A Hawaii Story for the Inauguration. Part IV of IV
On December 30th, Barack Obama, Michelle, and various friends and family went to dinner at Alan Wong’s, their third visit. And I think about that small restaurant.
In charge of the kitchen (I assume) you have Wade Ueoka who got his training at Zippy’s. Obama must have gone to Zippy’s as a teenager. But it seems unlikely that he and Wade chatted about Zippy’s.
And masterminding everything you have Alan, from Leilehule High School in Wahiawa who worked in the pineapple fields in the summer.
Kirk (who uses what he learned about food growing up in Hawaii to very good effect in his blog on the food scene in San Diego and much more), wrote in his comment.
“Both of my Grandparents picked pine, as did both of my parents during their younger years. I picked pineapple one summer while in school, swathed from head to toe in several layers of clothes, a thick hat to protect from the sun, netting to protect ones eyes from the sharp spike of the pineapple. Bending and twisting…..living in a barracks for six weeks, waking when the whistle went off a 5am. It was during this time that I decided that perhaps an education wasn’t a bad thing at all.”
And Kirk wasn’t the only one who decided that an education beat picking pine. Gary Okihiro, now Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, has a book coming out with Universityof California Press called Pineapple Culture: A History of the Tropical and Temperate Zones. He dedicates it to his family–“Three Generations of Workers in Hawaiian Pine.”
For those who have grown up in the islands, the names alone tell a whole story: Kame Kakazu, Kashin Kakazu, Alice Shizue Okihiro, Ellen Kiyoko Nitta, Edward S. Kakazu, Joyce Ayako Kakazu Villegas, Gary Y. Okihiro, Faith Okihiro Lebb, Karen N. Oshiro, Stephen R. Oshiro, and Alan K. Oshiro.
I don’t think Obama ever picked pine. He probably drove through the pine fields near Wahiawa. Everyone does when they go to the North Shore and the North Shore is a favorite outing for people who live in Honolulu.
Obama lived in leafy Manoa and Makiki and he went to Punahou School. Holly Hadsell-El Hajji’s posting on the Punahou Carnival is one more point of entry to that school.
And I think about that Obama meal at Alan Wong’s. How much do Michelle and the accompanying journalists and FBI agents get of all this? Are all menus as laden as Alan Wong’s? For me, a big part of the pleasure was how Alan Wong had so deftly woven his past and the past of others in Hawaii into a meal that could stand by itself. Should the menu come with footnotes?
And of course, as Karen Resta points out in her comment, just after my last post Alan Wong was nominated again for a James Beard Award. His food stands by itself. But the footnotes give it a whole new flavor.
Footnotes to the menu. Yes. As you note, Rachel – when there are footnotes to the menu drawn in real lives going back in time the experience of eating (or dining, depending on the situation) has the potential of being much richer (and I’m not talking saturated or non-saturated fats here!).
I’d love to comment on the topic of education you have deftly interwoven with the story here (and added the topic of restaurants-as-employers) but I’m afraid this post would become torturous and complicated to say the least. :)
But anyway. When you said ‘footnotes to the menus’ it reminded me of something I’d seen recently – a new literary journal (put out by Fresno State) is asking for ‘annotated recipes’ among the other categories of pieces being called for as submissions. I thought this was fascinating, for I’ve never seen this exact thing before!
Here’s a link to the website of the journal – it’s called The Normal School and here’s part of what it says about the annotated recipes:
Fun stuff!
(Tangential to your point, which I do take, and agree with thoroughly by the way.)(Maybe we can call this response a garnish?)