# paradise

So one of my best friends decided to have a wedding in Hawaii. It had been twenty one years since I'd been, so I was intrigued. I had pictured lush tropical lands. But when I arrived, I was met with a whole bunch of dry flatlands. It was how I remembered parts of Australia through the reality TV I watched on Netflix over the pandemic. Apparently, Hawaii was going through a drought. Fast forward five days and I am going mad. Food costs a fortune here. For me, it's the worst offense!

I had some questionable tuna the other day. From one of the best sushi restaurants on the island. Touted as such by one of the best restaurants on the island, which was also backed by one of the best poke food trucks on the island. All backed by thousands of customer reviews. It was a shrimp tempura roll topped with ahi tuna poke. I was surprised, expecting turnover to be the highest. Apart from the fact that ahi is the most popular raw fish on the island, it's also their most popular roll. And it cost $25. The most money I've spent on a single roll in my entire life as a New Yorker. A roll I could buy in New York for $4 topped with fishy poke. Poke. In Hawaii. Surrounded by water. For thousands of miles.

Food should not be like this. Food should not be $15 for fishy scrambled eggs and bacon, especially when scrambled eggs is your specialty! Food should be $1 pork tacos that you would die for out of any food cart on any random street corner. Specialized, affordable, local, and good. My food journey had only recently begun but all the signs are there. Few places are able to escape the clutches of the spectre that is capitalism.

But how did this come to be?

As you drive through Maui, you might come across the words, "We are not American" graffitied on the one building on the side of one of the main roads. These were the words of Haunani Kay Trask, Hawaiian nationalist activist, 1949-2021. Dr. Trask had called Hawaii “once the most fragile and precious of sacred places, now transformed by the American behemoth into a dying land. Only a whispering spirit remains." She hated tourists. "The Americans... took our land, they imprisoned our queen, they banned our language, they forcibly made us a colony of the United States.” They destroyed all the native crops that made Hawaii a sustainable place to live and replaced them with sugar, thereby enslaving Hawaii to the cash economy. The clearest of waters and the softest of sand. Suffocated and reamalgamated into its present form. Tourist towns consisting solely of curated hotel gardens, shopping centers, and golf courses.

Dr. Trask's words "We are not American" replay over and over in my head.

I don't want to be an American.