MENU PLANNING

Those who have read Miss Gone-overseas will remember the small child, Mariko, daughter of the engineer and his mistress, Armina. In a sequel to that book the child becomes Maria, an easy jump from the diminutive, Mari-chan.

As an adult, Maria operates a small restaurant on the island: Maria’s Place. We meet her as an adult, in the mid-1970s and 1980s in the short story collection, Islands. In the sixth story, as yet unpublished, we meet her daughter Helen as an adult.

Helen asks if the kitchen can make a couple of fish tacos, her current favorite among her mother’s other menu items: pulled pork sandwiches, tuna burgers, or the popular plate of sashimi, fried tuna nuggets, rice, and slaw.

The backstory here is that Helen suggested adding fish tacos to the menu, having learned of their popularity while at school in Hawaii. The dish is a natural for the islands. Fish abound and cabbage for slaw is grown locally, while masa is easily imported so that fresh tortillas can be made daily.

I’m not much of a cook but I do have an interest in diet, especially the diet of Pacific Islanders when it is based on local foods. One of the biggest banes of American influence in the islands is imported foods which are the cause of most of the medical and physical problems of the islanders. So, actually it was me, not Helen, who suggested this menu item to her mother. Whatever.

Maria and Helen, and Armina, whose identity was usurped at the end of the book by Mieko, the narrator of Miss Gone-overseas, are all part of the short story collection Overseas: stories. Many readers expressed dismay at the abrupt (to some) end of the first book. I did attempt to write a straightforward sequel, but found the pillow book format was not suitable for carrying the story far enough into the future without being seven or eight hundred pages long -- way longer than my stamina.

Instead, I carried the story forward in Overseas:stories. Composed of five short stories, the collection is set in the 1980s, except for the first, Same Father, Different Mother, which is set in both the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s. Echoes of Miss Gone-Overseas are evident in the stories: the “acquired” child, a suicide, and the lives of colonials. In this case, the colonials are American expats -- most of whom are there short term, some very short term.

In the first story of the collection we meet Maria and Shige, the young boy who the narrator of Miss Gone-overseas watched say goodbye to his father, the engineer. In the second story we meet Maria's family and a couple of expats. In the third and fourth stories are more colonials/expats interacting with the local population, and in the fifth an American tourist.

Most of the main characters, both locals and expats, of the first five stories will reappear in the sixth, but the adult Helen is the star, and the whole saga will turn a circle on itself.