Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (Picador)

Lois-Ann Yamanaka was born on the island of Moloka’i. She and her four sisters were raised on a sugar plantation by her parents. Based on her own experiences, she has managed to create stories featuring the local dialect of Hawaiian Pidgin. 

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is her second book and her first full-length novel. It is narrated by a Japanese-American girl named Lovey Nariyoshi. Her family is not rich and is not even considered middle class. They live on the edge of poverty on the Big Island of Hawai’i. 

Lovey has a younger sister named Calhoon. Her father’s name is Hubert and her mother’s name is Verva. She has two uncles, her father’s older brothers Tora and Uri. Lovey also has a best friend. An effeminate boy named Jerome who everybody calls Jerry. 

The story is set sometime in the seventies. There are references to hit songs of the era such as “Seasons in the Sun”, “I Shot the Sheriff” and  “Kung Fu Fighting”. Lovey and Jerry talk about TV shows like Charlie’s Angels and The Dukes of Hazzard. At times it’s hard to determine if they are in junior high or in high school. 

Lovey doesn’t tell anybody but she is ashamed of her pidgin English. Her teacher tells the class for the umpteenth time, “No one will want to give you a job. You sound uneducated. You will be looked down upon. You’re speaking a low-class form of Standard English. Continue, and you’ll go nowhere in life”. 

Lovey cannot help the way she speaks. Her parents speak pidgin, her uncles and aunts speak pidgin, her grandmother speaks pidgin, All her cousins speak pidgin as well and “nobody looks or talks like a haole”. A term used by native Hawaiins to describe mostly white people. It is very similar to the use of the Japanese word gaijin which is the vernacular for “foreigners”. 

Her haole classmates often make fun of her and her friend Jerry. They are considered outcasts or nerds if you prefer. Lovey is also not very good at math. When one of her classmates sees that she can not reduce the fraction 8/14, her classmate says, “You real stoopid for one fricken Jap”. And when one student starts, others join in - “Yeah, I thought all Japs suppose for be smut. But you cannot even reduce one stupid fraction, eh, you, Jap-Crap, Stupid, thass why, you Rice Eye, good-for-nuttin’ Pearl Harba bomba”. 

Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers is a series of vignettes by Lovey Nariyoshi describing her life on the Big Island. It’s a coming-of-age story as Lovey deals with bullies, mean teachers and just trying to fit in to find an identity of her own. 

Sometimes the story is hard to follow as Yamanaka makes Lovey jump from one subject to the next. She may be talking about wanting to be a haole in one chapter, then she’ll be talking about hunting goats with her father or talking about going to a school dance and being one of the wallflowers as she waits for some boy to ask her to dance. 

As entertaining as the stories are, if you are not familiar with pidgin English it could be very difficult to read. Although I am not a full Japanese-American, I am a half-Japanese, half-American person who grew up in Japan on an American army base. 

My mother is Japanese and often speaks English with a lot of grammatical errors. Her English wasn’t as difficult to understand as Lovey’s pidgin but a lot of times it did remind me of my mother’s speech. Perhaps if more haole were to read Yamanaka’s novel, they would be more understanding of people like Lovey Nariyoshi. One can only hope. ~Ernie Hoyt