JAN MORRIS

 Paradox in the Sun

"The most isolated city under the sun is also the most worldly."

ALMOST OPPOSITE THE HYATT REGENCY WAIKlKI, IN THE flashiest part of Honolulu, where the towering hotels jostle one another for supremacy along the sandy line of Waikiki Beach beneath some palm trees at this supremely brassy spot, four dark boulders unprepossessingly brood. Few people take much notice of them, except perhaps to throw their towels on them while rinsing the sand off their feet at a nearby faucet, and the stones seem to me to stand there in attitudes of perpetual reproach.

They are the Wizard Stones, immemorial totems of Hawaiian awe, and they were standing there, very much more honored then, in the days when Waikiki was the power center of an independent Polynesian chiefdom. I interpret them as reminder that the city of Honolulu is far, far more than its popular legend allows; not just a glittery pleasure-haven, but a place of profound and remarkable consequence. It is a complete modern conurbation, a place in many ways prophetic of the way the world is going, and it is stUfl ningly deposited in the most geographically isolated spot on earth, the island of Oahu in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

No other sea has ever given birth to such a place, unless you count the mythical lost city of Atlantis. It is as though a Lisbon exists on the Cape Verde Islands, or a Bombay in the Maldives. Honolulu is 2,400 miles from the nearest continental and, except for neighboring Islands, nothing but open sea en Oahu and California, Japan, Alaska, or South America. History could not have chosen a more improbable spot for the creation of a metropolis.

Honolulu is the captial of the 50th state of the Union, embracing all the Islands of the Hawaiian archipelago, but it is very like a city-State itself. With a population approaching 900,000, it has its own private hinterland in O'ahu, all 600 square miles of which fall within the city and county limits, like a gigantic civic park with Honolulu in its lee. From the sea, the blue green highlands, wild and jagged on their summit ridges, gently sloping below, seem to descend directly into the city's back gardens; and silhouetted astonishingly against them, bustled about by tumultuous traffic, topped by radio masts, with vessels moving constantly offshore and aircraft flinging themselves ceaselessly into the sky, Honolulu's serried tower blocks stand like a living logo--a declaration of weath and energy at the remotest spot on the planet.

If it looks from the sea like an exhibition city, its ground plan too suggests to me a planner's theorem. All is rational. There is the original commercial and industrial quarter, around the old docks. There is a university district on the hill slopes behind. There is Waikiki, the famous pleasure quarter, populated chiefly by vacationists. To the west is the naval base of Pearl Harbor, and in a swath all around, reaching up into the mountains and along the shore, are Honolulu's residential districts, whose housing prices are among the highest of any city in the United States, whose citizens are said to possess more cars than any other citizenry, and whose residents range from reclusive billionaires in barricaded mansions to diligent corporation men in ties and striped suits to destitute beachcombers with straw hats and tangled gray beards, representing between them almost every race and condition under the sun.

No wonder the Wizard Stones seem resentful. This is not just an overhyped tourist destination, as the world generally supposed, but a great contemporary working city.

It happened while I was in Honolulu last time (I have been going there on and off for more than 30 years) that the city was honoring the birthday of Kalãkaua, nicknamed the Merrie Monarch, the last Hawaiian king to rule these Islands before the United States annexed them in 1898. 1 went to a celebratory parade of the Royal Guard at the 'lolani Palace, the endearingly ornate mansion the royal family built for itself in downtown Honolulu; the building is now no more than a museum, but the occasion movingly illustrated for me the historical compulsion of this city.

A century ago, Honolulu was hardly more than a village; yet is inescapably impregnated with a sense of history. The Royal Guard that day was dressed in liveries (white pith helmets, bandoliers) that looked like uniforms from the Zulu War, and given its orders in the Hawaiian language. Its music was providi by the Royal Hawaiian Band, founded in 1836, and appropriately conducted by a magnificently bearded bandmaster. Before the Palace steps was placed a huge eagle-topped trophy presented to the king in 1881 by his colleague the emperor of Germany.

The march-past was to music composed by the king himself. The national anthem was the anthem of the Hawaiian Kingdom, whose lyrics were written by the king. And the parade was inspired by Prince Edward Kawananakoa, the man who would, if the monarchy still existed, now himself be ruler of Hawai'i. All this, in the capital of the 50th state! Flags flew everywhere that day, and the place was draped in bunting, but there was not a Stars and Stripes in sight.

