eBikes

That aspect comes through loud and clear in The Hawaiians. Nyuk Tsin (the main girl character so far) was on the boat and had been pre-sold to a house or prostitution in Hawaii. She wants no part of that. Captain Hoxworth sees a commotion on the docks and intervenes. He solves it by buying off the guy who was going to basically enslave her as a whore. He takes her to his plantation.

That is, "bad white male" culturally appropriated (interfered with) the Asian habit of treating women like dirt. Like I said, when Chuck looked down into the hold of his ship and referred to them as "heathens," it was not without some cause.

This is one reason I give little credence to the "big bad clergyman" as presented in Hawaii or many other, in my opinion, dishonest books. 

I know for a fact that missionaries were very well thought of amongst the regular Chinese. Americans were held in much higher esteem that the Brits, French, Dutch and other Europeans exactly because of the large number of American missionaries who went to China and did many good things. I even ran into this during my early years in Asia. I sometimes experienced the positive view Asians held of Americans over other Europeans. 

 

Captain Hoxworth has gotten his pineapples from either New Guinea or Guyana. I thought he said New Guinea but, really, nothing is going to be close to Hawaii. Either would be a long trip.

His wife is going crazy. His son is growing up and has gone to sea. Knuk Tsin, in a "noble" gesture, abandons her five young sons in order to join her pseudo-husband who is being shipped off to a leper colony. You go, girl. I guess.

Speaking of Polynesian women and their beautiful accoutrements, Captain Hoxworth has begun hiring Japanese for his expanding plantation. He says that compared to the Chinamen, the Japanese are tamer and work cheaper.

Cut to a scene of the Japanese (men and women together) taking a bath in their newly-built communal tub. They wonder if Hoxworth will be angry but assure him they built it on their own time. Well, when in Rome. Hoxworth strips and gets in the tub.

We are presented (before and after he gets in the tub) with a lineup of pretty naked Japanese woman. But one woman (played by Miko Mayama) enters the tub and she's truly built like a brick shit-house. Earlier, Hoxworth had asked any of the Japanese bathers if they spoke English. When this girls enters the tub like an Asian Venus on the half-shell, she tells Hoxworth that she speaks English. He then answers with something like, "Honey, they way you look, you don't have to talk."

Cut to the scene of Hoxworth and our Boom-Boom Japanese Venus out on a picnic. Chuck doesn't live with his wife. That's good enough for Boom-Boom and they start kissing.

Meanwhile, Knuk Tsin returns to the plantation. Apparently her pseudo-husband has died of the leprosy and Hoxworth pulled some strings to get her out. She seems to be immune to the disease. Her children are now in their teens and she's not sure who is who when she meets them on the road.

If you get a chance to see The Hawaiians, do so. It's certainly not woke.

But I can see where the natives (to the extent anyone is native) could get cheesed-off. Hawaii isn't a state. It's a development by corporations, large and small. And now the home of one of the world's largest navel bases.

This wasn't highly rated by the critics at the time. But we all know that the opinion of movie critics isn't worth spit. It has good scenes, good characters, good acting. The problem is that it takes in so much history. You don't spend enough time in any one era to get invested in it. This probably should have been a miniseries.

Still, they probably condense all that history down about as well as you can expect. But bits of the movie could easily have filled out an entire series episode unto itself, especially when the queen of Hawaii proposes to take back all the land from the white people. She even jails Captain Hoxworth (who smirks his way through this entire episode since he seems to know it won't hold up).

The U.S. Marines bust things up. But we never learn any details. Zoom. On to the next era and story.

Nyuk Tsin, as mentioned earlier, has come back from the leper colony after her husband died. And she magically changes in character from a rather charming and humble woman just trying to scratch out a piece of Hawaii for herself to an aggressive cold-blooded capitalist matriarch. And it's not that I find her (new) character unbelievable. Oh, I think it's perfectly believable. It's just that there is this switch.

