back in Honolulu

Hanauma Bay

 

shave ice at the north shore

I'm reunited with my kids, back for a second round of setting up a new life in the US.  That same main detail is still elusive, getting a new job to work out, but the rest goes well.

Reverse culture shock wasn't a concern this time; I've last spent two months living here while setting up this life within the last half year or so.  My kids are finishing their first complete school year here, living in the local apartment that we rented back in September.  The expense has been taxing but that was expected, and savings and working remotely at my Bangkok job has balanced it out well enough.

What is the story then?  Different story lines weave together, but a clear main thread is still missing.  It feels a bit like living an immigrant's life, struggling with finances and other forms of acceptance, in particular applying work history to current circumstances.  My wife is now working two jobs, as an entry level cook in Italian and Japanese ramen restaurants, but full time work at local minimum wages doesn't help that much, and her working hours aren't even close to full time.  I get it why people might work these kinds of jobs for some years and then move on, trying to find a better balance elsewhere.  I lived in a ski resort for a number of years and that was a main theme there too.

It's important to take comfort and satisfaction in the small victories.  The main point has been gaining exposure to this culture for our kids, and related to education being better here than in Bangkok.  In the higher tier international schools in Bangkok that would be less true, that there had been a gap, but with tuition and fees there running over $30k per year, per student, it costs less to set up an apartment here for two kids, even including covering a higher cost of living.  This same concern comes up everywhere in the US, that different kinds of conditions and future potential is available for a very small category of people.  Expensive private schools are options here too, and surely many of the best placed locals went to them.

Other small victories:  my son has a positive social network now, and has moved through a struggle to catch up in classes to doing ok in most them, with two exceptions that still need a good bit of work.  My daughter has moved past gaps in math and English learning into a normal range, at a learning pace that could put her on the higher side of that range by the end of the school year, or given the short timing maybe only at the center.  Socially she's fine, already a star.  

I just attended my daughter's first volleyball game, in a local park league, which I guess could be the start of many rewarding athletic experiences.  It didn't feel like it; her team was so bad, and I was pleasantly surprised that they won one of three games, and were competitive.  That was not at all about the theme of placing for a trophy, or standing out as a star player, so if they had fun and showed some improvement that was fine, what they were there for.  We bought her a volleyball since, and it has been nice walking over to a nearby park and practicing, and less helpful doing the same in a tiny yard here, where we've hit it over a small wall at our apartment complex a couple of times.

It may sound like I could be more positive about all this, as if experiencing small victories and ongoing challenges seems a little bittersweet.  There's one part of my life that I've always focused on, enjoying the time and experiences with my kids, and that goes so well, better than I could hope for.  I'm very proud of them, not just for ticking off accomplishments and rankings, but for being the kind of individuals you would want to spend time with.  That's the part I enjoy every day, even every hour to the extent that I can.  

I talk with them about their lives, their experiences and their perspectives, and it seems to go well.  This is absolutely the right place to be a two culture kid; people are open and welcoming.  It's crazy how there are hardly any completely white people in my daughter's school, as if that's the only background and set of genetics that would stand out.  I suppose having wealth would; I take it that the next school over is where standards of living and income are higher, and at a guess the private school theme here probably starts right away, at the pre-school level.  I asked my son if he knows any completely white kids and I think he knows two, with at least one of them from Europe.

Along with talking about small victories it would be fair to mention that small challenges add up, not to an extent that seems oppressive, at least at less than one month in, but those drain positivity and energy.  Cockroaches have a real foothold in our apartment now; it will be an ongoing challenge to win a war against them.  We are poor, and that changes things.  My son gets it, for being older, but I have to constantly explain to my daughter why we can't go on a trip to LA and Disneyland as her best friend just did, that we have to watch spending on small toys, or even food.  It took a lot of work to set up assistance based health care here, and we lost that plan due to not re-enrolling for not responding to mail in a timely way, now just six months after setting that up.  There are steps forward and steps backward.

