Category Archives: Family News

Community, Family News

Kamau

Today we’re talking about Richard’s grandson Kapono, 18, who just graduated from Kamehameha Schools and plans to attend the University of Hilo at Hilo in the fall, where he’ll major in performing arts.

And he’s not just sitting around in the meantime. Next week he stars in the play Kamau, up at Jason Scott Lee’s Ulua Theatre in Volcano. (Though we call Richard’s grandson “Kapono” around here, on the program his name reads Christian Pa).

The play tells a story about a Hawaiian family torn between preserving their traditions and surviving in the modern world, and it revolves around three cousins.

Kapono plays the main lead character. Ron Serrao, who has done numerous local Hawai‘i plays and appeared on TV, plays the second cousin.

Well-known actor and Volcano resident Jason Scott Lee plays the third cousin. “He’s really good to work with,” says Kapono, “because of what he can do. He really gets into his character. He can change his emotions on the flip of a dime.”

“He’s actually kind of challenging to work with just because he’s so good at what he does.”

The play, by Hawaiian playwright Alani Apio, tackles some complicated subjects related to Hawaiian sovereignty and family.

“It’s about a Hawaiian family who’s living in a shack on the beach,” explains Kapono, “and one day they receive this bad news that they’re going to be kicked off their land. It bounces back and forth between the current time and the past. It’s kind of about standing up for what you believe in. It communicates what being Hawaiian is, and how we as Hawaiians today have to adapt to the modern world and western influences.”

The play’s title, “Kamau,” means to “carry on,” and Kapono says the play has a really strong, good message. “It gives a multi-point of view of what it is to be Hawaiian,” he says. “What we as Hawaiians should be doing. We’re not going to forget about our culture and what not. We have to keep moving forward, stick together, and work together. If we going to separate, then things are just going to fall apart.”

Tickets to the intimate theatre venue are available online and selling fast. Opening night is already sold out. Buy tickets here if you’re interested. Advance tickets are also available at Basically Books, Kea‘au Natural Foods and Volcano Store.

Kapono says the play is indescribable. “You have to see it. It’s very emotional and spiritual, and for people who are Hawaiian—even if they’re not Hawaiian—people are really moved by this story.”

“It’s a really incredible play.”

The details: August 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 7:30 p.m. at Ulua Theatre. 19-4325 Haunani Road in Volcano Village.

Advance tickets $12 general, $10 students & seniors. At the door, $15 and $10.

Family News

On My Own

June left for the mainland yesterday to visit our son Brian, his wife Kris and their two boys. Brian is a Apache helicopter pilot and is stationed at Ft. Hood, Texas.

Papa’s buddy Gunner is now a little over two years old and can’t stop chattering. (I’m Papa.) Gunner’s new brother Hunter is two months old and having some health issues. June went up to help Kris as they work through this. Kris’s parents, Ron and Etsuko, took the first shift—they were there for Hunter’s birth and just came home a week ago.

This is the first day that June’s been gone and I am having to adjust to her absence. I can remember the first time she was away from home for any length of time. I wanted to prove that I could take care of everything and my strategy was very simple: Don’t use too many dishes. Keep things simple.  Only one utensil out at a time.

Once I got the first couple of days under my belt I looked around and decided I could handle the house plants, too. So I put one of the hanging baskets in the sink and turned on the water, because I remember June watering the plants that way. When I got ready to hang it back up, something didn’t look quite right. I looked closer and discovered it was a plastic plant!

I remember telling that story to my old friend Bill Stearns a few years back. We were on the same flight to Honolulu a few years ago and he told me stories of the old days of cropdusting in Hawai‘i. He was the original cropduster and the first to use an airplane to spray and fertilize sugar cane. His company was called Murray Air.

What he was doing was so new and so unique that the Ka‘u sugar plantation boss gave him a cottage next to the Catholic priest. Bill told me how he would get himself all slicked up and travel the long way from Ka‘u to Hilo in order to meet the Hawaiian girl who would later become his wife.

