Daily Archives: March 12, 2015

Dancing with Seaweed

Report on a cultural event

My face felt raw as I trekked through the February blizzard to Alumnae Ballroom, where a hula dancing workshop was being held by Wellesley’s Hui O Hawai’i Club. Eventually, I arrived, apprehensive and snow-dusted. There were three other students there, including the teacher, Emily, a Wellesley student in the Hawai’i Club. Emily was from Hawai’i and had taken hula lessons growing up, as many Hawai’ian kids do. She handed each of us a long floral skirt to wear over our jeans and sweatpants. I couldn’t help but feel like a gawky little girl playing dress-up.

I’ve experienced the very same impostor syndrome every time I’ve visited Hawai’i. Four years ago, my dad moved to Hale’iwa, Hawai’i, a touristy country town on the north shore of Oahu. Spending time in Hawai’i has always made me slightly uncomfortable; I’m not a tourist, but I’m certainly not kama’aina, a resident of the islands. Hawai’ian culture is extraordinarily welcoming—Oahu translates literally to “gathering place”—but I can’t help but feel the uncomfortable reverberations of colonialism all around me. By being present, I’m participating in the massive tourist industry driven by colonialism and cultural appropriation. I decided to venture out through the snow to the hula workshop that February day because I wanted to engage in more appreciation of Hawai’ian culture, and less appropriation of it. Hula is still very much a vital element of Hawai’ian culture, not simply a gimmick used to please tourists or exoticize Hawai’ians. Hula is a hymn linking the present to the past, a shared ritual that transcends generations.

The hula workshop began with introductions and watching a video of three Hawai’i Club members performing a slow and elegant hula dance in the living room of a Wellesley residence hall. The dancers were dressed casually—no campy grass skirts or Western caricatures of Hawai’ian culture to be seen. “The song is about seaweed,” Emily explained to us, giggling as she pointed to a sheet of translated lyrics she’d printed out, “Hawai’ian music is always about nature. Even if it’s about love, it’s expressed through nature.” Each of the dancers’ synchronized movements and gestures told a story.

After we’d spent several minutes being mesmerized by the tiny, pixellated dancers on Emily’s dim laptop screen and swaying to the tinny music drifting from the meager speakers, Emily beckoned us to get up. She told us that we would be learning the dance performed by the girls in the video we’d watched, as it was slow, simple, and repetitive relative to many modern hula dances. She started by teaching us the building blocks of hula, most of which centered around swaying hip movements and subtle steps taken with bent knees. Little by little, we learned several variations of the kaholo, a series of steps to the side. “Step right, left, right, tap!” Emily called to us as we clumsily mimicked her graceful, flowing motions. I found it to be infinitely harder than it looked—step gracefully, but keep your knees bent to emphasize the sway of your hips, don’t fall behind!

Next, we learned the ‘ami and the ‘uwehe, swinging our hips in synchronized figure eights and popping our heels up from underneath our voluminous skirts. Soon enough, Emily told us it was time to learn the arm movements that accompany the dance steps. I wasn’t so sure I felt ready for this just yet—the gesturing of the hands is what really tells the story, and I didn’t want to destroy the beautiful flow of the melody’s tale. It took a lot of coordination to try storytelling with my hands while dancing with my feet; to mimic a wave with my palms while doing a sharp ‘uwehe with my heels. I felt like a cartoon character in fast-forward as I skittered around the floor: the dance didn’t seem so slow anymore.

The dance accompanies the song “Ka Uluwehi O Ke Kai,” composed by Edith Kanakaole; the title translates to “Plants of the Sea.” The song begins with the singer’s gentle voice crooning to a plucked refrain which repeats often, stitching the song together. The verse translates to “Such a delight to see / The great big ocean / So familiar and very cherished / With its fragrance of the lîpoa,” expressing affection for the sea and its lîpoa (a type of seaweed). Hawai’ian looks like an intimidating language to American eyes, endless strings of vowels punctuated by glottal stops, but upon hearing the words spoken, the enchanting phonetics snap into clarity. The words themselves become music.

As we went, Emily explained to us the meaning of the dance we were learning, folding tidbits of information into her explanations of the moves themselves. The song and dance are about picking strands of seaweed off the beach as though they were flowers. One of the gestures repeated throughout the dance involved holding our hands out in front of us, then flipping them over and drawing our fingers together to form flowers with our hands, bouquets of seaweed we’d just plucked off a faraway beach.

Before long, Emily checked her watch and announced that there were only five minutes left of the hula workshop. We had only learned the steps to the first two verses of the song, but since the song’s melody repeated so consistently, Emily encouraged us to run through each verse twice so that we could dance for the entire song (even if the moves weren’t entirely accurate). Though challenging, the full run-through of the dance was a lot of fun. The lilting lyrics created a lighthearted atmosphere that set the stage for our dancing.