Captain Hoxworth's son comes back from the sea. What did he learn? We'll never know. His aspect in this is completely superfluous. And we don't even care that he's fallen in love with Nyuk Tsin's only daughter. And both the father and mother against this mixed marriage, and for pretty much the same reasons.

And then a plague comes to a section of town. They have to burn part of it. The burning gets a little out of control. No problem. Captain Hoxworth figures when the flames have died down, he can pick up this property for cheep. And then pretty much The End.

As I think back on this, it doesn't seem we really get immersed in Hawaii all that much. There are scenes here and there of beaches. But who knows where those were shot. The point it, you don't actually have much of a feel for the islands.

But the stories and the characters are interesting enough to make this more than watchable.

My understanding is that you got to see the place before it was over-crowded and somewhat spoiled and over-developed. I'm glad you had that experience. Sounds like you had an amazing time in a magical place.

I love movies and novels set in the exotic islands of the Pacific. Jack London has a few of these. It really seemed to be paradise...at least at first glance. My general understanding is that, yeah, a lot of places (perhaps including Tahiti) were the bona fide tropical paradise of tight and bare-breasted women, mangoes just for the bother of reaching into the trees, and splendid beaches that host Technicolor sunsets unknown in any other part of the world.

But then there have been frauds such as Margaret Mead who wanted so bad to find unspoiled, idyllic, brown-skinned paradise that she fudged the data. As I understand it, the natives (wherever she was) told her what she wanted to hear while the reality of the supposed sexual utopia was, in fact, a quagmire of taboos, often quite violent ones.

So I suppose it depends on what neighborhood you're in and if the white people who came before you left a good or bad taste in people's mouths. The Hawaiians, as one reviewer noted, is a "spectacular Hawaiian epic that intertwines existences of ambitious people living in Hawaii." So there's a lot of common ground in this film, no matter your ethnicity.

Somewhere between the ills of cultural imperialism and the delusion of The Noble Savage, there is probably a truth that applies. And it's probably different on each island.

I don't know the history. But I suspect that many Pacific Islanders were savage by any reasonable definition of the word. Others were probably doing just fine until the Christian missionaries butted in and, under the guise of helping the natives, they were simply making themselves feel better about their way of life.

We see that all over the world today. They even have a name for it: voluntourism, also known as religious tourism. In some cases, the natives probably got the better part of the deal. Maybe they had to give up swapping wives and running around naked. But they got schools, medicine, and basic civic infrastructure.

The idea of the Noble Savage, unworried and at-one with nature, is a tempting and romantic image. It's the idea that we could share this unhurried, spiritual, and peaceful life if only competition and capitalism (the original sins of the Leftist world) didn't sully us.

I believe there are clearly cases where missionaries were buttinskies who did little but impose their narrow views on a society that, by and large, probably new better how to live in the place where they lived than the missionaries did. But probably the missionaries were so successful in the overall because the idea of The Noble Savage is false and most natives liked the goodies brought by the missionaries. So many images from afar look idealistic. But close up tends to reveal the true squalor of many places.

Mission students in rebellion against the mission, especially education, they took the skills learned to a new western political philosophy, Marxism. if you examine the education of the Marxist leaders in Asia during the 20th century you will find that nearly all were educated in mission schools in the late 19th and early 20th century. They did not learn Marxism in the schools but that is where they learned to read and write. The missionaries were so focused on being "godly" that they failed to educate these students in western philosophy and ethics. They left out the classical part of a classical education. They did not teach Greek, or Latin except to read scripture and Homer in any language is very instructive. That made it easy to change from a mission education to a Marxist ideology. The world would have been better off if they were still swapping wives and running around naked. 

It is not the Catholic vs Protestant religious teaching but the absence of interest in the cultures they were attempting to influence. There were many, probably most, of the students that profited greatly from the mission schools. However, those schools also produced Che, Mao, Ho, and many other anti-western communists. 

