This story begins one of my all time favorite story collections by the same title. Dark, precise, and exhilarating. I’m fortunate and honored to count Kahakauwila as family, a friend, and source of inspiration. This collection was grossly overlooked, perhaps because it is hard, honest, and resists the white colonial gaze and violence perpetrated by American and European ideals of paradise and entitlement to an already inhabited vision of paradise. The narrator is that of a collective, a community of housekeepers for one of the many resorts along the beach in Waikiki who befriend a tourist. We get a glimpse into the private and collective lives until Susan vanishes with a man and meets her end; her death nothing more than a passing warning as more and more tourists flock to claim their little version of what they think is paradise.
Collected in This Is Paradise: Stories, Hogarth, 2013
A Personal Anthology 