They were married for more than 50 years, and she had just passed away. Sitting next to him on that flight to Honolulu, I knew he was having a hard time adjusting. So I told him my story about watering the plastic plant as a way of illustrating how we sometimes take them for granted. He could really relate; he laughed so loud that he choked.

Bill and I really liked each other. When we first got into the banana business we used his company to spray our crops. When we got behind in payment, June and I worked out a repayment schedule with him and paid back every penny on time. And when I was sponsored to join the Rotary Club more than 20 years ago, Bill did not know about it in advance, but he stood up and told everybody loudly that he was vouching for my character. He did not have to do that and I never forgot the gesture.

Another time, at an annual meeting of the Farm Credit Association, I was nominated to the board of directors. When I found out it was for Bill’s seat, I withdrew my name. He will always be one of my all-time favorite people.

June will be gone for at least a month and maybe longer, so I’m keeping her in the loop at work by copying her in on all the emails.

As for me, I have to fend for myself. I am taking this opportunity to eat at every single lunch place in Hilo. And I’m looking forward to cooking small meals for myself. Not as a chore, but as an opportunity to try different things.

Family News

Music Man

Richard and June were thrilled to watch their grandson Kapono Pa star in the Kamehameha Schools musical “The Music Man” last month. He played Mayor Shinn.

“I auditioned for the role of Harold,” he says, “but there was pretty much no one else who could play the role of mayor the way I played Harold. I had the really loud voice and I could yell a lot, which was basically my role—to yell at everyone.”

Richard and June say their grandson Kapono Pa has always been a performer.

“When he was five years old he would cut small pieces of colored paper into confetti,” says Richard. “He’d throw it into the air to mark the entrance of whichever make believe character was about to enter our living room, knowing full well that he would have to pick up all the bits of paper.
   

“And when he was about 10,” he says, “he used our video camera to make hilarious video productions with his sister Kimberly.”

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Kapono says his grandparents were proud of him for his performance in The Music Man. “They didn’t know I could act like that,” he says. “I don’t think any of my family knew I was capable of that. Yelling and screaming. I never rehearsed at home so they didn’t have any idea what my character was about.”

The Kamehameha Schools student, who will be a senior this year, wrote about the experience of acting in The Music Man for his college applications. “It was one of the bigger things I did this year,” he says, “and I am extremely proud I did it.

“At first I was afraid I wasn’t going to get a part,” he says. “For the audition you had to first learn a dance, even if you weren’t going to be dancing. You had to learn a dance in 15-20 minutes, then go to the front of the room and perform it in front of everybody in the room. We’d get a scene out of the musical and have 15-20 minutes to examine it, study it and bring your own character into it.”

June, who loves musicals, has always given Kapono CDs from musicals.  “Last year we took Kapono and went to New York City,” says Richard, “and we took in The Color Purple, Chicago, Phantom and The Producers.”

Kapono says going to New York City really inspired him in terms of acting. “We went to see all those big famous plays everybody hears about. It got me to thinking that I really like this. It’s not a normal thing everybody gets to do, so if you get a chance do it….”

“I’m ready for next year,” he says. “I want to do it again already.”

While he really enjoys acting, and hopes to do more of it, his college plans are to study business and entrepreneurship. “So when it’s my turn to take over the farm,” he says, “I’m ready.”  — posted by Leslie Lang

Family News, Health

Through the Window

After we did that post about his mom the other day, Richard and I got to talking. I was saying how much I admire Mrs. Ha’s commitment to stay fit vs. letting herself get creaky and “old.”

And then Richard told me a great story. He said he picked his mother up one morning a few years ago, when she was in her late 70s, and she told him she’d locked herself out of the house the night before.

He asked her how she got in. It turns out she rolled over an empty 55-gallon drum and climbed up on it so she could climb in the house through the window.

I have a similar story about my grandmother. She, too, was in her late 70s when, one day, there was a big earthquake here in Hilo. I was living in California then, but I heard about it on the news the next day and I called to ask her about it.

“Where were you when it happened?” I asked.

She and her sister had found themselves locked out of her sister’s house, she told me, and she was climbing in through a window. She was halfway through the window when the earthquake hit.