I admit I have a very critical view of Christian missionaries. For all of the effort, time, and billions of dollars the efforts to convert and put a run on the scoreboard for their faith supersedes all others. If you are poor illiterate Asian, Latin, or African the mission schools offered a way out but it always came with a price. Give up your traditional religion and the west will open up for you. Best example, Mahatma Gandhi. 

It was a stupid train conductor who threw him out of a first class seat, that he had paid for. That made Gandhi realize that a western education without western rights was useless. Gandhi had recently graduated in England and was a lawyer working in South Africa. He returned to India and started a revolution. 

Sorry, I have held back but you have mis-stated the facts and they must be corrected. The above claims are on the one hand, not true and on the other so general as to be meaningless.

First, Che was born into an independent Argentina which was already Catholic and had been for several hundred years. The question of mission schools does not enter the question.

Second, neither Mao, nor Ho attended missionary schools. Neither did Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping nor the founders of the Chinese Communist Party Li Da Zhao and Chen Du Xiu.

This is also the case as regards Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah and Sukarno. The same goes for the generation in Singapore and Malaysia which brought about the end of colonialism in those countries. As I recall, the same can be said of Aung San of Burma and those who pushed the French out of Laos and Cambodia.  I cannot comment with any certainty on the education of thousands of other colonial Marxists in Asia. 

In fact, much of the Marxism of anti-Western Asian leaders was learned when they studied in the U.K., France or elsewhere in Europe. It is not surprising as Marx had only died in the 1880s and Marxism was still a newish theory for everything when many future anti-Western Asian leaders visited Europe. Lenin was writing his anti-colonial pieces in the early 1900s. 

Attending a school run and funded by the colonial power under which one lives is not close to being the same as being educated in a “missionary” school.

As to being “anti-Western” that might be expected from the inhabitants of countries ruled over by foreign colonialists. One didn’t have to go to a missionary school to develop that feeling. Of course it helped that the same colonialists sent bright boys to schools in which they learned about western political theory and the wonders of Democracy. Some of these same boys even read on their own and were in wonder of George Washington who threw out colonialists from his country.

So you are saying don’t educate the natives because they might later learn something you don't like because they can read? This is a very strange argument. 

Where do you think Western ethics came from? Judeo-Christian ethics. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans were, by-in-large very ethical people if by ethical you mean, do unto others as you would have them do unto you, or love others as you love yourself, or monogamy in marriage or all men are brothers. If you mean Western rationalism, that might be nearer the truth, but rationalism was already a large part of Christianity by the Middle Ages. Whether or not people understood this.  

Hummm? You are poor and illiterate and your own people do nothing for you. But here come some strange foreigners who treat you well and help you get ahead. All they ask is that you spend some time reading the Bible and going to Church on Sundays. Some might eventually send you on your way if you decide not to convert, but many still treat you kindly and help you in various ways.

People were not forced to convert and even if they did so out of less-than-wholly-religious reasons, many missionaries kept one eye shut in the hope and belief that these persons would find their way to God eventually.
I thought you were a libertarian.  After all, it was their money. I would much much rather have missionaries “wasting” their own money than having the government extort it from the whole populace for “charitable” reasons as it does now.

And even if you do not like the idea of those Christians converting people, you will admit, I believe, that much good was done by these crazy missionaries and all the money they spent. 
I have no stats on this, but the Jesuits were hugely interested in the countries they were sent to. They spent years in China and broadened the West’s knowledge of the Middle Kingdom significantly. They were scientific advisers to different Chinese emperors. The same can be said of numerous clerics in India. As I recall, different clerics were responsible for much work on expanding the knowledge of the history and culture of India. I believe one such man wrote one of the first English/Hindustani dictionaries.

By the way, it was Catholic priests and monks who were leading the fight against the exploitation of the local America natives after Columbus discovered the New World. Some of them paid dearly for trying to protect the Indians. I am not basing this remark on the movie The Mission, which I thought excellent.