Only some 9,000 people, I am told, now speak the Hawaiian language fluently. Only 12 percent of this population can claim Hawaiian or even half-Hawaiian, blood; the original Islanders have long ago been swamped by the Caucasians, Japanese, Chinese, and all the others who have come here since Captain Cook first revealed the existence of Hawai'i to the world in 1778. Yet there is no forgetting the society that was here before, and the figure of Prince Edward on the steps of the Palace, unmistakably Hawaiian despite his elegant European suit, descended from chieftains who dressed in feathers of the 'o 'ö bird and appeased their gods with human sacrifice--Edward's dignified presence there, as his guard marched by, seemed to me inexpressibly poignant. Indelibly, the Hawaiian civilization has been debased by generations of occupation and tourism. Its ancient music has been vulgarized. Its ritual dances have been trivialized. Its language has been ignorantly plundered or patronized as a tourist gimmick.

Half-submerged, the culture does live on-passionate enthusiasts keep the language going, and at almost any of the old Hawaiian temples, dedicated to the gods of long ago, you may still see offerings of flower and fruit laid in gratitude or supplication. It is a ghost of itself, though. The illusion of the old society is promoted boisterously everywhere, but its reality loiters wraithlike through the city, wistfully reaching out to susceptible travelers in the rustle of the palms, or through the sickly mooning of guitars beneath the stars of happy hour.

One characteristic of the indigenous, however, lives on more robustly in Honolulu. The old Hawaiians had a supreme capacity for enjoying themselves, when they were not being sacrificed to deities. They were the original surfers, the original Waikiki escapists, and old pictures show them besporting themselves along their beaches just like the package tourists of today. Honolulu has inherited from them a genuinely rollicking talent for having a good time, exploited of course by the tourist industry, but perfectly organic still.

The Wizard Stones may grumble to find the mystique of their environment reduced to Waikiki's cheap publicity; but actually this two-and-a-half-mile-long enclave of hedonism is a model of its kind. You might not think so, if you found yourself allotted one of the many Waikiki hotel rooms that look desperately out on a blank wall across a noisy alley, but actually your bedroom is the last thing to worry about here. This is an uninhibitedly public, cheerfully democratic resort. Jam-packed indescribably into its narrow limits, climbing always higher above the long-dwarfed palms and banyans, it often suggests to me a kind of neo-Oriental pleasure bazaar. Seen, for instance, across the artificial waterfall of the Halekulani, an oasis of green, luxurious calm amid the general hubbub, Waikiki at night looks remarkably like a richer Calcutta, all movement, lights, noises, smells, with an all-night restaurant gaudy on the corner, and the dazzle of Kalãkaua Avenue, Waikiki's strip, casting everything into a bilious glow beyond.

Nothing clashes in Waikiki. Anything goes, and you can make your own combinations. You can sleep in a back-street boardinghouse and breakfast at the Halekulam. You can breakfast on a Big
Mac and swim at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel beach-all beaches are public on O'ahu, and all are equally clean. You can buy dreadful mementos at honky-tonk stores, or spend a bit more at Tiffany's, Cartier, or Alfred Dunhill. At the Sheraton Moana Surfrider Hotel, you can even sit on a real open veranda beneath a banyan tree, in a miraculously restored retreat of South Seas clapboard. Every degree of squalor or refinement informs these remarkable few city blocks-eager prostitutes and chichi restaurateurs, five-star suites and sleeping bags in Kapi'olani Park.

Well, almost every refinement. Hard though the posher hoteliers try to give the resort exclusivity, this is decidedly not an upmarket Elysium. It is too populist to be exclusive; too easygoing: not since the Hawaiian kings maintained this particular stretch of sand and surf as their royal preserve has Waikiki managed to be snooty.

Many citizens scarcely go to Waikiki from one year to the next. It is no more than one city quarter of several, and the fulcrum of their Honolulu is a different quarter altogether--downtown, the original port and business district, where the Palace is, and the modernistic State Capitol, and the City Hall and the portentous offices of the corporations that have made their money down the years from Hawai'i's sugar and pineapple plantations. There is heavy Japanese investment down there, too, and real estate fortunes are frequently made or lost, and enormous tourist developments are plotted.

It is a handsome downtown-one of the best looking in America, I think-yet here, history agreeably blurs, the edges. Honolulu is not one of your flash-in-the-pan business cities. It was a whaling station 150 years ago, and even now it has its schoonerport echoes, its Conradian moments: when you look down a steeland-glass business thoroughfare, say, to see the piers of the old port, where the Nantucket ships used to dock for their provisions, and where the interisland freighters still set sail for Kauai, Moloka'i, Maui, and the Big Island. On the corner of Merchant Street is Murphy's Bar & Grill, formerly the Royal Saloon, a. splendidly plush-and-mahogany kind of tavern where the Merrie Monarch used to amuse himself by mingling with the seagoing classes. The little Catholic cathedral of Our Lady of Peace stands magically hushed even now in its secluded close at the end of a shopping mall, while Chinatown bravely resists the inroads of gentrification with a proper mix of the homey and the raffish, food market beside artgallery, pool hail and nude video show along the road from modish boutique.