Running has been nice here, the one thing that I enjoyed developing during that two month gap in being around my wife and kids.  A route around Diamondhead is perfect (that one iconic ancient volcano), not too difficult, but with decent hills mixing it up, not so short or long at just under 8 km in length (5 miles or so).  I'm not pushing it for running frequency, or extending intensity or distance, just trying to keep up with it.

view from the top of Diamondhead, showing part of where I run

My kids are learning to swim in the ocean better.  They took swim lessons for most of both their childhoods, so that part isn't about being able to swim, but applying it to the ocean context.  It can be scary having waves added to pool experience, or fish swimming below you, or rocks and coral around.  We did a fantastic outing at Hanauma Bay, a popular snorkeling spot, and my daughter felt a bit cautious about that new environment but both spent a lot of time exploring it.  The amazing fish were what one would expect, like swimming in a really well stocked aquarium, with a meter plus long eel as a highlight.

it's quiet early in the morning

In a sense I feel as if this is their birthright.  Eye and I met in Honolulu, during grad school, so this place brought us together.  Exploring the sea and trails was an influential part of our earlier experiences together.  Our kids are named Hawaiian names as a result, which I guess could be taken as cultural appropriation just as easily as a tribute, both with the same middle name referencing a family friend here, which means the sea. 

They've spent their whole lives learning and practicing swimming, only a bit isolated from some forms of natural environments due to limitations on what they were exposed to.  For us visiting many Thai beach areas we went on only one snorkeling outing with them, one year ago now.  There it's always the case that while most beaches are fine you really need to go to a next island over, by boat, to experience that sort of clear water natural environment, no matter where you happen to be.  We did that with them, that once, taking a guided tour out to very isolated and beautiful spots, and Eye and I did a second time when they weren't with us.  Here in Hawaii tropical fish are 30 feet off shore no matter where you are; it's already a remote island.  Then the extra beautiful spots you might visit are really something.

snorkeling outside of Rayong a year ago

My wife swam laps in a pool for exercise when pregnant with our son; his earliest swimming experiences precede his own birth.  My daughter was comfortable in the water before she actually learned to swim, so comfortable that it made me nervous, because she would paddle around before she had the competency to keep herself safe.

Our kids never had the background I did granting them an early life connection with nature, beyond our house in Bangkok having gardens (my mother in law's house, to be clear), and having cats.  They didn't hike much at all, and were barely ever in the sea, and never explored mountains as I did in my 20s and 30s.  It was never a big regret for me, since we were living the life that circumstances granted us, along with pursuing the interests of my city-dweller wife, but it was something else to get to that just never came up.  So now we get to it.

Bishop Museum; worth checking out

art!

As far as American culture goes I have less to say about that this time.  There isn't the same pronounced liberal and conservative divide here; people still fall somewhere on that scale, but make less of that.  Local Hawaiian culture is both liberal and conservative in its own way, and they don't want mainland influence, two political parties, or mainstream media telling them how to interpret all that.  The problems of late-stage capitalism will all come here, with that process already starting, but there is no reason to rush it.

We just had an outing experience that summed up a divide here that I think explains part of the resentment towards "white people" and long term visitors in general.  We took a bus through one small local town to get to another, where we planned to have dinner.  The more local town looked much older and shabbier, although to me the local eating places looked interesting, probably with some really nice food themes to check out, although we would've been out of place.  

In the more upscale transplant town it all looked new, like a high end strip-mall, with mostly white faces around, with people clearly wearing money, even dressed quite casually.  I stopped by a grocery store to see if they had tempeh (fermented pressed soy beans), and they did, but at a cost of double or more that of meat, so I didn't end up buying it.  And checked out a Target, to buy Cool-Whip to go with a pumpkin pie I cooked, a store so large it took time to walk from one section to another.

Does any of this actually impact the locals?  That's hard to place.  From a distance high demand and limited availability drives up land pricing and housing costs, but to some extent that must be more relevant in places like that second town and Honolulu, since locals probably aren't flipping home ownership so much.  General cost of living is high, but I expect having more people demand goods here gets it to drop, and corporate stores certainly seem to drive down the price of goods by streamlining problematic supply chains.  Maybe negative feelings, that resentment, isn't about clear cause and effect chains, but instead the sum of a complicated history with the rest of the US, and an aversion to the current cultural aspects that even many mainland liberals and conservatives dislike being a part of.

It feels like a time of transition, for me personally, and maybe to some extent for US culture.  It can't stay like this, can it?  I hope to be checking back in soon with a positive update.

my normal run, just a little off typical pacing

missing Myra and the other cats back in Bangkok, and Mama Nid