The Marine said his name was Dusty. She said hers was Laila, which was the name on the fake ID Kareena presented to the bouncer at the Wave Waikiki. If Crystal hadn’t led the way in a tube top…
I wrote the first draft of this story ten years ago. I don’t recall a specific incident that inspired it, but I think it might have been a trip back to Honolulu from New York in the months following 9/11 that got the wheels turning, triggering a memory of an encounter I’d had with a man who was in the army when I was in middle school. I’d gone to a reggae concert with a bunch of friends and he cornered me.
The one aspect of the initial draft of the story that has really stayed the same all these years is the ending. I knew this character was going to wind up where she does. I was always interested in her desire to “belong,” and the way in which these two characters from vastly different places share this longing, and how problematic that is in the context of militarism and settler colonialism in Hawai’i.
During the writing process, I struggled to piece together details from memory since I couldn’t access two of the major locations; nor could I contact the people who had shown or taken me to these places. Taking creative liberties with respect to locations and timelines in a place like Hawai’i was a very uncomfortable experience—but, as a good writing friend advised, I had to lean into the discomfort. The feeling was integral to the story.
Writing a teenager’s perspective was another challenge I wanted to meet. Her loneliness and the roots of it were important to explore, and while the adult writer part of me wanted to arm her with a stronger political consciousness, a sense of self, a friend she could trust, she just didn’t possess them at this point in her life.
SHIVANI MANGHNANI grew up in Honolulu, Hawai’i, and now lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has been recognized by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, MacDowell, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Instituto Sacatar, VONA, and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in Boston Review and Hyphen.
