Ono Ono Girl's Hula [Hardcover]

Carolyn Lei-Lanilau (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1997

Both playful and serious, this audacious riff on ethnic and sexual identity by Hawaiian-Hakka Chinese-American writer Carolyn Lei-lanilau revolves around the persona she calls “Ono Ono Girl,” an icon that interweaves and transcends Lucille Ball, Little Lulu, Tina Turner, and Spottie Dottie. Challenging assumptions about genre and gender, and acting out the notion that language is a function of the body, these essays are transforming soundbytes of Ono Ono Girl inventing herself.

“Just when you thought American literature was canonized and commodified beyond saving, Carolyn Lei-lanilau’s intertextual, irreverent work, Ono Ono Girl’s Hula, brings language and philosophy back to the table. Her book is a miracle delivery: a rebirth of poetry, Third World Spam, and love wrapped around the hybrid vigor of Hawaiian, Hakka, French, Latin, and English. Soulful, powerful, and wise.”—Russell Leong, editor of Amerasia Journal

“A book enjoyable equally for its fun as for its profundity, Carolyn Lei-lanilau’s Ono Ono Girl’s Hula is irresistible must reading for feminists, anthropologists, contemporary culture buffs, and anyone who wants a refreshing take on some of our more vexing current disputes. Down-to-earth and poetic, serious and hilarious at once, her unconventional voice invites the reader to understand the paradoxes of identity—sexual and ethnic—in new ways.”—Robin Lakoff, author of Talking Power

Editorial Reviews

From Kirkus Reviews

A collection of ``chants,'' as the author calls them, that constitutes a post-Tan/Hong Kingston Amerasian anti-autobiography of sorts. Lei-lanilau was born in Hawaii of Chinese Hakka heritage into a home where only English was permitted; not until later in life did she discover the pleasures of the Chinese and Hawaiian languages. As she says at the outset of this confounding journal-memoir, these essays ``represent the metaphors of many languages in and on the author's tongue and hands.'' Bored, confused, and disgusted by English (English is dead, she tells us: ``Just look at the English monarchy''), Lei-lanilau advises that one must embrace disorder, instead: ``I am always be teasing, testing, fooling around with English.'' Her claim is borne out in the varied typography, dialects, and unconventional line breaks she employs here. She justifies her narrativeless technique always in political terms. Embracing the Hawaiian people and their native culture, Lei-lanilau wants to challenge the common view of Hawaii as ``paradise'' and succeeds in her account of working inside a pineapple cannery. She's distrustful of traditional authority``the media . . . and the publishing milieuall that white imprinting,'' she puns, biting with a rather facile impunity the hand that might feed her. An award- winning poet herself, she repeatedly cites William Blake as her hero. While Lei-lanilau's 200-watt brand of radical feminism can be inspiring, her book is just as affecting in its more complex and dappled passages, such as her self-deprecating recollection of returning home from a lackluster night out to find her grown children waiting up for her. If nothing else, Lei-lanilau has the verve of a self only she could create. Maybe she couldn't, and shouldn't, care less whether we like her, so long as we try to understand her. Boldly irreverent, but also reckless and dissipated, personal writing. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review

If you think you know something about what multiculturalism means in real life, read Carolyn Lei-lanilau and think again.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 196 pages
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press; 1st ed edition (October 15, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0299156303
• ISBN-13: 978-0299156305
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #9,882,259 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Pseudo-Hawaiian Mask, Post-Colonialist Face, February 27, 2001

By 

Pele Ah Chu (Maui) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ono Ono Girl's Hula (Hardcover)

I wanted to give this book 0 stars, you know? Anyway, what got me was the character of the Native Hawaiian policeman whose only human quality was his sexual availability, and whose only character trait was his bad temper...and this made-up character was said by the author to typify Native Hawaiians! They used to call that kind of generality Racism. This book by someone who is not Native Hawaiian but uses Hawaiian language like a tourist is not what I expected and I didn't appreciate it. Thank you. --Pele Ah Chu

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A loco moco brew of mongrel identity politics, more or less., May 17, 1999

By 

Rob Wilson - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ono Ono Girl's Hula (Paperback)

Ono Ono Girl's Hula ia a "loco moc" brew of mongrel identity politics, more or less, emanating as much from the grounds of cultural political struggle in contemporary Hawai'i as much as from the verbal flux of the diasporic Pacific Rim and the ethnic opportunism of California. I like it a lot, at times crazed and infuriated as I read the schizo-text of herstory; Carolyn Lau (who was a great Chinese poet in days past) is not Haunani Kay Trask and moments in the text when she aspires towards primordial ideological bullying are way off the mark. But when she lets the language flow and mix, she becomes one shameless hussy of mongrel postcolonialty, and it is worth it, dear reader, to go along for the poetic and sexual ride into the ono ono girl's blissy blessed hula.