OUR ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LIVING HOPE

OUR ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF LIVING HOPE

I had the chance to speak before my fellow graduates at a commencement ceremony of my graduate school of religion in the US continent a couple of years ago. This is what I said:

“Aloha, everyone. As I stand here and look at the proud parents, friends and loved ones, I am reminded of my mother. Right now she is working at a hotel in Waikiki, preparing beds and cleaning toilets for the tourists visiting Hawaii. In about an hour, she will finish her first shift. Right after, she will take an hour-long bus ride to go to her next job, at a local bank. There she will clean office cubicles similar to the offices of our professors who have talked to us about our need to work for democracy and justice and equality. My mother will have access to the bigger offices, too, the offices of the powerful. But that access is not about her power of which she has none, but that she has access to these offices because she needs to clean up the dirt in these offices of the powerful who, unmindful of what my mother does and the countless sacrifices she has to go through to pay for my college education, will turn these offices spic-and-span.

“I stand here before you as a proud son of an Ilokana working-class immigrant mother. It is her dedication to her children that has allowed me to go far—up to this point of my education. And yet at times, I feel that I would willingly trade this position for a moment of rest for my mother. It is her dedication to her children that has fueled my dedication to the struggle for economic, cultural, and linguistic justice in the name of our people.

“It took my family at least one hundred years to come to this point of having someone reach a degree of social mobility through education. My great-grandfather harvested sugar and pineapple in the plantations of occupied-Hawaii. And now my mother, three generations after, is working at a hotel, cleaning up the rooms of guests, and making them feel good so that they will come to Hawaii again.

“These hundred years is too long to wait, indeed. And I am lucky. I am the first beneficiary of those one hundred years of sacrifices.

“The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights leader, cried out, ‘Wake up, you chaplains of the common good.’ He was, of course, giving the admonition that we people in the seminaries and universities studying God’s Word must begin to let go of our claims to knowledge without our people included in these claims.

“This is a wake up call, indeed, even as we must look beyond the walls of our seminaries and universities and get off the Holy Hill and pay attention to those who cannot read our books. Some days, I am convinced that our ivory towers—our seminaries and universities—deliberately keep people of color out.

“But today, we graduates of color have come a long way. But this long way is never far enough to reach our people. Thus, our work is not over. We are still on that journey to reaching out to our people, to getting to that point where we are with them in that long journey to real freedom, to liberation.”

I spoke these words during our commencement ceremony. I had my professors and classmates before me. And even as I spoke those words, I trembled: I trembled at the thought that here was an occasion, another occasion, of a bundle of contradiction: we declare our good intentions, but we do not know if we ever will have the chance to pursue them, translate them into action. I could not settle within me whether I had learned to live a more ethical, just and compassionate life or just learned how to pretend like I knew what I was talking about; I felt, as if the pretensions and posturing that had gotten me this degree was eating away at the idealisms and the kind of ethics that I learned growing up in Kalihi—an ethic of relationality.

The stories of people and their struggles that I have learned outside of the university and seminary did not make it on to the books and texts that we carefully scrutinized, if it did, it was relegated to mere footnotes or labeled as ‘just’ anecdotal evidence, meaning to say—it doesn’t count as ‘proof’—that is to say someone who lost their home cannot possibly be qualified to comment on the homelessness—quote someone else more learned, someone who has studied and earned the qualifications of the white man.

I am not trying to rob away the importance of the great theories and wisdoms that I learned in the university and seminary—I am deeply in debted of the great scholars that I have worked with and the many great classmates that have taught me—there was value learning in the classroom—I only wish to say that the beginning of learning is the realization that everything learned must be met with a deep sense of humility, involvement, accountability, and returning again to the earth and people that have kept you alive and taught you how to love and relate with other people and the land.

Even as I spoke those words, I had my Kalihi neighborhood in mind, its picture distinct and clear, like a landscape demanding definition, like a land demanding nurturing, salving, saving.

It is the Kalihi neighborhood and what it stands for that I had in mind clearly and distinctly when I challenged myself and the other graduates to get out of our shell—out of our Holy Hill—and be with the people once and for all.

Now I see this: before me is a landscape of stories and sorrows—and a landscape of struggles and challenges as well. I had all those theories in mind, and I needed them to anchor in my talk in that graduation ceremony so it would have some resonance. Yes, resonance, indeed!

But on second thought, I did not need to be reminded that the minimum wage has no ethical meaning when what a family needs to survive—just to survive—is more than that amount.

The ethical burden was too much too bare in that talk—as it does until now, recession or no recession. I see the lines of hungry people. I see the lines of children deprived of warmth because their parents have to take on two jobs that would take their quality hours away from their children.

The wisdom I learned in the streets of Kalihi has taught me how to navigate the streets of Sunnydale projects in San Francisco and the South Central streets of Los Angeles. It has also kept me safe from the dangers of the classrooms. In a more subtle way, I have learned to navigate the subtle institutional violence my Kalihi is prone too.

But now, I have come back to Kalihi, to return to its earth and its bowels and its bosom once more. My mind is clearer now: I have to give my share in transforming my Kalihi earth and make it an earth of all the people of Hawaii once more.

This returning is important, as the Tongan poet Konai Helu Thaman reminds us: “thinking belongs in the depths of the earth/ we simply borrow what we need to know.” Indeed we borrow and the only way we can repay the interest of the borrowed wisdom is to come back, when you are ready, and share it with the land and the people.

And now I return to Kalihi with the interest rate of wisdom ever so high—the responsibility to share this wisdom with those who could not afford to visit and attend the great schools that I sat in; to transform this sacred place so all can have access to its rich resource of lived experience and stories that it may end these symptoms of oppression—high drop out rates, domestic-violence, military dependency, substance abuse, violence against women, no medical care, disregard of elders, and the overlooking of the experiences of the youth—the list goes on.

I have recalled what I told my fellow graduates during our commencement exercises when it was my turn to speak.

And now I challenge the new graduates to look into themselves and ask what they can give back to their own people and their communities.


To the graduates of this generation who choose to leave this sacred Kalihi I say peace be with you. I am delighted that you are leaving. Sometimes leaving is part of loving Kalihi. I hope that Kalihi has nurtured you as it has with me. Though at times it was violent I hope you never overlooked its elusive beauty. Remember that the violence is not intrinsic to Kalihi. I hope too that someday when you are ready, at your own pace and time, that you come back. Though Kalihi is alive it is not well—and so we need you—but only when you have sat in silence and heard the voices of the land and the ancestors call to you—you will know this because you will comeback and help not with the sense of guilt in the privileges that you have inherited but with the sense of urgency, clarity and the foresight to simply return that which is borrowed.

The point here is to move forward and to move on. The point here for our graduates is to make their graduation an occasion for hoping.