 My name is Elaine Gallant and I'm your host of Books, Books, Books. It's a live streaming series through Think Tech Hawaii. And in this segment, we're going to discuss everything about reading books, writing books and everything in between. Today is no exception. I have a special guest with us today and he has written two books in particular that we're interested in and that is Molokai and daughter of Molokai and our author is Alan Berent. The title of our show today is Stories of Heartbreak and Triumph of Kalal Papa. Alan, welcome to Books, Books, Books. How are you? Hi. Good, good. Nice to be here. Aloha. Aloha. One of the biggest things that when I was talking to people about your two books, which have been successes for quite some time, is what is your interest in Hawaii that makes you, that has you feeling so connected to these islands? And secondly, in particular, to Molokai and the stories that are held there. Well, I've been visiting Hawaii ever since, for the first time in 1980. And I fell in love with it on first sight. I walked off the stairway onto the tarmac at the old Maui airport and I smelled the scent of Plumeria carried in on the trade winds and I was in love. And I came back at least once a year. I live in California, so it's easy to come back fairly often. And at the same time that I was coming here for vacations, I was also buying books about Hawaii, about its culture, so history, sociology, mysticism. Because I was fascinated by the people, by the culture, by the music. But I didn't actually ever think about writing anything set in Hawaii until 1997 when I wrote a pilot for NBC, which was for a supernatural series that was going to be set in Hawaii. They didn't pick it up, but it got me started thinking about writing another novel, a writing a novel rather instead of a TV script that probably would never see the light of day. So I had in mind a contemporary novel set on Molokai, which my wife and I had visited about five years before. And I found it a remarkably beautiful island and unique even for Hawaii in that the residents cared passionately about keeping it undeveloped. The saying goes that you can drive from one part of one tip of Molokai to the other without ever encountering a stoplight, and it's true. And I learned just how passionate they are about that and really why. And so I started to think about this novel, which would be sort of about the bonds of community in this some exotic locale. The more though that I researched Molokai, the more I learned about Kalapapa. And the more I learned about Kalapapa, the more I realized, well, this is the ultimate story about the bonds of sacrifice, the bonds of community in a community. And it just became a passion. The more I read about it, the more I thought, my God, this is this is so unjust. And it's so at that time, at least it was so little heard of on the mainland. A lot of the stuff surprised me and I'd been coming to California from California for 20 years. And I thought, well, if it surprised me, it'll surprise readers too. So I just started off going to the Hawaii State Archives in Honolulu and asked to see their their research on Kalapapa. And that started is the wheeled in a library cart with four shelves stacked on both sides and said, here, here's the first folder. You finish with this, we'll give you the next one. And that ended about two years later. Oh, my goodness. Well, I empathize with you on the mysticism and the beauty of Molokai, because I can look right at my window and stare at it all day if I want to. And it is a beautiful island and it does beckon you to come and or at least to come and understand what happened. A lot of people do know about Father Damien and Sister Marion Cope, but they don't know the heartbreak that the people had who were abandoned there. And I used the word abandoned. You don't use it in your novel, I don't recall, but they're alienated and there's left there to survive on their own with what the church will provide them. How did that affect you when you when you were there? When you when you went and visited and you were doing your research and you were talking to people, I assume there were some survivors still? Oh, oh, yes. At the time that I went there were probably about 100 patients still residents still alive. I think today that figure is down to below 10. There is there's more staff than there are residents now. But it came home for me when I opened up that first older of stuff at call from the Hawaii file state archives files. And the very first letter that I found was a letter from one of the very first patients sent to call papa or call a while actually in those days to the board of health in 1866. And it just read, please take pity on your humble, you know, servants, the lepers, we have need of a water cask. Please send us a water cask so that we may be able to gather water more and more, you know, better. And I thought, oh, my God, they really were just dropped here without any kind of of thing to try to survive with. And I sometimes even pushed right off the boat. Am I correct? Pardon me. Sometimes even pushed right off the boat. No, that's an old man. That that would be the cattle or something. The cattle were pushed off of that way. The all of the the patients were taken in by robots. But the the cattle, unfortunately, did have to you'd have to swim to shore. And at least one of them turned around and was headed to water. Honolulu. Last time anybody saw. Tell me about Rachel, your main your main character in Mullikai. Tell me about Rachel