No regrets

What little I knew of Korea I learned from either watching "M*A*S*H" as a child or from dear friends in either undergraduate or graduate school. What I have learned of Hawai'i I learned on my own. I even tried to learn to speak native Hawai'ian as a highschool student, a real hoot for a midwestern kid who had difficulty enough mastering his mother tongue and failing to learn Spanish.

Alan Brennet, however, has done his homework. A lot of it. "Honolulu" is an absorbing work of historical fiction. For many readers, much of that history will be surprising.

The novel's action begins in Japanese-occupied Korea and follows the life of Jin, named "Regret" by her father according to the fashion and prejudices of the time. Jin assumes her new name after traveling to Hawai'i to become the wife of a man she has never met. She becomes a "picture bride," the equivalent of a mail-order bride. But she is not alone. She shares this fate with four other Korean women and a Japanese woman. The balance of the book is the twists and turns as their lives unfold in American-occupied Hawai'i at the turn of the century.

The lives they live are as colorful as the island they live on. But it's not the paradise they had been promised. There is plenty of hardship as their lives on the island begin with the backbreaking work in the plantations. Later they each find their way into the city where each in their turn establish families of their own, live through the ups and downs of the Great Depression, and confront the outrage of two tiers of justice: one for haoles, one for locals.

These characters are very human, sympathetic and relatable. And Brennert does an excellent job of creating this period piece. As the balance of this book takes place before the Women's Suffrage movement, one does wonder if the women in Hawai'i really were as liberated as they seem in Brennert's book. But this is a minor quibble as the lives they lived in Confucian Korea do seem oppressive by comparison.

"A road need not be paved in gold to find treasure at its end."

"Honolulu" is an absorbing, fully researched work of historical fiction with well-drawn sympathetic characters. This is one journey that is well worth the taking.