I love two things about that story. One, that she was still climbing through windows in her late 70s. And two, that it was no big deal to her and I wouldn’t even have known about it except for that earthquake.

Richard’s mom Florence just ordered a lawn mower, the old-fashioned push kind. She purposely got that kind because she wants to get some exercise when she mows the lawn. Pretty impressive for someone who’s about to turn 83. May we all take such good care of ourselves in our later years (or now!), and do as well.

P.S. Check out our friend Sonia Martinez’s new food blog, especially her post about Richard’s tomatoes and her recipe for roasted tomato sauce.

Bananas, Family News, Health

Meet Florence Ha

When I chatted with Richard’s mom, Florence Ha—who still works on the farm at age 82—I realized that her family’s history tells some of Hawai‘i’s story.

Florence’s mother, Kamado Kina, came to the Islands from Okinawa as a picture bride.

“She was supposed to marry somebody else,” Florence told me. “But when she got off the boat and saw the person she was supposed to marry, she didn’t like him. And, you know, it was a disgrace to go back.”

It worked out. She met Matsuzo Higa, who had come from Okinawa to work on a sugar plantation. They married and had nine children.

Florence was their third child. She grew up in Honolulu and then lived for several years on Moloka‘i, where her father farmed, raising watermelons he sent to market in Honolulu by barge.

After the family returned to Honolulu, Florence worked at a cousin’s café. A young man who lived upstairs came down for breakfast every morning. That was Richard Ha, Sr., and they were married in 1944.

Chef_alan_and_grandma_ha_2Florence and Richard had six children, and Richard, Jr.—our Richard—was the firstborn.

“Of all my children, he got into most of the trouble. Oooooh,” she said, remembering. Still, she said, she knew he was very smart.

“I didn’t think he was going to be a farmer. At first I thought he might be a lawyer. But when he came back from the service and saw us struggling, that’s when he came and helped us on the poultry farm.”

And then he started another farm. “I helped him. This and that—I helped him box the bananas and grade the bananas. Whatever needed to be done.”

She’s modest about her help, but Richard stresses how hard she worked.

“She’s been working with us from day one,” he said, “all the way to now. And she is the person most responsible for us being where we are today.

“Mom was the person in the early days who, when we needed help, she was there. Not only eight hours, but 12, 15, 20 hours. Whatever it took. Back when we started up it was seven days a week, for years.”

He told me that in those early years, she would work at their Waiakea Uka farm during the day. When that work day was done at 6:00, he’d bring a trailer load of bananas from his new farm in Kapoho and she would stay for hours, packing those bananas so the trailer was empty and ready to go back to Kapoho early in the morning.

“When I think about it now, I don’t know when she slept,” he said.

“She was always the hardest worker of all of us,” he said. “She was an example. Some of us were marketers and talkers, and she was a doer.”

Though she’ll be 83 next month, she still works from 7 a.m. to 11 in the mornings, “every day that I feel like going. Richard told me, ‘I don’t want you to retire.’ I’m working in the nursery and I feel kind of bad, because I hardly do anything now. I don’t feel I’m doing enough. But he says he doesn’t want me to retire because he wants me to get exercise instead of just sitting home and doing nothing.”

“People would tell me, Don’t work so hard. I said, I’m not working, I’m exercising.”

She talked about all the exercise equipment her son has bought her over the years, which she uses. “Exercise machines, weight-lifting machines, bicycles. One day one of the bishops came to my house, and said, where did you get all this equipment? I told him my son got it for me, and he said that’s the best thing he could do.”

Richard joked that he gives her the equipment because it keeps her able to work. “Cheap labor. But of course it’s not that. Mainly it’s for health.”

He said he wants her to exercise for her health, and to keep coming to work to keep active. “Even if she just comes to work for one hour a day,” he said. “Whatever it takes to keep on going. It keeps her young.”

He talked about a time when she decided to retire and stopped working at the farm.

“It was maybe more than ten years ago,” he said. “She started getting fat, really sluggish, not happy. When she started coming again, she slimmed down. I was able to pick her up and talk story with her, tell her where the farm was going, this is what we’re doing. She’s like a sounding board.”