and her story. Well, Rachel, we first meet her when she's five, six year old girl, a native Hawaiian living in Honolulu. Her father is a merchant seaman. And she is one one day discovers a rash on her on her arm. And her mother knows what it is because she's heard this before and she does her best to use goes to the local Kahuna to try to get him to make it go away. And it works for a little while and then it comes back. And and ultimately, she's diagnosed with leprosy. Now, what would later become Hansen's disease? And she is taken from her family brought to the Kalihi receiving station where she is imprisoned and hooked up and prodded at by scientists for for a year or so before she is taken to Mullikai. And without her parents, without anyone, except an uncle who she knows is at at Kalapapa. And to me, this was just the most terrifying thing that I could imagine happened to me as a child. And the fact that it did happen to children be ripped away from their families and taken to some strange new place like this. It was mind-boggling. And then when I had read about how the children of the patients were often taken away from them or to try to to prevent them from coming down with leprosy because it's not a genetic disease. It's it's it's one from close contact. I thought, well, that's it. This has to be the story of a young girl taken away from her family as a child who grows up, finds someone to love, marries, has a child. And then has her family taken away from her. And the other story repeated itself with daughters of the daughter of Mullikai, right, because Ruth is taken away. That's right. That's right. And I didn't actually plan that before I started writing Mullikai. I I wasn't that smart. But as I started my research and I realized, well, I wanted Ruth to go someplace farther outside of the island. So it would be harder for Rachel to track her down. And I knew that a lot of Japanese farmers went to California in the early 20th century. And the more I worked out the math, I realized, oh, my God, she would have been interned. And it just it was serendipity. It just it just clicked into place that they would like to point out that in Daughter of Mullikai, you're very good about, you know, listing the names of the camps, what happened in those camps, the struggle that they had, the Utagawa's, not the yeah, no, Watanabe's had when they went there to try and start farming and growing strawberries and the things that went on land wise between the Californian landowners and the Japanese that came over. And not only that, another heartache was the fact that the Japanese family that adopted Ruth suffered some consequence as well. They were they could have been shunned as well, right? Yes, they they could have been shunned and and ultimately where they were shunned just for the fact of their their their their simple Japaneseness. And all of the all of the things that happened, I mean, the two books have, you know, are kind of companion tales to each other. They they're complementary. They together they form one big overarching story. And the thing that they both have in common is that the characters of Rachel, everything that happens to her in that book as a Hansen's disease patient is something that really happened to somebody somewhere. And the same is true of Ruth as someone who is in turn everything that she experiences is something that happened to somebody during that time. So I don't I have an armature of truth that the character is based on and then I just superimpose a fictional character on top of that. Yes, well, I believe your readership is probably very happy that you did write Daughter of Molokai because you do end up wondering at the end of Molokai what happened to Ruth? What was Ruth's fate in all of this, right? Here she is the daughter of a leper father and mother. Charles Kenji. What was his last name? Carlson Kenji. That's where the Utagawa comes in. And he had leprosy, too. What a good man he was, by the way. But also, Rachel was a lovely, lovely person, loving, loving, loving people. And their daughters taken away from them. So Ruth has that stigma about her. And then the Japanese family, the Watanabe's adopt her. And they are then stigmatized for having adopted a child of leprosy, a child that is the union of a leprous family couple. Not so much for that. Although there is a subplot there about why they chose to adopt somebody from Kala Papa, but they find that that she experiences, Ruth experiences prejudice because she is part Hawaiian. She's not pure Japanese. And so a boy is that she is interested in. Their parents say, no, I'm sorry, you can't you can't be involved with her. She's a she's a you know, I have for you. So so there are levels. The point I think I was trying to make was how far reaching leprosy was into the healthier society and how frightened by it, everybody truly was. Right. You dedicate your book to Edgar and Charlotte Whitmar, then you call them your ohana. And you also dedicated it to the people of Kala Papa. So I assume they are well represented here. Oh, you know, my my Edward and Charlotte Whitmar were my grandparents and and I a great great pair of grandparents, too. And Uncle Uncle Eddie was somebody who I was frequently in touch with when I was writing my my book, Palisades Park, which was set in in New Jersey. But I had previously I had dedicated my book previous to Molokai to my parents and it seemed right that I should dedicate this to Eddie and Charlotte, because at that time they were the only real family that I had