 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha, my name is Roger Jelonek. I'm the host of Think Tech Book Worlds. And my guest today is Malia Mbaleck-McManus, the author of Dragon Fruit, a historical novel. And so here we are, Malia. Thank you for having me. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thank you. Tell us a bit about yourself. You are actually pretty well known anyway, but for the purposes of this interview. Oh, you're very kind. Thank you. I was born and raised in Hawaii, and my father's family is from Hawaii. My mom is from Nebraska. And after doing some time away, I came back and worked as a reporter for about 10 years, a reporter and anchor. And I've continued to do a bit of television and a bit of writing. And yeah, now you live here with my family, my husband, our two boys. You have two boys, yeah. Yeah, ages 9 and 12, yes. You burst into print. Do you want to show them? Sure, yes. It's been a few years. People call it the Hawaiian House, which is a selection of your favorite houses, all the most beautiful houses, published by Abrams about 12 years ago. Just give us a little bit of a story on that. You know, it was a collaboration with Jean Jean Bauer and Lenny Morris, who's an incredibly talented photographer. And the three of us just thought it would be fun to take a look at some various houses around the state. And it's been a while. I think it's been about 12 years, I think. And it was a work of love, and we had a great time doing it. And it was with Abrams out of New York. Well, Abrams is a major art book publisher. Yes, we were very... Pretty grand entry you did as the publisher. Definitely. And it was thanks to Lenny. Lenny had the credentials and the connections to get Abrams. So that was all thanks to Lenny. Yeah, I actually just did a book signing for my next book in Kailua at a wonderful book store. And the owner, Pat Benning, was just saying that some German tourists had come in and bought a few copies that very day. So it's still selling. So that's great. So how do you get from that to historical model? Yeah, it was a circuitous route. I had two children, and I had stopped working full time in the news. And I had some time while they were napping. And I started to think about stories that I had grown up with that I had stuck with me and experiences. And I started to think I had always dreamt of doing fiction and been a big fiction reader, particularly historical fiction. And I would take the children, first my first son, and then when I had both, to Bishop Museum a lot, because it was cool and in the shade. And I would walk them around in their strollers and just look at all of these gorgeous objects, the feather capes. And then I would also sometimes go to Iolani Palace. I went again and again during both pregnancies just because, again, it was cool. And I would listen to the different docents tell the stories of the various rooms. And it all just started to brew in my head. It took a long time to put it together because of the children and just taking a tremendous amount of time to do research. But it came together in this, in Dragon Fruit. Just give us the premise of the book. Yeah. So it's set between the years of 1891 and 1900, which as we all know is an incredibly tumultuous time here and in the overthrow. And it is from the viewpoint of a woman named Eliza, whose mother is from Whalingstock and his father is a machinery plantation stock. And I chose her as the narrator because I wanted to talk about these events. But I felt that it wasn't my place to talk about them from a Native Hawaiian point of view because I'm not, sadly, Native Hawaiian. And so I felt it was important for the narrator to be outside of that point of view but have some credibility to it. And so in the book, she is childhood friends with Princess Kailani, which is consistent with, in the research I did when Kailani was a child, you'll see a lot of photographs. And she very much was raised, you know, with a lot of the machinery and plantation children around her as playmates and at her birthday parties. And so Eliza became my narrator and it tells a story of sort of the loss for the wider community during the overthrow and then her personal story, which involves some pretty dramatic events that take her to Molokai in back. Just to, by way of background further, getting into the story, just run through the overthrow from the point of view that you took, which is an unusual one. Yeah. So in the book, her father is friends with and close to an ally of Kalakawa and feels a loyalty there. And so he chooses to not support the overthrow, which other plantation families, not all plantation families, but some plantation families were espousing. And so he's sort of on the losing side, if you will. And then after the overthrow, suffers sort of the consequences of that. And that's based a little bit in some distant family history of my father's family. And again, these are distant relatives who were not plantation people, but I had always been told had allied themselves more with that point of view. And that had stuck with me. What would that be like to be, you know, Anglo-Saxon white American and be choosing to side with the king and with the royal family and with the queen? And that was the premise, the political premise. And then the next, there's a subplot with Eliza and the Chinese element? Yes. And that was a lot of fun to write. There's a romance, and she is in love with basically the boy next door. And he is the product of a Hawaiian Howley mother and a Chinese father. And, you know, the book is dedicated to Heather Ho. And she was a best friend growing up. And, you know, we lost her in New York in 9-11. So I always wanted to dedicate it to her because she brought so much joy and excitement to life. But I also, because it was going to, I always knew, be dedicated to her. I wanted to bring in sort of a Chinese element to it and look at the Chinese community in Hawaii. And that was so much fun getting to ask friends about their stories and try to bring that element into it. And there were some real characters. The character in this book is fictional, but there was a lot of real life inspiration. There were some amazing stories of men who