.
When I walked the route for the last time in August, I decided to leave my apartment in the afternoon. Twenty five minutes later, at the ocean, there was no saturated sunset nor glamorous palm trees one will find on a postcard. A few catamarans and a cruise ship dotted the horizon. I never swam at the end of my route, but in my mind now I do. I count the waves and let the hours wash upon me. One, two. How the pale orange hues taste as sweet as guava and sour as a plum. Three, four. The water’s cold, but I dunk my head in the water. Five: the sky has set and it’s a shallow blue. By six, it’s dark. How the night became lucky because I crossed the fork in the road in only one chorus. Surely, I’ll be home by seven. How the last grains of rice from my musubi are the grains of sand I sweep off my slippers. And I still yearn for these summer days during the spring. Eight, in my dreams.
