Hilo’s Nalukai Academy gives local high school students the information and skills they need to stay in Hawai‘i.

Good for them. Teaching skills to eager teens who want to stay on the islands.

But bad for us. 

Bad for Hawaiʻi because there is no way programs like that can make more than a tiny dent in the brain drain.

But even worse, the brain-drain idea reinforces a Stay-Put Syndrome that exaggerates Hawaiʻi as a special place while demeaning and patronizing former islanders who choose to live elsewhere.

The syndrome sufferers don’t understand what home really means.

Here’s how the Stay-Put Syndrome misunderstands both Hawaiʻi and the people who have left. 

Hawaiʻi Is Special But So Is Everywhere Else

“You ask anybody, anything you grow up with, it sort of lives differently inside you. Because you’re talking about where you’re from. You’re talking about what matters, what you knew growing up the entire time.” 

Sounds like local people describing their special place. “Lucky you live in Hawaiʻi.”

Actually, it’s “lucky you live in Wisconsin.”   

A Milwaukee Brewers baseball executive said that, talking about the team’s very successful business plan that stresses local roots.

“Special” is not a contest. There aren’t any objective measures showing why one place is more special than another. Special is about attachment, and attachment is everywhere.

I’ve lived in small Midwestern towns, big cities, as well as fifty years in Hawaiʻi. In every one of these places the “lucky we live here, we want to stay” attachment is part of the place.  

Sure, people in Rust Belt cities worry about brain drain, folks in a small Iowa town may be sad because they miss their children who moved to the coast. Or for that matter, Mormon parents in Connecticut whose kids decide to go to BYU, then do two years of mission and afterwards settle in Salt Lake.

But Hawaiʻi takes this regret to a new level that makes it sound like people who leave have lives that are lovelorn and full of longing for “home.”

You Can Leave Hawaiʻi, Miss It, But Still Move On

For the Stay-Put Syndrome, home is where you were born and raised in the bosom of your ancestors. “My island home.”

Not so fast with that sentimental, simple definition. Home is more than a singular place for the thousands and thousands of people who have left Hawaiʻi over the years. 

Home for them is really something else again.

Dave Hickey, an art critic and rock musician, found himself living in Las Vegas during the last years of his life. He’d never lived there before.

To his surprise, Vegas – a place you don’t associate with “be it ever so humble there’s no place like home” – turned out to be the only place where he felt he could ever call home.

Why? Because home – as Hickey says in his 1997 book “Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy” – is a “refuge and a source of comforts and reassurances that are unavailable elsewhere.” The feelings, not the place. 

Hickey is right about home being about refuge and comfort rather than location. But when it comes to Hawaiʻi – like the folks you know living in Las Vegas but also anywhere else – he is only half right.  

With Hawaiʻi’s diaspora, people have multiple homes with multiple attachments. Layers of memories.

How The Diaspora Keeps Hawaiʻi Close

Those who have moved still see Hawaiʻi as home in their hearts as they move on to settle in at a place that is now home in their heads. Not one replacing the other.  Rather, each weaving in and out of their lives. Layers of memories, some here and some there.

The people who have left do all sorts of things to keep Hawaiʻi alive: civic clubs, halaus, language classes for their children, gathering with people like yourself, talking story on social media. Many of you could make this list because you have friends and relatives doing it.  

And food. Such as the annual Pacific University Nā Haumāna O Hawai‘i Lū‘au and Hō‘ike near Portland. It’s like a gigantic photo op for “one heart, two homes.”

Distance from the islands may make the heart grow even fonder. Rona Tamiko Haluani, a California professor and daughter of a father who grew up in Hawai‘i but moved to California, has never lived in Hawai‘i. But she has spent years learning about her Hawaiian roots. It helps that professionally she does research on cultural identity and diaspora.

Her search, she said in a 2019 paper, “shapes me as a mainland Hawaiian. It links together…my Hawaiian identity in the diaspora.” Not just one anchor but many changing and flowing unpredictable ones. 

The Stay-Put Syndrome tries to perpetuate a world that no longer exists and that in some ways never really existed at all.

After all, those descendants who canoed thousands of miles on an unprecedented voyage to settle in an isolated unknown place were not exactly stay-at-home types.

Nor were all your ancestors from Asia who went through that same combination of homesickness and successful adjustment that today’s Hawai‘i diaspora has done. Too busy busting their asses.

A Songbook For All That Hawaiʻi Longing

The song “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” is so lovingly nostalgic and sad: “I’ll be home but only in my dreams.” Here’s a beautiful version with Renee Fleming and The Mormon Tabernacle Choir. 

Sad but incomplete. Because it says nothing about the rest of that person’s life.

The same is true with classic songs longing for Hawaiʻi, such as Andy Cummings’s “Waikiki” and Keola Beamer’s “Honolulu City Lights.” Anthems of longing.

But when Cummings wrote it, he was working as a musician on the continent where he did pretty okay playing hapa haole music. 

And “City Lights” is about someone who is leaving and not coming back. 

A much more applicable syndrome-busting anthem isn’t a song about Hawaiʻi but a Grace Nichols poem “Wherever I Hang.”  

It’s about a woman from the Caribbean who moves to England. She often feels so lonely, misses “back home,” and needs to change many of her “calypso ways.”  Sometimes she doesn’t know where she belongs.  

But she prevails. And makes a decision:

Divided to the ocean, Divided to da bone

Wherever I hang me knickers.

That’s my home.

Divided by the ocean from her first home, she looks forward.

Divided by the ocean from all those people who have left Hawaiʻi, the Stay-Put Syndrome looks backward.