left. And that was what Kala Papa was all about, family ohana. Yes, well, I thought I stumbled onto something really not known before. I guess it was because, you know, no one knows that they're your grandparents. But the people of Molokai, I'm sure were very, very helpful and were with you all the way. One of the little heartbreaks in talking about the far reaching side of leprosy is is Henry, I mean, Rachel's father. He was a mariner. He loved the high seas and he wrote to her and I have the quote right here. It says, if I had one wish that God could grant me, it would be to come to Molokai to live out the rest of my life, my days with my little girl. But since that won't happen, I might as well sail the globe as I always and I'm thinking, oh, another heartbreak for Rachel, right? That's her father. Yeah, it's a heartbreak for him, too. But at that at that point in the history of the settlement, they were no longer allowing relatives to to come as a kakua, the helpers. It used to be that that a mother could accompany a child, a parent could accompany a child, some relative or a friend, but they slowly did away with that because they realized they rediscovered that inevitably those people also came down with the disease. So so the unfortunately, Henry would love to a move there, but he simply wasn't allowed by the authorities. Let's talk about some of the triumphs because there really were some triumphs and a lot of love that was on the island for each other in this colony. One of the funniest or no, well, not funny, but one of the most wonderful nights in the book is when the girls steal out of the of the of the of the where they're staying and they go to a dance in. Oh, let's see, where was it? I have to find. Yes, thank you. Kakakuna. I still didn't say it right. Got it. But I'm not high. Thank you. And they sneak out like so many teenagers sneak out of houses and they climb up the poly and they get all muddy and they get to this dance and they get to dance with a boy. How precious is that? Is that something that happened? Is that in the records that you found? You know, the record of it that I found was one that I found at the the little museum and gift shop at Kala Papa that they've established. I did not see this in a book in a newspaper article in a biography at the museum. They had a picture of the poly and under it was a caption that read many worthy Saturday nights when local residents would climb over the poly to attend a party at Kanaka. I looked at that and I thought, oh, I can use that. And in fact, I got a whole chapter out of it. And as you say, it's it's one of the more exhilarating chapters in the book. I agree. I agree. But it brings a smile to your face. It's like, wow, relief for these people, right? There's there there are being kids. They get to be children. And you used to keep the dog too, just quite fun. I don't think they need to be away, but, you know, there's there's a lot of wonderful things in here. Some of the people were cured and they had a choice to leave. Tell us about that. Well, the disease ultimately took a 180 degree turn when the Salfa drugs were discovered in 1940s. And very quickly, after administrating these these these drugs, within about six weeks, it reduced the levels of the bacillus that causes leprosy to non contagious levels. Now, it didn't do anything for the physical effects that occurred. Like when you have lepromatis, leprosy, which were the tubercles that are on people's faces or the the contracture of their hands into claws because the bones were resorbed. It couldn't fix that. So a lot of people were in their mind, they felt disfigured and they didn't want to go out into the world again and have people stare at them. Some of them did and they were stared at. And so and they came back ultimately. But a few, a few actually had the desire to know I want to go back out there. I want to, you know, what the world that was denied me. And if there is one person that Rachel is based on, you know, to some extent, it's a woman in Margaret Zamora, who was written about in a book called Margaret of Molokai by Mel White. And she was a Portuguese woman who was sent there as a teenager, was ultimately cured, went back to Honolulu and she did experience some prejudice because she was physically disfigured by leprosy. But she didn't let that stop her. She made friends. She became part of an information campaign where she would talk to audiences, to children, to schools about leprosy, about the effects of it, how anybody could get it. There was nothing, you know, particularly different about the people who had it. There was nothing to fear about them. And she just struck me as having the most courageous and outgoing spirit that I thought that I'm going to give that to Rachel when the time comes for her to leave. And wonderful because these were real people. They were real people, right, with real lives. We have some questions in the chat room, too. But before I ask the first one, I wanted to mention that there was also some good things that happened in Daughter of Molokai in these internment camps, how the people came together and looked out after each other. And you want to talk about that for a minute? Yeah, it was it was a very similar experience. I mean, if the people in Molokai, Colopapa, rather, were drawn together by a shared sense of of Ohana, the Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals at Banzanar were brought together by a common Japanese culture and by a common American culture. The most of these people thought