came over and made fortunes here in Hawaii and were very politically powerful. And I wanted to include that. So her love interest in the beginning of the book is the product of that. And his father was very close to Kawakawa, through the opium trade. What's the background there? Well, and I do want to caution. I don't want to present myself as sort of a specialist in Hawaiian history because I do not have a degree in it. And I simply sat down and read everything I could get my hands on. But my understanding from my reading and my research is that, you know, opium was legal in Hawaii and at one point there was a permit that was issued to, you know, sell it legally. And that the Chinese community in Hawaii did an amazing job of thinking through how to go after that permit for it to be sold legally. There is a lot of talk in the history books about how it was not contained to the Chinese community that, you know, this was a really profitable element of the economy here and in California. Actually, there was a lot of that going on there from what I've read. And then it did become illegal at some point, yeah. Eliza, the heroine's father, had a different future for her than transpired. What was, I mean, it was an arranged marriage she had in mind, but almost an arranged marriage. Right. Well, so the opening pages, you know, from the opening pages that Eliza basically has a choice presented by her father, which I felt was accurate with the times, which is she is pregnant. She's not married. The boy she loves has been sent back to China because of political events here. And she's alone. And so he either presents her with the choice of going back to Boston to some distant relatives and having the child and giving it up to an orphanage and coming back as if, you know, she's been on a trip and never seen the child again. Or he will find a husband for her to make the child legitimate. And she chooses the latter. And that's the beginning of sort of her adventure and, you know, her tragedy, if you will, and her redemption and everything else. And that takes it to Molokai. Yes, exactly. Which was as different then as it is different today. Tell us about Molokai at that time as you describe it in the story. Yeah. Well, again, I don't want to put myself for it as a specialist on Molokai, but I just read absolutely everything I could find and it was completely fascinating. And some of the events in the book actually happened and are based on letters that I read. I have a scene in which cows are jumping off of the path down to Kalapapa and exploding in sort of pink clouds. That actually really happened. And that was, you know, written about in quite a few places that I was able to do research. And I found it just fascinating that this actually happened. And that's the funny thing about so many of the events. But so many of the events and instances and descriptions in the book are true. And, you know, truth is stranger than fiction. It's hard to believe, you know. So she goes to Molokai and why does she go to Molokai? The husband he has found for her who is willing to be paid off to marry her is the manager of a ranch above Kalapapa. And so she is thrown into that world which is very different from sort of the palace life that she had been a part of here in Honolulu. The house consists of one room is how I remember. Yes. And is, again, very consistent with what I read about what Molokai was like at that time. And, of course, there was leprosy going on and that's part of the book as well and the tragedy of that. And, you know, also I think I tried to balance out some of the harder things that are in the book with some of the joy. And, you know, Hawaii and Honolulu is a very, very, it still is a beautiful place but it was a phenomenally beautiful place at the end of the 19th century. So I did a lot of reading. They talked about how you could walk, if you were able to. You could walk on the top of tree tops from Niuwana to the palace on unbroken canopy of monkey pod trees and that really stuck with my mind and is in there. And a lot of the legends that I grew up, you know, a lot of the stories I think we all grew up with at camp in Hawaii and stuff, you know, the stories and the different gods and I wanted to incorporate all of that into the story. I was fascinated in the Molokai section about her relationship to the local kids. Tell us a little about that. You know, well, one of the things that the missionaries did really, really well from what I read is that the level of literacy was very, very high in Hawaii at that time. So I did want to balance out some of the things that might have been a more negative impact of the missionaries with, you know, really high. And so I wanted to write the children on Molokai as being, you know, reflective of the fact that they were sort of caught between these different worlds that were going on. On one hand, the native Hawaiians were losing so much and there was so much disease. On the other hand, they were going to these schools and I felt like the children that she would have known there would have been reflective of these children who could navigate many of these different worlds and were needing to, you know. I feel when you read about that time it makes you very, very sad about what happened. But you also, I think, read about different characters who became tremendously strong and tremendously talented leaders in the Hawaiian community because they rose to the occasion, you know. Well, we'll leave Molokai and we'll go back to Honlulu in a moment. Thank you. This is Stink Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Good afternoon. My name is Howard Wigg. I have the exquisite pleasure of hosting a Stink Tech Hawaii program titled Cold Greening. I have some of Hawaiians and the mainland's most fascinating energy efficiency experts as my guest and each one of them brings us a bit closer to realizing Hawaiians' goal of 100% clean energy by the year 2045. For the first time, Stink Tech Hawaiians participating in an online web-based fundraising campaign to raise $40,000, give thanks to Stink Tech. We'll run only during the month of November and you can help. Please donate what you can so that Stink Tech Hawaii can continue to raise public