Maia: May 2008

"Pretend that you have a baby in your stomach."

We had gone to Kona on the Big Island for Willie's memorial service. He had died on Saturday, April 19th. This was May 17th.

But we hadn't found the service. We had stopped at the Assembly of God Church in Honaunau (which, it turned out, was where it was supposed to be) and several other churches in Honaunau and Captain Cook. But no luck.

After lunch back in Kona, we had decided to see if we could find Hannah, Willie's widow. We had an address for her and went to go look.

Maia had been good about sitting in the car but was getting bored. She was now on Kristina's lap in the back seat of our rental car--a monster of a car.

"And pretend you have to go to the hospital," she said, "and pretend you have to tell the doctor that the baby wants to come out."

Kristina dutifully obliged. "Doctor, the baby isn't due yet, but he's kicking..."

"She..."

"But she's kicking, and I think she wants to come out."

"And pretend they cut your stomach open," Maia continued, "and pretend you have to tell them to wipe the blood off my head."

By now, all pretense that this wasn't about Maia was out the window.

The blood was taken care of.

"And pretend I'm one now, and you have to say, 'Baby, you're talking so well.'"

Kristina complied.

Maia's next jump was to four and then to five, accelerating from the birth into her life now. She will soon turn six.

It was a kind of denial, I guess. But it also says something about how she feels about us and Kristina in particular. Things would just be so much simpler if the story of her birth and life had been as she acted it out today. She yearns for that simplicity, but it will never exist for her.

We will let her deal with the complexity of her life in her own time.

***

These photos were of Maia and Kristina at lunch, after we had given up looking for Willie and had returned to Kona, which is where we were staying.

These photos are of the Painted Church, one of the stops we made while searching for Willie.

It is a Catholic Church, that was built in the 1840s and used to be located near the beach.

There is one theory that holds that migrants to an island start out by living near where they land, by the beach, but then move to the higher and cooler land of the interior as the island becomes their home.

I don't know if that's generally true, but it appears to be true of the Painted Church. I read that it was dismantled in the 1890s or so and followed its parish upslope to its present location, as the parishioners moved inland.

These are shots of scenes from the highway and of Captain Cook, a little town above Kealakekua Bay, during our efforts earlier in the day to find Willie.

These next shots are of what was happening across the street as we ate lunch. The old part of Kona is built around a little bay, and canoe races were being held there that day.

Willie was a complicated man. He was an intellectual, a handy man, and a family man. He was the fourth man to father children with Hannah, but the only who stuck with her and her many children. By ancestry, he was Hawaiian, Caucasian and Chinese, as was Hannah herself. Their racial histories and relationship compressed and reflected the last hundred years or so of Hawaiian history. Owing to the importation of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino men (and Portuguese families) to supply labor (and midlevel supervision) for the sugar plantations, men have outnumbered women of reproductive age by as many as three to one during that time, making for racial backgrounds like Willie's and Hannah's, and families like theirs, in which a woman's children often have more--and sometimes many more--than one father.

And yet Hannah and Willie, their children, and their relatives have remained Hawaiian in outlook and spirit. That's the great mystery of this place--how the culture has survived such change to the race. Owing to the spirit of that culture, Willie and Hannah had absorbed me into their family some twenty-five years ago--which is why I had been invited to the service.

"Sometimes I like go Bishop Museum and just imagine how things were," Willie said to me once. He loved Hawaii and its history.

Rest in peace, Willie.

John, Saturday, May 17, 2008

Labels: adoption, Hawaii, Kazakhstan

We went out to Sea Life Park last Sunday. For the birthday of a friend of Maia's, also adopted. The two girls rode back together in the friend's mother's car, which left Kristina and me alone.

"She wasn't impressed," Kristina said. The event at Sea Life Park had been called, Dolphin Encounter. Maia's expectation had been that she would swim with the dolphins.

"She said, 'Nobody was free.'" They had lined up the people to touch and kiss the dolphins. It was all recorded in still photos and on videotape for later sale.

You can really feel her thinking, sometimes. I'm glad we've always talked to her about being adopted.

For some reason, the thought occurred to me that she was going to be pushing ahead with the questioning soon.

"I wonder when she's going to start asking why."

"About being adopted? Well," Kristina said, "the other night, when we were on her bed, she said, 'And I was in somebody else's stomach? And then there where did I go?'"