How ironic, I thought, that I should feel so much more connected to Hawai’ian culture in the middle of a Massachusetts blizzard than I do when I’m 5,000 miles away in my parents’ mainland bubble on Oahu. It’s the people that make a culture real, not the place. Upon examining a translation of the lyrics after the workshop was over, I learned what the last two verses guiding us through the dance meant: the words eulogized the diverse species of seaweed found in Hawai’i—limu kohu, lîpoa, lîpalu—as though they were old friends frolicking in the sea mist. Nature is revered Hawai’ian culture, and there is no better way to understand this than to tell stories of their friendship with your own two hands—and your feet, and your hips, and your bent knees.

The Magic of Dali

Report on a cultural event

Two summers ago, I visited Dali with a friend to breathe the fresh air of this small town in southwestern China. I had long heard of Cangshan Mountain wreathed in mist, Erhai Lake decorated with bright flowers and cacti, and the stone walls and stone-paved roads of the ancient town. I had also learned of Dali’s reputation as a bohemian hub that attracts artists, poets, vagabonds, and hippies from in and outside China. But being a natural skeptic, I had some reservations. I wondered if “the bohemian air” was limited to the circle of self-branded hippies who lived there, and the rest of it was just another block in building a fantasy for tourists and one more way to attract business.

I found that Dali has lived up to its reputation.

Upon arrival I was in fact quite disappointed by the town. It was raining, and on the streets there weren’t many people but a lot of litter carried over by the winds. Pools of rain water reflected fake-old architecture and chintzy lights from shops that seemed to be selling cheap, inauthentic souvenirs. Full of grievances, we ducked into a small restaurant on the side of the road.

The owner/chef/waiter, DaHai, seated us, told us what ingredients he had that day and asked us how we would like the food prepared, before going into the kitchen to cook. He came out with two bowls of delicious fried rice, sat down at our table and started talking to us.

Learning that it was our first day in town, he recommended a list of food, sites, and other fun things that we should try. While we were eating, two friends of his came in to practice singing before their debut performance at a pub later that evening. DaHai brought out his guitar too, and as the sun began to set, we all started singing along in the small courtyard filled with delicious smells.

The two hours at DaHai’s restaurant completely flipped my first impression of Dali. And unlike in most cities in China, where such precious moments are rare cases of serendipity, in Dali they happen on a regular basis. I soon learned that, despite the encroachment of cheap souvenirs, the town is still filled with quality shops, bookstores, restaurants, and pubs, all with a hip twist. Most people, residents and visitors alike, are so friendly that it’s astonishingly easy to start conversations and make friends.

Every evening, the town’s main street turns into a marketplace with dozens of little stalls on the sidewalks. Among the vendors are local craftsmen, artists who have moved here, travelers who sell trinkets to fund future trips. People walk up and down the street, looking for good stuff and good chats. At first I was a bit reluctant to talk to the vendors, clinging to my big-city mentality that conversation often serves as the best sales strategy, but I soon realized that it was ok if I wasn’t going to buy anything, as long as I had a genuine interest in hearing the vendors’ and fellow shoppers’ stories and sharing my own. In one evening, I probably talked to more strangers than I would have in a whole month in my hometown, a city of eight million.

Walking past the night market, my friend and I ran into a street performance. There were about five or six musicians, including two white guys. With one guitar, one bass, two drums, one accordion, and many voices, they were belting out folk songs. A guitar case was laid open in front of them, as is the norm for all street performances, but they seemed too into the music to care about how much money was in there. Behind them, a row of listeners sat on the stone platform, most with a beer in hand, some singing along, others using their phones or cameras to record the performance. We sat down too, and joined the ensemble. The performers and listeners were always exchanging glances, smiling and nodding at each other as if they had been friends for a long time. Several times, one naughty singer replaced the lyrics with his own improvisation, which evoked a hearty laugh in the group. It seemed to me that the awkwardness common among strangers vanished in the air, and everyone sang along like old friends.

 

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Street Performance in Dali

To say that Dali is a paradise on earth is romanticizing it. My initial disappointment, although later outweighed by my affection for Dali, still reflects the troublesome reality: the ancient town is bit by bit commercialized and waves of tourists are putting pressure on the local traditions as well as the bohemian way of life. A hippie couple we befriended told us that they were planning to move away soon because Dali was losing the charm that had attracted them in the first place.

But Dali does have a kind of magic that softens people and “opens the door to their hearts”, as the Chinese expression goes. Of course, the resident artist community in Dali is a self-selected group with bohemian spirits. But haven’t most of the visitors, like I have, been conditioned to be on our guard against everyone else? The country’s recent history definitely contributed to the low level of trust: the Cultural Revolution that praised liars and informers, the lack of market regulations that led to an explosion of selling schemes and counterfeit goods, not to mention all the abduction and fraud cases rampant in local and national news. Having grown up with the maxim “don’t talk to strangers”, why were we able to shed our habitual vigilance so quickly?

It occurred to me that perhaps people come to Dali to let go of their constant alertness, to feel the geniality of this place and also to be part of it. As much as we normally avoid talking to strangers and consider those who do so suspicious, deep down there is still a desire for serendipitous encounters as well as sincere and agreeable conversations with strangers.

I’m glad that there is a place like Dali, where communication is not something to be wary of but to be longed for, where I can wander aimlessly, knowing that somewhere around the corner there will be a group of strangers who will talk, laugh, and sing with me.