Grandpa Ralph's Paintings and To Maui, With Love
Internalizing Hawai'i
When we were opening Poi Dog the restaurant in 2017, it was on a shoestring budget and we decorated the space on 21st St in Rittenhouse with art by my family and a few touches from our friends in Philadelphia. My grandpa’s paintings dominated the walls. His paintings had very specific subjects: Hawaiian flowers, the plumeria tree in his backyard (which I fished Easter eggs and his stray golf balls out of) and scenes of old Waipahu. He had few outlying subjects (I have possibly his only painting of an active volcano hanging next to my bed in Philly), and handful of flourishes, which made his paintings absolutely unmistakable. In his scenes of Waipahu, which often featured the Arakawa Store (the plantation store where my grandma worked for years), he’d paint a figure of a woman — her — in a window. He signed most of his paintings with the initials REA. Ralph Epefanio Aranita. It’s a name with discordant origins, somewhat Americanized. I think he began life as Rafael, or maybe just Epefanio and Ralph was added later.
Grandpa’s painting of old Waipahu in Rocky’s Coffee Shop. My grandma is the little dark figure on the right.
He gave away his paintings almost as fast as he painted them. He started giving them to me when I was in college, when he was going through a dry spell and not painting so much. When he handed me an unfinished painting of Waipahu Depot Road with the old Ford cars penciled on the canvas but not painted, I asked him to finish the painting for me. “Finish ‘em yourself,” he told me.
He gave them to restaurants, to friends. My aunts, uncles, cousins, and I covet them. They’re our family treasures. He sent them to my parents when I was a little kid in Brooklyn.
(And no, I didn’t exactly speak English at this point, just Mandarin.)
If you want to see a truncated version of my Hawai’i family’s history, I talked about it here on the American Girl channel when they released Nanea, the American Girl doll from Hawai’i.
Anyway, right before Poi Dog the restaurant opened, I was scouring thrift stores on Oahu for stuff to decorate the walls with. So imagine my utter shock when at the Savers in town, I found a pile of paintings signed REA.
Here are some of them, mixed up with other pieces we put on the walls.
It sent shockwaves through my family and my cousin Ash raced around to other Savers around the island to see if they had any others.
Ash found these at a different Savers.
We’re assuming one of Grandpa’s friends passed — someone he gave a lot of paintings to, and their family donated them. The timing made it feel like he was looking down on me from heaven, seeing that I had a whole restaurant to decorate, and sent me a load of paintings, sort of the way he would inflict his paintings on restaurants like Rocky’s when he was alive.
I bring this up now because I left the Savers price tags on the backs of the canvases. And I finally got this one framed the other day (well, I went to Jinxed and bought an old frame for $24 and shoved the painting into it). Only took 7 years to get it on my wall.
It’s been a year and a half since I’ve been back in Hawai’i, which is possibly the longest I’ve been away. But I write a lot about Hawai’i, and I recently wrapped up the last part (not out yet) of a trilogy I was working on for The Guardian about the legacy of sugar plantations. It’s a short piece that addresses an immensely disturbing and little reported piece of Hawai’i’s sugar history, the presence of canec, a uniquely Hawaiian building material, similar to drywall, that was made from sugarcane bagasse (the cellulose material leftover from sugar processing). It was treated with arsenic and commonly used as a building material in older houses. You can imagine the problems this caused when these older houses burned, like in the Lahaina fires.
In my research for the article, it was painfully apparent that coming up on the fires’ year anniversary, there is still a lot more needed to support the community.
Which brings me to something a bit more fun. I’m working with a few other entities to continue to raise money for Lahaina. One will be in DC (at Wolfgang Puck’s CUT and supporting Maui Food Bank) and one is next week in Philly, in conjunction with G’Day Gourmet Aussie Pies and Love City Brewing.
Tuesday, July 30, 6-8pm at Love City Brewing.
G’Day Gourmet’s Aussie pies are something else — and this Huli Pork pie has been a loooong time in the making. We’re debuting it on Tuesday to the public and $1 from each pie will go to Chef Hui. (The donating will be ongoing, beyond the event, it’s baked into the collaboration). How did this all come about? Our friend Jordan Mailata is G’Day Gourmet’s spokesperson and his wife Niki introduced him to the wonders of Hawai’i food, at our dinner table basically, and they handed Poi Dog sauces to Big Mike, the chef-founder of G’Day. So many Pacific entities, eating together…and now we have a pie.
This is when we tried the first samples last year:
So please come hang out with us, have some Pa’lante rum cocktails, eat some Poi Dog Huli Aussie pies and Coconut’s Uncle Jordan may swing by, too.
Yes, this is the highest she’s ever been off the ground.
Mahalo and see you Tuesday!
Kiki