Chaminade University freshmen need to “keep things in perspective,” according to a celebrated pidgin poet and writer.
Lee A. Tonouchi is the author of several books, including the award-winning “Significant Moments in da Life of Oriental Faddah and Son: One Hawai‘i Okinawan Journal” and “Okinawan Princess: Da Legend of Hajichi Tattoos,” a children’s book that won the Skipping Stones Honor Award. He’s also edited an anthology of Hawaiian and Okinawan literature and wrote a renowned play.
Earlier this week, Tonouchi was invited to Chaminade’s campus to deliver a special lecture, the second in the CUH 100 course series. The CUH 100 seminar, required for all freshmen, is designed as an orientation to Chaminade life and scholarship in Hawai‘i.
Tonouchi kicked things off by entertaining the crowd with a lengthy retelling of one of his short stories, delivered entirely from memory. His specialty is literature that celebrates pidgin, the unique dialect endemic to these islands.
With wit and a sharp memory, he shared the story of when he first submitted his writing to a fiction contest held by Honolulu Magazine. He was the runner up, which he thought was pretty impressive, until a famous local writer informed him that he was “never going to win” because of his emphasis on pidgin words and phrases, as he recalled.
Tonouchi would go on to win the Honolulu Magazine fiction prize in 2004. He took those top honors again in 2006.
Regarding that famous writer he met and her discouraging words, Tonouchi said she never unfazed him; rather, he came out of that exchange more determined than ever to keep pursuing his passion for pidgin and the local culture.
“Can we fault her?” he asked the students of this famous writer. “Yes, you can still fault her,” he said, saying she not only behaved rudely, but she was also at fault for restricting her own imagination of what’s possible in local Hawai‘i literature.
His determination and hard work has paid off.
This past February, the State of Hawai‘i named Tonouchi the Hawai‘i Poet Laureate after a competitive review of contestants held by the Hawaiʻi Council for the Humanities, the Hawaiʻi State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, and the Hawaiʻi State Public Library System.
He’ll carry the title of state Poet Laureate until 2029.
The honor comes with a stipend that funds his travels across Hawai‘i to share his poetry and lead writing workshops.
Tonouchi was also granted a fellowship by the Academy of American Poets.
Despite his long list of accomplishments, Tonouchi came across in his lecture as affable, funny, relaxed, and supremely confident. That energy resonated with the student audience.
“Da Pidgin Guerilla” (the nickname given to him by a former professor) spent the Wednesday lunch hour sharing stories, poems, and anecdotes from his childhood growing up in Hawai‘i to his eventual pursuit of a career as a poet, book author, and playwright.
He recalled how, as a child, he once tried looking up the pidgin word “bumbai” in the dictionary because his classmate didn’t know what it meant. Bumbai is a pidgin word that loosely translates to “later” and sometimes “or else.”
The pidgin poems and stories he shared with the Chaminade community celebrated rice, spam, relationships, and a zeal for life and art.
Noted for his activism in linguistic justice, Tonouchi shared that, growing up, it never dawned on him that he was a pidgin speaker or speaking pidgin; he was simply expressing himself, and he understood that he had the right to share this part of himself with the world, and not hide it.
“I was born pidgin, but I never know I was talking pidgin,” he said.