An Exciting Soap Opera

            I feel really terrible for saying this but at best, my initial reaction to The Descendants by Kaui Hart Hemmings, is my reaction to most soap operas, which more or less can be summarized like this: “how is that even possible in reality?” You’ve got your privileged characters, a man that rejects his fortune but has a prolific career as some doctor (or in this case lawyer), daughters that epitomize “beauty”, a foreigner housekeeper, a jaded wife, elitist institutions and of course…comas. You can’t have a soap opera without comas. Don’t get me wrong, I really tried hard to apply literature theories to this book but I just couldn’t stand it. And out of respect of people in my section who really do enjoy the genre of soap operas, I for one never understood them. But maybe this is just my reaction for sympathizing with the Hawaiian native cause through the course of our class.

            I didn’t get the vibe this was a pro-Hawaiian book. I got the vibe that there were internal family issues, but I really could not connect the themes in which we have been working with to this vague work. However, I did see a vague connection with Alexandra on the postcards with some issues of exoticisms. Joanie, (not the best of mothers I might add) says she lets Alexandra frolic in “dental floss bikinis” because “It’s what [she] [does]. And she wants [Alexandra] to respect what she [does]. ”(pg.15).  Maybe Joanie is a desensitized to this sort of exploitation, because it seems to be common in the world that they come from, but letting her young daughter pose for such postcard is an invitation for someone to vacation in some fantasized foreign exotic land where a apparently skinny tan beach babes run around half-naked all the time. This is especially concerning considering that they are in fact supposed to be “descendants” of native Hawaiians that lived off the land. With Alexandra’s photograph, I saw a succumbing of somebody’s own heritage to feed an external consumerism and colonialism. Though they are of mixed blood by now, their cultural history doesn’t seem to have clung well to them.

But because of my impression of this book, I didn’t really take that any further. I saw it as the only moment in the book where I felt like there could be some connection with everything else I was learning in this course. The rest of the book, like I said, read to me like a really bad soap opera with internal family issues rather than large metaphorical issues that related back to the Hawaiian culture.