Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers
Uploaded by innocence__lost on Sep 14, 1999
Pages 3-82
In the beginning, Lovey and her best friend, Jerry, are watching the Shirley Temple movie before they go to church. They never get to see the end because they have to go and leave. They make up the endings and cry in the middle of the pastor's sermon. On Lovey's birthday, Jerry would make her a gift certificate from the toy store for $500.
Lovey is very embarrassed to be speaking pidgin English. She doesn't tell anyone, not even Jerry, how she is ashamed of how she talks, looks, or even where she lives. Lovey secretly wants to be haole, but she knows that she can't. Everyone in her class has a very hard time speaking proper English, and the teacher yells at them for not being able too. Lovey has a hard time in math class and gets teased for being Japanese. It's as if the rest of the students expect her to be smart just because she is Japanese. Lovey is supposed to write her own obituary for her English class. It gets her thinking about death, and consequently she thinks about it all the time. Lovey dreams and fantasizes about being haole. She thinks up of the perfect house with all the trimmings. She wants to marry a haole so she can have a haole last name. Lovey makes haole friends so that she can sleep over their houses and eat their food. Her father says that she is crazy for wanting to be friends with haoles, and that she should stop.
Lovey and her family do many things together. They sit on the back porch picking fleas off of their dogs, squeezes blackheads off of her mothers back, count all white cows, sing war songs, and pick macadamia nuts for extra money. A normal Sunday afternoon would be their Mother smoking Parliaments on the porch of their house, grumbling about white hairs, and Lovey picking fleas off of their dogs.
Lovey and her sister, Calhoon, goes to their Aunt Helen's on Saturdays while their mother sews leis or cashiers at the Lei Stand for extra money. They watch the old crazy ladies stand behind the fence, muttering to themselves. Lovey wants to become pregnant just like her neighbor Katy is. She secretly dresses up and acts like she is pregnant. Her mother tells her that it is hard because there is a lot of pain that comes with...