If Alvar’s “Shadow Families” provides a glimpse into how some upper-class migrants see migrant workers, Kristiana Kahakauwila’s titular story from her collection, This Is Paradise, attempts to provide the shared perspective of Micronesian helpers who clean hotels in Honolulu, Hawaii. While Alvar’s collection captures the diversity of the Filipino/a diasporic experience, Ka-hakauwila’s showcases the diversity of Hawaii not as a multicultural paradise but as a colonial territory of ongoing rivals and prejudices that include dia-sporic Chinese (“Wanle”), queer sons (“The Old Paniolo Way”), and indigen-ous Hawaiians (“Thirty-Nine Rules for Making a Hawaiian Funeral into a Drinking Game”). The most ambitious of these stories, “This Is Paradise,”
focuses on three separate groups of women, who, as in Alvar’s “Shadow Families,” all speak in a first-person plural voice. The first group are young local surfer women, the second are middle-aged and upper-middle-class women, and the third are hotel maids who have migrated from Micronesia.
The story follows these three groups as each observes the promiscuous and careless freedom of Susan, a white tourist wearing a polka-dot bikini, who
conjures sexual anxieties in every group and who, in the end, is assaulted and killed by a man sporting prison tattoos.
“This Is Paradise” represents the migrant helpers as matronly women with whom tourists feel comfortable and who are expected to clean up their condoms and pornography. Unlike in Alvar’s story, Kahakauwila’s “we” nar-rative takes for granted the maids’ matronly affections, which appear bound-less and seem to disregard the colonial histories that brought them to work in Honolulu. The maids instead appear as magical healers and as the least judgmental of all the women. Whereas the two other female groups see Susan as a dangerous, young, and foolish tourist, the matronly maids see her as one of their own children, their “eldest daughter,” as they say: “This girl, like our girls, is the type a mother can depend on to do things: drive Grand-mother to a doctor’s appointment, cook breakfast for Papa, dress and feed the babies before school. We smile back at her. We feel as if we can trust her”
(12). Despite the unlikelihood that each of the maids (whose number cannot be determined) has a similar eldest daughter, this passage repeats much of the same gendering labor that produces matronly maids: reframing the sex-ual, effervescent energy of a young woman into recognizable labor power.
The same woman who dresses scantily and seeks adventure, the maids know, can be incorporated into becoming a woman who can be trusted to “cook breakfast for Papa” and “dress and feed the babies” (12).
If the maids themselves show little awareness or concern over the coloni-al histories that brought them to the Hawaiian Islands, the bikini that Susan wears tells of this very past. As Teaiwa points out, the bikini was originally named after Bikini Atoll, a site in the Marshall Islands where the United States tested twenty-five nuclear bombs from 1946 to 1958. The story’s focus on the maid’s reactions to Susan’s bikini externalizes the implicit narrative of the suit, as Teaiwa puts it, to “manifest both a celebration and a forgetting of the nuclear power that strategically and materially marginalizes and eras-es the living history of Pacific Islanders” (87). The bikini is also a prominent feature of the exotic brown beach woman, a figure commonly seen in tourist advertisements in island states in both the Philippines and Hawaii. For Gon-zalez, the sexualized bikini-clad brown body entices American soldiers in their routes to conquer and marks the tourist space as one in need of Amer-ican security and protection (Securing 13). Furthermore, the bikini-clad body also serves to distract from the matronly maid, who is meant to remain barely visible, unexciting, and nonenticing. Desexualized, the domestic worker serves a moralistic, quasi-religious purpose, one produced through a history of colonial religious training. Yet their function serves the same imperial structure, as the matronly maid’s asexual but comforting nature and ability to nurture provide legitimacy to the tourist. The domestic work-er shows happiness whwork-ere one might expect angwork-er and provides a symbol of moral virtue that affirms and approves of a tourist’s pleasures.
