Makai

Employing the voice of a 50-year-old plainspoken Chinese-Hawaiian woman looking back on her life, Tyau (A Little Too Much Is Enough) affectingly follows the friendship and romantic rivalries of two women whose closely connected lives revolve around the period of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Narrator Alice Lum is the most sturdy and sensible of the two friends who, 35 years before, attended high school in Honolulu together. Annabel Lee is the pretty, impulsive one, who first gains the attention of Alice's heartthrob, Sammy Woo, the slop boy at Annabel's father's Chinatown restaurant. After the war, Sammy eventually marries Alice, and they have two daughters. They move makai (toward the sea), to Maui, where Alice almost dies in a flash flood, and then back to Hawaii. The affection between her best friend and her husband continues to rankle Alice as she strives to make sense of their entanglements in her honest and amusing narrative, peppered with pidgin words and phrases. The romantic caprices of her daughter, Beatrice, an inspections officer who has left her husband and baby in order to move back home with Annabel's son, Wick, further complicate Alice's domestic upheavals, while she nervously anticipates the glamorous Annabel's sporadic visits from the far-flung places where she, too, has gone makai. Tyau enters the world of Alice Lum with unsentimental empathy, yet Alice is never allowed to have her say in confronting the manipulative Annabel Lee, and she remains disappointingly passive as events unfold around her. And while the wartime atmosphere is evoked quite strongly at first, the defining events of WWII are never pursued beyond the attack on Pearl Harbor. Still, this is a touching story that mirrors the alternating bonds and stresses of many women's friendships, and poignantly evokes the tension between the safety of domestic love and the lure of exotic adventure. (June)