awareness and promote civic engagement through free programming like mine. I've already made my donation and look forward to yours. Please send your tax deductible contribution by going to this website. www.thanksforstinktech.causedox.com on behalf of the community enriched by Stink Tech Hawaiians 30-plus weekly shows. Thank you for your generosity. This is Stink Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. Here we are. Back again. We were on Malakai. Now we're going to go back to Honolulu because the heroine manages to get away, gets away in a pretty interesting way. Just tell us how she got away. Should I save it for people who haven't read it? I don't know if it's a surprise exactly. I mean, leave it... I guess I can say it involves her, you know, experiencing what being in Kalapapa is like and what it was like at that point. And I got to visit Kalapapa and actually stay with patients thanks to a group of friends who were traveling together. And I know Atomsen very kindly took a group of us there. And I got to spend, I think, a few nights and really see what it would be like to have lived there. And that was amazing, and something I definitely wanted to put in the book. That's pretty unusual. I don't think... It's very unusual people to stay over there. Yeah, well it was very generous and the patients were amazing. And so, you know, open with their stories and I did want to include sort of some of just more of the impressions and the feeling of the place and what they sort of conveyed in what was the beauty of living there, you know? Yeah. So she gets back to Honolulu. And it's the eve of the overthrow or rather it is the overthrow, really. The eve of the overthrow? Yeah. Let's just tell us about what it was like to research that because how do you select and there's a lot of material on that, a lot of anger about it, obviously. Yeah, and there's almost too much material. I mean, I could have spent another 10 years, you know, because there is so much material. And, you know, I really didn't want to touch anything that was... It is such a hurtful event and I didn't want anyone to feel as if I thought that I was a specialist on it or had the complete understanding of it. So that is why I felt Eliza as if she's an insider and yet she's an outsider and she's telling her sliver of the story. Well, she wasn't a specialist. Right, exactly. She's just experiencing it through her eyes and through her father's position. And, you know, any one of the characters in the book could write the story from their perspective and you could have a completely different history of it. But, you know, I think my biggest hesitation about completing this book was so many friends are native Hawaiian and I would never want the community to feel that anyone had sort of decided that what's their story was mine to tell. But I did feel like the history warrants had as much attention as it can, you know, receive because it's such an important thing that happened and it needs to be talked about. And so I felt as if I wrote it from the perspective of a young, you know, howly girl that, you know, she's seeing it with a tremendous amount of sympathy for what is happening to native Hawaiians, but she herself is not native Hawaiian. So I wanted to make sure the narrator was that. But, yeah, I wanted to handle it with as much respect as I could and so far the reception has been really, really good, which has made me feel good. Well, I can't imagine any native Hawaiian writer wanting to write a book about the overthrow from Elizabeth's point of view. Right, so it's Elizabeth's point of view, or Eliza's rather, Eliza's point of view. Exactly, exactly, yeah. So one thing you told me before we met today was that when you were talking to publishers in New York one story they wanted to take out, which to my mind is, you know, a key to the book is the relationship of Eliza to Kailani. What was their rationale for taking them to Kailani? Actually, there were a few people along the way along this process who suggested taking Kailani out of the book and I did try to rewrite it that way without Kailani and the whole thing just sort of collapsed. It just wasn't a story because without Kailani and that friendship there's no reason Eliza would have the relationships that she has with the royal family who are so prominently involved in this. And I think one or two people said, oh, you know, I don't know if there's sort of a wider audience for a book about Hawaiian royalty in the 19th century but of course the story of the royal family and Hawaiian royalty is the story of the overthrow so there's no separating the two. So I felt like the story wasn't intact without that, yeah. And you have quite a lot of correspondence between Kailani and Eliza. Is that invented? Totally invented. Completely fictional. I did read a lot of Kailani's actual letters to try to get her voice, but yes, they are fictionalized between those two women what I think they would have said to each other. I think that was very successful. Thank you, thank you. I appreciate that. I was looking for the footnotes. No, fiction. But I hope fiction in the true spirit of... I loved reading about Kailani because of course I think every little girl has been raised here. She's such a romantic, beautiful figure but now looking at her through the prism of an adult woman I just loved her letters and her voice because I think that she was sort of a bit of a woman before the times. Her words jumped off of the page and her spirit jumps off of the page and her strength and I think she would have been a really amazing queen. That's surprising to me. It may be as a project for you. I don't think there's a good biography of her and it's odd because or even a novel based directly about her they're usually very sentimental there's a lot of ideology attached to her situation. What do you think? Is it possible? I really enjoyed the books that have been written about her and I was so appreciative of having them and I felt like they gave me a really good sense of who she was. I think actually you've touched on something which in addition to not wanting to sort of appropriate the overthrow as if I knew everything about it I also didn't want to write about that