Corner View - At the End of the Street

At the end of the street, when I am visiting in Hawaii, this is what I find: Chinatown.  But it is an END only in that sense, that it is what I find at the end of a short journey.  Or if an end is only really about coming full circle.

Because this  is the place where my story of life really BEGAN.  And where the story of the Chinese in Honolulu began. Where many, including my mother's family, marked time in cramped Chinatown rooms, until they could find the house up in the green hills underneath a mango tree.  (Which looking up the streets to catch a glimpse of, is still one of the prettiest sights in the world to me.)

For me, it was the starting point from which my mother and I left, journeying on a bus in a morning rain over the cane filled hills to visit one of her sisters.  This is where my love affair with food and color incubated, as I accompanied my grandmother on her Saturday shopping trips.  This is where, shopping with my mother, we would meet old friends of hers from highschool and stop in dim restaurants to eat huge bowls of crispy wonton and noodles studded with chunks of red roast pork and green vegetables.  Under lacquered lanterns and the cooling breezes of giant fans.

Which would keep me looking for such noodles everywhere I went for the rest of my life!

This is where my love of the search began.  The search for the delicious, and sunny, measured, sheltered pleasure.

Today this place doesn't know itself if it's at a beginning or an end.

Daily it still buzzes with color and vibrancy.  The shops open early and bring their goodies out onto the streets.  The shoppers pour out of buses and stream down alleys to find both necessities and delight.

It is vivid and pungent.  Aromatic and sweet.  Fish still flop here in tubs of fresh water.  And whatever

 you want to eat, from any part of any animal, you can find it.  (Oh, does that spoil the tone a bit?)

But many of Honolulu's Chinese no longer come here, businesses have been taken over by Vietnamese and Phillipinos, intent on their own beginnings.  Once the Vietnamese restauranteurs tried to rename the area (or at least a street) for Saigon.  This was met with a great outcry.  And ultimately never happened.   All the Chinese came out of the hills and the suburbs:  "Impossible!"  This was still and always would be CHINATOWN.  Somebody's auntie or grandma would ALWAYS need to come here to buy lychee in season, or chinese parsley cheaper than at the supermarket or a special sauce or noodles or dried fish.  It was the Chinese who built and made Chinatown.  Just because it wasn't SO Chinese anymore didn't mean that it STOPPED 

BEING CHINATOWN!!!!!!

And yet, many of the buildings are neglected now.  People no longer meet here for banquets or do major deals in Chinatown.  Only a few dragon dancers still train here, the noodle makers and jewelers are disappearing.  The pharmacies with their mysterious bins, jars, and drawers of dried shards, stalks and powders are part of myth and legend now.

The beauty queens are a relic of times past.   It's not what it was.

But Chinatown will never be OVER in the minds of the local Chinese.

Never.  Over.  Because to them, life is a circle.  There is neither a beginning nor an end.  It is all one. 

Absolute Oneness.

We are neither Coming or Going.  In or Out.  Up or Down.  Cold or Hot.  Near or Far.  But a little bit of each.  So that we keep ourselves in balance.  So that we can get to the end of that next street. And (as I keep discovering) find our starting point again.................!


For other Corner Views:  jane, ladybug-zen, ian, bonnie, esti, sophie, cele, modsquad,

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