They both told me that that’s the part of the day they enjoy the most—the mornings, when he picks her up at her Waiakea Uka home and they talk on the way to the farm in Pepe‘ekeo.

“He tells me what he’s thinking of doing (at the farm),” she said, “things like that. That’s what I really enjoy.”

Richard said he gets his sense of humor from her and sometimes they share a good laugh.

“She loves to laugh,” he said. “We have a good time. Every once in awhile I’ll crack a joke and crack her up.”

She’s at home right now, recovering from foot surgery, but said she’s going back to work this week.

“I know Richard’s trying so hard,” she said, “so it makes me feel good.” Her hard work at the farm, she said, has always been “a real labor of love.”

Bike, Family News, New York City, Travel

Taking the Lead

2 Comments

Richard and June have left the premises. They are accompanying grandson Kapono Pa (that’s Kimo and Tracy’s son) to New York City. I’ll let Kapono tell you what he’s going to be doing there.

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Kapono writes:
I am 16 years old and this coming year I will be a junior at Kamehameha Schools Hawaii Campus. The thing that I am going to is a sort of leadership conference where I will be mainly looking at the aspects of Global Business and Entrepreneurship. I was invited by the people at LeadAmerica last year.

I was able to choose from a variety of things to study such as Medical Studies, Crime Scene Investigation, etc. that were to take place at a variety of cities across the U.S. (my conference just so happened to take place in New York).

For the next 10 days I will be with other kids from around the U.S. (possibly the world) learning about global business and entrepreneurship. I think we will be creating a “mock” business plan and going through a sort of fast-forward simulation of how it all works and what happens. We will also have field trips to various locations in the city such as the financial district (NYMX, World Trade Center, Wall Street, Museum of Finance, etc.) Liberty Island and The Statue of Liberty, and Sony Wonder Tech Laboratory. We will also listen to some key speakers and learn from their experiences. That’s the gist of it.

Leslie interjects: Sounds like a chip off the old block, doesn’t he?

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And then Richard picks up the story: What are the chances of spotting a Hamakua Springs bumper sticker on a seat at George Bush International Airport in Houston as we’re changing planes? Could it be George Herbert’s son, George W., is thinking of visiting us to go mountain bike riding?

We took a New York City, double-decker open-air bus tour, getting the lay of the land. We had to occasionally duck branches and low-hanging traffic lights. The weather is beautiful–in the high 70s. The city is cleaner than we had imagined.

The three of us spent five hours, on and off the bus, cruising the city. We walked around a block in Greenwich Village on Bleeker Steet. No wonder that street name sounded so familiar to us–that’s where the New York office of the Rainforest Alliance is located. In 1993, they awarded our farm the first “ECO O.K.” certification in the world.

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We knew this was going to be a different experience when we found ourselves in a 150-foot line waiting for a cab. The cab driver turned out to be an easygoing person from Bangladesh. He talked about immigrants and how they manage to survive in the city, all while he was jockeying for space against the other traffic. He and a van dueled at low speeds to get ahead of each other for about a hundred yards. Finally the van got a nose in front and cut him off. It seemed to me that our driver gave in good-naturedly.

But a short while later he spotted an opening, because of a break in the off-street parking, and shot in front and regained the lead for good. All this was going on while he was carrying on this easy conversation. Highly entertaining. If you watch carefully, it is going on all the time by bicyclists, pedestrians, even elevator riders.

It’s not easy to maintain the Hilo pace here. But we’re trying.

We ate dinner at a five-story Appleby up the street. The food is generally pretty good and plentiful. I’ll have to do 50 minutes at the fitness center and hope for the best. I hope their scale measures to the 10ths.

As they say, it’s “the city that doesn’t sleep.” At 8:00 at night, the line at Starbucks was longer than at 8 in the morning. At midnight on a Tuesday, Times Square is packed as much as at 5:00 p.m. pau hana (after work).

Kapono’s conference starts tomorrow and we’ll drop him off at Fordham, which is close to the Bronx Zoo. The conference finishes on the 25th. We’ll just have to keep ourselves occupied.

Here’s Kapono and June at Times Square:

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