character in a way as if I knew everything about her and so I think having Eliza as the narrator and it being set in a friendship made me feel like it was okay to write about this tremendous real-life human being. I might be a little overwhelmed trying to take on Kailani because she is such an amazing and almost poetic figure in Hawaiian history that I can see why it would be intimidating. Have you seen the films about her? Yes and actually a good friend was involved in the making of that film and I thought the film was lovely. I really enjoyed it. No, I thought what you captured was the sense of two girls who had grown up together and had grown up and had that same kind of intimacy that you could only get from that kind of a long friendship. Yes, that's very kind and I did want that and it is dedicated to Heather Ho and she is one of the people that I feel lucky to have had that kind of friendship with and so I did want to give it that spirit and I hope women when they read this book recognize those best friends that you have that you can really count on and that no matter what happens in your life in the book they are apart for quite a few years but once they are together again they have that same feeling of honesty and complete trust with one another and I did want that to be in the book. You even bring Robert Louis Stevenson into it. And I love him. That must have been fun. Yes, that was so much fun because he was such a fabulous character and I was so thrilled to get to write about him and again very intimidating but you know, why not? Those quotes are real. I've got dialogue from him that is completely fictionalized in that one scene in which they are sort of reunited and then Wano after she's come back from Malakai but I think that the passage of poetry I have him saying is his. So I believe that I mentioned him offering to give a young girl his birthday and I read in several biographies that he had in fact on that in Samoa so a lot of it is based on reality. Oh, he's a fabulous character. Yes, he is. So this somewhat sad book in a way, you know, what's next? You know, it is a sad book and yet I felt at the end by the end that it was happy. I felt as if, well, Eliza I felt had emerged. Satisfyingly sad. Well, I felt like it was for me a bit of what real life would have been like at that point life was hard for women. They were not the creators of their own lives. They were told what they were going to be doing and I feel as if by the end Eliza has become a very strong person in her own right and sort of earned what she has. But now I am working on something that's completely different. It's a young adult and it's set in a museum and it's inspired by having a nine-year-old and a 12-year-old and going to a lot of museums and I started looking for books that I might be able to give my children that would get them to be more interested in going to museums and so I'm working on that. And what fascinates you particularly about museums? I just, my four kids, they have been dragged to every museum. I couldn't get my kids into museums. Yeah, I think they're at the breaking point. It's going to take a book to get them to another museum. I personally love them. They have always been very cooperative. We're starting to reach saturation point to museums so I'm hoping something like this introduces a bit of a sci-fi element to museums. You know, we'll see. I think one of the most fabulous museums is the Bishop Museum. I love the Bishop Museum. Which is a museum of a museum. Yes, yes, yes. It's like a perfect Victorian museum. I agree. Yes, absolutely. No, it's interesting. The person who's going to run it is the one who refurbished it and the new president. Yes. So that doesn't require a lot of research, but it was your agony for the first book, right? Exactly. No, the first book, this was ten years of research and it was like going to law school on an element, a specific period of time. Yes, it was. Yeah, it was. But I loved it and it has made living in Hawaii all the richer for me. You know, things have a lot more meaning for me now and things I didn't notice before. And I am sort of hoping in some way for some people that the book might do that for them. You know, in terms of we have so many visitors who come to Hawaii and enjoy the beauty, but there are a lot of stories here that I'm not sure everyone can pick up on within a week of visiting. And so I had hoped that perhaps this might be one of the books that brings some of that for them. In my experience, when visitors come, people who I think are quite sophisticated and I tell them the story of the overthrow or say, go look the Bishop Museum which is basically that story and they are absolutely astonished. Exactly. When I tell them that the Bishop Museum is telling the same story as the Holocaust Museum in Washington only over a much longer time period, they are absolutely amazed. I completely agree. I send everyone I can who's visiting to the Bishop Museum and they're always blown away one, by how absolutely beautiful the Hawaiian Hall is and that room takes my breath away every time and two, by the story it tells and how many people don't know that story outside of Hawaii and actually that was one of my biggest thrills was how supportive the museum's been of the book. The minute I contacted them and got in touch they immediately supported the book, put it in the bookstore or doing a book signing for it and I really appreciate how much they've embraced the book. Made me feel really good about it and I thank them because I don't think the book would exist without that museum because so many of the objects in the book are ones that were inspired by their collection. I'm going to wrap up now but you've got some book signings coming up at Namea and what else? Namea with a wonderful Miley Meyer and Bishop Museum and just finished one for bookends and finished one for Barnes & Noble. All of the local bookstores have been just really amazing. And there's a new bookstore about to open in Kaimuki. It's called The Shop and I hope they're going to stock the book. Yes, we've already spoken about it and they've been wonderful. They're a wonderful group. Well, thanks so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you.