Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

And my grandma. Her whole house smells like mothballs, not just in the closets but in every drawer too. And her pots look a million years old with dents all over. Grandma msut know every recipe with mustard cabbage in it. She can quote from the Bible for everything you do in a day. Walks everywhere she goes downtown Kaunakakai, sucks fish eyes and eats the parsley from our plates at Midnight Inn.

And nobody looks or talks like a haole. Or eats like a haole. Nobody says nothing the way Mr. Harvey tells us to practice talking in class.

My favorite town when I went to Hawaii last summer was Hilo, on the rainy side of the "Big Island": far from the tourist mecca of Kailua-Kona, Hilo felt to me like a real place, where real people lived. That meant grit and it meant visible poverty, including visible homelessness--each storefront on Hilo's small main street seemed to have someone sleeping in it. Lovey Nariyoshi, the young protagonist of Lois-Ann Yamanaka's novel Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, is a poor girl of Japanese descent living in the Hilo of the 1970s. Lovey wants more than anything to be like the rich girls who torment her at school, with their nice clothes and hair, and even more than that she wants to be a "haole," a white Hawaiian:

Sometimes I secretly wish to be haole. That my name could be Betty Smith or Annie Anderson or Debbie Cole, wife of Dennis Cole who lives at 2222 Maple Street with a white station wagon with wood panel on the side, a dog named Spot, a cat named Kitty, and I wear white gloves. Dennis wears a hat to work. There's a coatrack as soon as you open the front door and we all wear our shoes inside the house.

But Lovey is not a haole, she's Japanese and poor, and her visible poverty makes her deeply unpopular at school. Her only friend is Jerry, who is only slightly less popular than she is, and who is as interested in acquiring and amassing a collection of Barbie dolls as Lovey is--if you catch my drift. Jerry's brother, Larry, is one of the pair's chief tormenters--he steals and shaves the heads of all those Barbies, for one, but is capable of real physical violence as well--while his girlfriend Crystal is one of the few people who treat both Jerry and Lovey as human. One thing that sets Yamanaka's writing apart, both here and in Blu's Hanging, which I loved, is her attention to the material culture of time and place: Donny Osmond, Sonny Chiba, Charlie's Angels, a Hawaiian children's program called Checkers & Pogo. Yamanaka's cultural references come quickly, but they never feel irrelevant or overwhelming; instead, they seem to make up the cultural fabric that Lovey is always standing just on the outside of, dreaming of living the fantasies of popular music and television.

Wild Meat is a book about, among other things, how you speak: Lovey's teachers exhort her to adopt a kind of standard English that she's unable to master, illustrating that the difference between her and the world she wishes to occupy is one of being able to talk right. Lovey's parents aren't able to master it either, and the novel is buoyed by their colorful and evocative Hawaiian pidgin, a slightly modified version of which is also the language by which Lovey narrates the book. Of course, the strong and powerful voice that carries the book forward is ironically the very thing that Lovey tries and fails to eliminate in herself. Another recurrent motif is the importance of animals, both wild and domestic. In one story, we see Lovey's father drag her all around the island looking for feathers to use in the production of tourist leis. (The sellers who try to offer up native 'io, or Hawaiian hawk, feathers, are sinister people not to be trusted.) In the title story, Lovey describes being unable to eat a burger made from the family cow "Bully." There's a kind of overlap in these motifs, I think: the Hilo residents who speak perfect haole probably never stop to think where their meat comes from, or how a lei is made.

I didn't think that Wild Meat was as effective as Blu's Hanging. For one, Wild Meat is much more a novel of "linked stories," some of which are very brief and vignette-like. It lacks some of the physicality and viciousness that made Blu's Hanging such a shock, and until the very end it seemed much lighter in spirit and tone. I found myself longing for something like Blu's father's story about being isolated in a Moloka'i leper colony, and thinking it wouldn't come, until, in the novel's final chapters it did: First (spoiler alert) with the suicide of Crystal, unable to deal with the possibility of a second abortion. Then, with the possible blinding of Lovey's father in a convoluted story about trying to save some goats from a lava flow. Lovey, having listened to her father's stories about the highlight of his life--a boy's camp on Kaua'i--manages to hope a cross-island flight and bring her father back a bag full of earth. Blinded, he recognizes the earth by smell, and it smells, as he told her it would, like home. It's a wild swing by Yamanaka (she's like twelve??) but it works, and all the more because the novel refuses to tell us whether Lovey's father's blindness will be a lifelong condition.