Downtown Honolulu as a whole, though, is not at all a quaint or nostalgic place. It has a recognizable power to it, as the heart of a great city should, expressed not just in the buildings of consequence, old and new, but in an articulated sense of purpose. You can hardly have a serious conversation in Honolulu, can hardly pick up one of its newspapers, without realizing that this city now thinks of itself not at all as an isolated speck on the map, but as a Pacific fulcrum where the world meets, and Honolulu already sees its destiny as a prime point of contact for all the countries of the Pacific Rim-the Geneva, as one visionary lately put it, of the Pacific.

It is almost happening already. This hardly feels like an American city nowadays, even of the most exotic kind. It is multinational to a degree unknown even in the most teeming nmigrant cities of Mainland USA, and it looks to its Pacific eighbors,Japan, California, Australia, British Columbia, far more aturally than it looks to the distant authority of Washington,

All the Pacific faces, all the Pacific tongues and influences here: much of Honolulu is Japanese owned; Chinatown is rgely Filipino and Vietnamese; many of the best restaurants are liai; and you can hardly walk down Kalãkaua Avenue without earing Australian accents.

In short, Honolulu, capital of the 50th state, officially an inerican city for 90 years, is turning itself into something else--just as the world, too, while we watch, is becoming another kind kind of community. If Honolulu really were what people generally suppose it to be, the city might well be bewildered by such momentous progressions. In fact, it is very well equipped to assume the special status its situation seems to demand for it. It is not a shallow city at all, as its popular reputation suggests, but a city truly in the round.

It is well acquainted, for a start, with power. Much of central O'ahu is one big military base, with helicopters massed on airfields and rambling military townships, while the landlocked inlet of Pearl Harbor, almost within sight of Waikiki, has been for half a century and more one of the great power factors of the world. From its bunkers, the commander of United States fleets throughat the Pacific exerts his vast authority, maintains his hundreds of ships and thousands of men; there are gray masts and rigging everywhere, and mighty satellite dishes, and submarines steal in in the sea past the wreck of USS Arizona, sunk by the Japanese in 1941 and still leaking, even now, a gallon of oil to color the harbor water every day.

For better or worse, this is a city of mature experience. It has had direct experience of war, such as no other American city can claim, and it knows of all the problems that contemporary cities are heir to. It is no mere tropical paradise. Drug abuse is chronic, crime is all too familiar, traffic congestion is terrible, there are thousands
of homeless people and many hungry ones. At the same time, it has at hand all the resources of a highly developed modern metropolis. I do not mean, of course, just money--any tomfool American beach resort has that. I mean the intellectual and cultural strengths that alone enable a city to take a distinguished place in history. Honolulu is well aware of its historical potential, and possesses the institutions to handle it.

The University of Hawai'i, for example, housed in a leafy meander of a campus, has powerful departments of linguistics, marine science, tropical agriculture, and other specialties relevant to the new Pacific. The East-West Center is one of the world's chief exchanges of Occidental and Oriental thought, working in 40 different languages, and attracting scholars, diplomats, and business people from all over the Pacific. The Bishop Museum is an unrivaled repository of Pacific knowledge; Honolulu's international film festival is an exuberantly pan-Pacific affair; and even in the performing arts this city plays a symbiotic role: when I was there last, the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra was preparing a performance of Fauré's Requiem, accompanied by specially choreographed hula dancing.

Do not be deceived, then, if you arrive in Waikiki one balmy. evening, straight off your flight from the Mainland, and see the city apparently seized by the perpetual pursuit of fun and money. Take note of the Wizard Stones!

Those strange vessels you see offshore may be sunset cruise ships, but they may be experimental warships of the Pacific fleet.: The sound of electrified ukulele will doubtless fill the twilight air but the Ballet Hawai'i may well be performing later in the evening.

For myself, I sense in Honolulu not just the balanced modern city that I have been trying to describe, but an archetypal city of the future, empowered by the new mingling of all our races, liberated by the abolition of distance, given an altogether new significance by its extraordinary place on the map. History was right, after all, and 21°19' N, 157'50'W, which used to seem so quixotic a location, now seems perfectly logical.

Few cities speak so clearly of shifting national meanings and ethnic conceptions. I am sure, however, that Honolulu's original loyalties will never be eradicated. Bashed, guyed, and degraded as it has been, its native Hawaiianness may well be strengthened rather than weakened by the city's new place in the world--the wider the outlook, the tougher the root. A century from now, I do not doubt, a Hawaiian prince will still be reviewing his guard on Kalãkaua's birthday, while the royal band oompah-pahs, as always, beneath the palm trees, the commands ring out in the tongue of the Islands, and the old memories stir sweet and sad among the skyscrapers.