of themselves as Americans and they didn't understand what they were doing there, but they they made the best of it. You know, they they had sports teams, softball teams. They they loved baseball. They did make dances. They had shows, whatever they could to give themselves a sense of normalcy. And and and to me, that's really the triumph of both Colopapa and men's that are in the other internment camps is that they were these people were dealt a cruel injustice and and imprisoned against their will and against all reason, and yet they came out of it if not stronger than no worse than they had before, because they had the they had the inner strength and they had the community to to keep them going. I think that's what makes the book so beautiful, you know, to read that they overcome such adversity. So let's go to the first question from the chat room from Bonnie McChrystal. Why write Moloka'i from a woman's perspective and how did you do it with such authority? That's to the second part of the question. First, I have no idea. I write people and and some people are men and some people are women. And I start from the ground up and I I think about, OK, where are they born? What are the influences? What are their parents like? And by the time you do that, you wind up stacking up, you know, you know, the the coordinates of a character. And and and if I'm if I'm true to that, I I find the the gender works itself out. And as for why I chose one, it was exactly for what I alluded to earlier. It seemed to me when I found out that the children were taken away from them. I knew I had to write a story of a mother daughter story. Doing it as a father son story just didn't seem like it had quite the pathos that that a mother daughter story would. So that's what I wrote. Very good. R.H. I don't know who that is. Is the found marriage license that what started you thinking about writing the story? That was actually towards the end of the novel in Moloka'i. You found a marriage license is. Oh, you're going to have to refresh me because it's it's been so long since I've read every I think it was when I think it was regarding Dorothy, the marriage license of Dorothy and her husband, maybe. Oh, yeah, since I remember the novel. Yes, that's right. She uses it as a way of tracking down tracking down her sister. Yeah, that that came later. It didn't it didn't start out my research. It was just as I was researching the beats of the story that came up as, you know, the most logical way for Rachel to be able to track her down. Right. Right. Big records. Helen Weiss asks, what did it feel like to be at Cal Al Papa and see everything, especially the burial grounds in the church to actually feel it? It's it just feels like a very sacred like sacred ground. When you go there, you are, you know, I was part of a tour and it's a very sported tour. They don't like you get too close to the valley. I'm not sure why, but there are places you can go and places that you don't go. But you you go there. I came in from the the airport and I came in on the bus into town. And on one side, I saw the left side of the bus. I saw a beautiful little town like any town in Hawaii. And on the other side of the town, I saw acre after acre of tombstones and nothing said hello, Papa, more vividly than that. Yeah, yeah, it did take a toll that that is for certain. There's a couple of things that I want to mention that I actually little tidbits that I really like that you give the recipe for point kind of sort of kind of sort of you mentioned loves bakery. Oh, my goodness. Love. How do you do something except during that? I'm not mentioned loves bakery. I don't know. I don't know. I love the details that you give of the Japanese camps, particularly at Tool Lake. Very important. The mention of Kaha Huluwa, home of Maui's best banana bread and cream pies. You sold over 600,000. Well, there's more than 600,000 copies in print of Molokai. And we don't know the number on on the daughter of Molokai. But I'm sure it's six digits as well. How does it make you feel as an author? Well, it's very gratifying. It the sales on Molokai took took place over a period of about 20 years. So I never landed on the New York Times bestseller list because I never sold enough copies in one week. But it was something actually more remarkable than that. It was people discovering the book through word of map, starting with book clubs, especially in Northern California, who said, hey, this is a great book and let's read this. And one book club tested on to another and another and another. And it sort of took off spontaneously. And that's that's kind of rare because in this in this era of books that are fueled by, you know, million dollar publicity budgets. You know, I had no publicity budget for for for Molokai when it was first published. I had to go out there and hustle on my own and to have it discovered by readers and kept alive by readers 20 years later is is really quite remarkable. And I'm very humbled by it. Well, we're very happy that you wrote these books. I should mention your screenwriter, playwright and Emmy Award winner. And also Nebula Award winner. Congratulations. I'd like to thank you for joining us today, Alan. I so appreciated talking with you. I'd like to thank the staff at Think Tech Hawaii, Jay Fidel, who keeps us all straight, the patrons who support us, the the viewers that watch us and partake in our show and the people who send in questions. It's been a pleasure, Alan. Thank you so very much. Mahalo for having me. Mahalo and Aloha.