So, by the end, I found myself persuaded and touched by Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers. Not to pick on it too much, but I found myself thinking of Jesmyn Ward's Sing, Unburied, Sing, a novel where all "local flavor" to me felt cheap and forced. By contrast, Yamanaka's books pulse with Hawaiian life (as far as this haole can tell, at least), because she knows that such a local existence is also made up of the tawdry, cheap, and chintzy, and the stuff of mass culture.

Blu's Hanging by Lois-Ann Yamanaka

You know what I would wish if I could have one wish in the whole wide world? I wish my house was underneath Kaunakakai Groceteria.

In my bedroom there's a secret door up to the groceteria, which I could sneak into at night, after everyone went home. Then I can choose anything I want to eat when I get hungry, when all you, Maisie, Poppy, and I have to eat in the house is mayonnaise bread, peanut butter and jelly, or dry saimin.

And I would take Maisie and you with me too, so we can get all the ingredients to we need to make the biggest laulau dinner, the whole works--day-old poi, lomi salmon, haupia, pipi kaula, and squid luau, just for the three of us, and Poppy.

That's my wish. My one and only wish.

Ivah Ogata is a young girl living on the Hawaiian island of Moloka'i. After her mother's death, she has had to take up the role of a mother, looking after her imaginative little brother Blu (whose name comes from "Blue Hawaii," a pet name from their mother inspired by his real, Presley) and her youngest sister Maisie, who has become non-verbal. Their father, Poppy, is still around, but he works nights as a janitor at the Bank of Hawaii, and his despair at the death of his wife has made him increasingly bitter and resentful, especially toward Blu. Ivah does her best, but poverty makes their situation a difficult one, her two charges are especially challenging. The "hanging" of the title comes from a moment when Blu, inspired by the westerns he sees on TV, imagines himself to be an outlaw and comes close to accidentally hanging himself. He makes ropes out of the good sheets, like characters in cartoons. He has an adventurous spirit, but without the discernment of age to temper it: Ivah finds him exposing himself to a local creep in exchange for candy. And yet, Blu is generous and kind, too--he'd made sure to get three candies, one for himself, one for Ivah, and one for Maisie.

The central conflict in Blu's Hanging is within Ivah, who feels torn between looking after Blu and Maisie and her own dreams of a different life. This plays out in some predictable ways, as when the one kind schoolteacher suggests that Ivah apply to a prestigious school in Honolulu. But the novel itself is far from predictable, and enlivens a familiar scenario with the richness of its imagery and the sharpness of its characters. Yamanaka evokes a Hawaii of the 1960's where a child's life is perilously close to sex, danger, and spoil, to dying dogs and cats in heat, to blood and urine, dirt and rust. It situates Ivah's conflict in a particularly Hawaiian setting, noting that she's the only one among the Japanese students who receives a token for free lunch at the school, an indignity usually reserved for the Portuguese laborer families and native Hawaiians. She butts head with her haole teachers, white women who have arrived in Hawaii on work programs and not discovered the tropical paradise they were expecting. Once, when she discovers that a teacher has been shaming Maisie for soiling her underpants (another psychological effect, we understand, of the mother's death), Ivah ransacks the teacher's dormitory and spreads her ripped panties all over the street. In one climactic and chilling moment, Ivah learns that her parents met at Moloka'i's leper colony, a place they once thought they'd spend the rest of their lives. Her mother's death, as it turns out, resulted from kidney failure from overuse of the sulfones used to treat leprosy--terrified that she would be sent back to the colony and separated from her children, their mother medicated herself to death.

"But tonight," Ivah writes, "I loosen the knots in the rope that tie him to me, and let the rope fall away. Fall from my brother, who has learned how to fly." In the end, Ivah is unable to protect Blu in the way she wants. And it's important, perhaps, that she understand this, which her mother could not. She saves him from further disgrace at the hands of the creepy old man, but she cannot keep him from having much-too-early sex with the girl next door, a sinister Portuguese that Ivah labels a "Human Rat." The one thing that didn't quite work for me was the end of the novel, when Ivah discovers that Blu in the midst of--spoiler alert--being tied up and sodomized by Uncle Paco, another local pederast who might more properly be categorized a sleazebag than creep. Is it too extreme or too melodramatic? Or is it a moment that doesn't shy away from exactly the kind of dangers that Ivah must let Blu confront himself if she is to follow her dreams in Honolulu? My feeling is that it goes a little too far, but I found the book mostly so convincing that I'm not bothered by it.