The summer I turned 13, my Hawaiian ‘ohana gathered at Kiowea, an eroded beach on the south shore of Moloka‘i, to celebrate a distant cousin’s graduation. Scanning the sands for a familiar face, I thought achingly of my mother, still on O‘ahu, separated by 50 miles of Kaiwi Channel. I caught the gaze of a different cousin, with pockmarked cheeks and unruly eyebrows, whom I’d met that morning. He extended a plastic bag filled with conical ‘opihi shells, redolent of brine and algae. “Like try?” he asked.
“She no like,” said another cousin, or uncle. “She’s one chicken.”
While they weren’t wrong, their judgment only emboldened my resolve. I was stubborn, and starving, and missing my mother terribly. I was there for my Grams, a spitfire Hawaiian, who’d insisted she…
