Ohana. It’s a Hawaiian term meaning “family,” and family is probably not what devoted Anthony Bourdain followers expect if they come across a Parts Unknown episode dedicated to Hawai’i, that heavily touristed island state found in the Pacific Ocean some 3,200 km (2,000 miles) southwest of the US mainland.
For Bourdain, family was both personal and private. However, the idea of family as both a social ideal and a balm from the vicissitudes of life lies at the root of this reflective and unusual episode of Parts Unknown, which first aired on CNN on June 14, 2015. This was a strikingly different hour of television than Bourdain’s foray to Hawaii for No Reservations in March 2008, some seven years earlier.
Bourdain was the same man he was then, of course — none of us really, the philosophers say, we simply become more of who we are — but the Hawaii of 2015 caught him in a more reflective mood. Hawaii is one of my favourite Parts Unknown episodes for that reason, and not just because it both opens and closes with Bourdain breaking bread with one of my favourite writers, Paul Theroux, New England born, a resident of London, England for much of his early writing career, and now an avowed — and passionate — resident of and advocate for the island state.
Fun fact: Theroux first discovered Hawaii for himself while paddling a sea kayak around islands in the equatorial Pacific — this is true — for his 1992 book The Happy Isles of Oceania. Theroux’s doctor at the time diagnosed him with terminal cancer and gave him a year to live; Theroux, somewhat of a philosopher himself, decided to vanish somewhere in the Pacific, never to be seen or heard from again. A year later, it turned out, his doctor sheepishly admitted he had got the diagnosis completely wrong. Theroux emerged from Oceania healthier and happier than when he left, and he would go on to write nine more travel books and a dozen more novels, including this year’s Burma Sahib. He is now 83. That doctor’s diagnosis was off by some 32 years, and the clock is still ticking — an irony Bourdain himself would have likely appreciated if not laughed out loud at.
It’s not as if Theroux hasn’t tried: In 2019, at age 79, he drove his beaten-up old car through cartel Mexico, taking copious notes along the way, for On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, and managed not to get himself murdered in the process. When you’re old, he noted wryly at the time, people tend to ignore you, even drug cartels.
Back to Hawaii. Theroux, who knows a thing or two about island life, is quick to explain the island mentality to Bourdain in Hawaii’s opening moments.
“Hawaii is America,” Bourdain says, “as American as anything could possibly be, yet it also never shed what was there before in the layers and layers that have come since. It's wonderful, tricky, conflicted, and what, for lack of a better word, you'd have to call paradise.”
“Paradises don't exist,” Theroux corrects him. “Paradise is kind of in your head.”
“Wait a minute,” Bourdain replies. “You look at your window here. You look at those hills, those mountains, all that green, that blue sky, the gin-clear sea, it sure looks like paradise to me. Does it matter that it's America?”
Theroux: “The big thing is that it is America. It has elements of the Third World. The nicest elements of the Third World, which is the self-respect, the pride. There are things that don't work at all. But then it's mainstream USA. Where we are now, there are PTA meetings here. They get together and watch the Super Bowl. It’s the most Main Street USA as much as you will find. … To be Hawaiian to me, there needs to be a sense of connection to a place. Some sense of responsibility for it. It should be about being honest to a place, to be honest to what you love and to be honest to what you value is a road that's constantly trying to be more and more informed … what I love about the oceans, that's my pathway. That I go on the ocean to seek that sense of truth.”
Bourdain is both curious and passionate about the native Hawaiian campaign for political and social autonomy, most evident on the island of Molokai —one of the most evocative and heartfelt sequences in the entire episode — and Theroux takes pains to explain what makes Hawaii so unique, and special, and why, in a strange way, for those willing to look below the surface and see past easy answers, Hawaiian nationalism is not the simmering cauldron of repressed violence that is New Caledonia, a French territory to the west of Tahiti — or French Polynesia as the official maps label Tahiti — in Melanesia.
“It's not a particularly welcoming or friendly part of the world. Contrary to the aloha myth. No island is. Nantucket isn't. The island of Hawaii isn't. The Isle of Wight. Name an island that wants foreigners there. Sicily. Do they want foreigners there? No way. Did anyone come to an island with good intentions?
“Captain Cook put his sailors ashore, just to the northwest of here. He was the first haole. Like Magellan, Hawaii killed its first tourists. The Philippines killed their first tourist. People born on the islands view anyone who comes ashore with suspicion.
“To go back to what defines a Hawaiian, maybe we should go back in our imaginations, it could have been 2,000 years ago. … you get (the idea) that these were very productive people. They were industrious, healthy, strong. They had time for the arts. That was a large population, more than half of what we have in Hawaii today. Fully sustainable, because there were no other choices. So over time, the native Hawaiian population grew. It's the same story. Diseases were introduced from outside …, and the inability to deal with them caused people to die. In 1926, the public school system outlawed language and the practice of culture in public schools. The road to extinction was already being paved.”
Later in the hour, Bourdain spends quality time with native Hawaiians who warmly and gently share their concept of ohana with Bourdain, and it’s one of Parts Unknown’s most telling — and poignant — moments.
“The ocean is all around for thousands of miles,” Bourdain says. “It’s a humbling feeling knowing, at all times, the ground upon which you live and breathe is but a tiny speck in the middle of all this. So in Hawaii, (you learn) you’re able to handle yourself in the ocean no matter what it throws at you. It implies you're capable of almost mythical things. The ability to live in the water, handle its many moods above or below the surface.”
A lot has been written and said about Bourdain’s struggles with substance abuse and addiction over the years and whether he was physically worn down by the time it ended for him, but there’s a moment in Hawaii when, tanned and fit and looking a man half his age, is helping paddle a traditional Hawaiian canoe, far out at sea, when he is purely in his element — a man high on life, a discoverer and ocean explorer, learning about new cultures and coming ever closer to finding the meaning of life.
“Always bring the ohana. Bring the family, bring the kids. You rarely ever see a party here where there aren't kids.”
For me, Hawaii marked one of the high points of his entire run on Parts Unknown.
Aloha, and mahalo.
Supplementary reading:
https://explorepartsunknown.com/hawaii/bourdains-take-hawaii/
https://explorepartsunknown.com/hawaii/episode-intel-from-hawaii/
