Growing Up "Oriental" in 1950s Small-Town Wisconsin

"Looking back, I'm astonished at the complexity - both for our family and for the community that our father brought us to after World War II," author Nina Macheel says. "But people of all backgrounds - Czech, Greek, Irish - who have read the book have told me that, though the details differ, our experience maps to theirs. This is a universal story." 

 

Don't Call Me Moana delivers Ms. Macheel's unflinching memories of her mother’s strivings to seamlessly fit her South Pacific/Asian children into the region’s dominant white population. The author reclaims the cost of that effort, shielding them from their cultures of origin and their faraway family, by mapping the milestones of Hawaiian history to her mother's fears and ambitions. Reviewing the 19th-century American takeover of the Hawaiian islands and its disastrous marginalization of the Hawaiian people, Ms. Macheel explains, “It was hard, but essential, that I honestly convey the environment that my ancestors had to find their way through. The intergenerational implications on me and my own children became obvious, reflecting the universal experience of anyone who's been uprooted because of forces outside their control.”

 

Don’t Call Me Moana is 316 pages with ten photos. It was produced by Luminare Press, Eugene OR, and is available for order at Amazon and other online booksellers.

 

For information contact nina.macheel@gmail.com