While Kahakauwila’s story illuminates the contemporary struggles of Hawaiian locals and natives in dealing with tourism, poverty, and the buying up of private land, the representation of Micronesian maids as potential vic-tims of U.S. atomic testing and military recruitment remains hidden by the maids’ obligation to implicitly give approval to tourists and local Hawaiians, thus providing legitimacy to colonial power. For Teaiwa, U.S. colonial logic responds by gendering and domesticating such representations so that “the female body is appropriated by a colonial discourse to successfully disguise the horror of the bomb” (92). Indeed, the first-person plural narrative here does not mock the group but solidifies the migrants as matronly maids. The maids’ collective narration makes them more indistinguishable than the other two narrative groups—the “successful” women and the surfers—who are consistently identified as individuals even as they speak in a shared voice.
The successful women are individualized by differing life choices and careers:
Paula is a detective who never chose to live off the island, Kiana is a journalist, and the others are identified as a lawyer and a business consultant. Similarly, the young surfer women are differentiated by the parts of the islands they come from: Cora is from Kailua (which makes her “naïve”), and Lanie is “a Nanakuli girl and likes to pretend she’s tougher” (24). While the young women visit clubs searching for appropriate men to dance with, the successful women lounge at quiet bars wondering if passing men are single, wishing they could “have the husband and the babies and the home” (30). In contrast, the matronly maids possess a natural group cohesion of sameness and typicality.
In Alvar’s “Shadow Families,” the first-person plural narration exposes the group’s shared interests in maintaining their social position through shared attempts to “rescue” lower-class Filipina migrants, while in Ka-hakauwila’s “This Is Paradise,” the groups of local Hawaiian women do so by pining for what they collectively lack: a good husband and children. Indeed, in a story where heterosexual marriage seems like the only route to happi-ness (even more than financial success), the migrant maids are depicted not so much as victims to be rescued but as subjects who provide rescue to cli-ents through their affective labor, a commodified product of their “less de-veloped” origins. Their matronly identity speaks to their function of care and affection that allows the separate groups in the story to mourn the death of Susan, the promiscuous white tourist. When the maids discover Susan’s body on the beach, they conduct an act of mourning that sees Susan beyond the limiting and insulting language of the two local groups:
We form a circle around her, protecting her even though she is be-yond our protection. . . . She is older than even our eldest girls, and, on any other day, we could have called her haole, foreigner, a white woman independent and capable of caring for herself. But in these few minutes before the police come running down the beach with a
first-aid kit and walkie-talkie, this girl is a child. She is helpless. She is in need of a mother, and that’s a job at which we are experts. . . . We are here, we tell the unmoving girl. All us mothers are here. (38–39) In contrast to Alvar’s story, which employs plural narration to expose shared prejudices, this narrative’s first-person plural voice swallows up the individu-ality of these maids while foregrounding their “motherly” powers. The ma-tronly maids thus see Susan as their child, and their first reaction when they see her dead body is to cover her nudity and to protect and rescue a willful woman whose frenetic energy has been reduced to a childish helplessness.
Only upon seeing these maids mourn for the deceased Susan can the other two female groups appropriately reconnect to the “natural” purposes of female life. The career women are struck with a sense of guilt for not help-ing Susan: “We should have done somethhelp-ing,” they collectively say (42). The surfer women see the maids standing in a circle near Susan’s body, “stand[ing]
sentinel, very still and very tall,” to protect Susan’s exposed body from the news cameras and tourists. Ahmed’s discussion about the will is useful for us to think through the disciplinary techniques for migrant women. Ahmed writes that “willfulness” helps understand how “power relations can be se-cured ‘willingly,’” and “once sese-cured, the will is not easy to apprehend as will” (Willful 16). Through this act of covering the “willful woman’s” body in death, as she refused to do herself in life, the maids’ encircling is under-stood as a mournful act that erases Susan’s sexuality and adventurous atti-tude as an integral part of her selfhood. Indeed, the maids’ efforts also succeed in guilting the surfer girls into performing their own islander ritual with flowers purchased from a nearby Safeway (45). In inspiring others to forgive, the maids’ desire to sexually police Susan becomes symbolic of their natural morality. For these matrons, the distractions of success and tourism have not gotten in the way of the things that provide them happiness: mar-riage, children, and group comfort. The facts that Micronesian migrancy is partially the product of military technology (the atomic bomb) and that their husbands and sons may be serving in the U.S. military for want of other work seem like distant counterpoints to the women’s matronly majesty.