The Mynah Bird Eats Hawaiian Shave Ice

In pulverizing the thing we most associate with cold, we dupe ourselves into believing that there is more of that cold, even as it melts so much faster here, hisses some deathbed manifesto about ownership, occupation, the attraction a Mynah bird has for a bottle of yellow pineapple-flavored syrup, the proximity of ice-shaving to vapor, vapor to breath, breath to a running leper, and all great distances affected by water.

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Shave ice is both a command (as in Shave ice!) and a noun. Only the tourists call it shaved, imposing the past tense, a history, as if this cutting-down to manageable size isn’t happening all around us here, all of the time.

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In the cutting down of the ice, is our occupation of a great, if temporary, coldness. In the cutting down of the ice, is the almost instantaneous melting on our tongues, the quickness with which we can take a second bite, pretending that our mouths are not the colors of this overcooked flora, of this decades-old blood.

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Once the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was overthrown, the “new” government enforced, in 1893, “The Act to Prevent the Spread of Leprosy,” which, in 1893, ignited in Hawaiʻi, the Leper War on Kauaʻi, when, rebelling against the forced relocation of Kauaʻi lepers to a barren reservation on the island of Molokai, the leper Kaluaikoolau shot and killed deputy sheriff Louis H. Stolza, in protest against this forced deportation, leading to further stand-offs and battles between the lepers and soldiers of the “new” government, and the lepers hid in caves, and the soldiers came with howitzers, and the lepers hid in the thickest of the vegetation, and the soldiers contracted subsequent assaults to American Civil War veterans, and 27 lepers were captured and quarantined and one leper was lynched for murder, but the remaining members of the colony disappeared, which meant that the colony itself had to dissolve as a consequence, the members dispersing into isolated households, where, in an effort to cool the heat of their disease—their wounds, their mouths—they would do in isolation what they used to do communally, which is to wave their swords through the air toward blocks of ice, catch the shavings in baskets, and toss, like confetti, these flakes into the air like a real snow, a new kind of weather that even a new kind of government couldn’t wrest, as if a scream—of victory amid loss—from their newly-cooled throats.

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In scream, in the expression of pain, is a sort of greeting, is a This is Who I Am, however involuntary. Is a definition of our weather. No wonder that, in joy, we also scream, in order to mimic this.

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The surface area of Hawaiʻi is 6,423.4 square miles. The surface area of our kiwi shave ice is incalculable—it melts too fast into green water.

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In the cherry-blue raspberry combo, is the purpling of our mouths with old murder. In purple, as in shaved, is a forcing of the present to the past, an imposition of a false perspective, as if King Kamehameha III didn’t write, Where are you, chiefs, people, and commons from my ancestors...? Hear ye! I make known to you that I am in perplexity by reason of difficulties into which I have been brought without cause, therefore I have given away the life of our land. Hear ye! both in 1843, and again just this morning, and again just now, as we swallow a cone of ice dust the color of another idiot sunset.

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When in captivity, the Mynah bird, in what naturalists believe to be an act of desperation, reproduce, in panic, the sounds they hear, including human speech. We have come to expect, even demand, that they mirror our voices. Some species of Mynah, though, have larger, more unwieldy tongues, which their owners often cut to match the shape of the human tongue in miniature, in order to allow them our version of speech.

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When the captive Mynah speaks to us in our own voices, that is the Mynah slowly going mad.

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In Hawaiʻi, the Mynah is now considered an invasive species, along with their interpretation of our language.

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I wonder about the distance between language and the heart, the marginalized and the conqueror. The fruit, and the syrup we render from it. Which the mainland, which the far-flung archipelago?

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Here, we live on the faraway...

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My father, having cooled himself with a cherimoya shave ice, mutters something in his sleep. The Mynah, in its nightstand cage, whispers, Kill them all...

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If my father never muttered this in his sleep, never in his life ate a cherimoya shave ice, is the bird wrong?

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The Mynah can hear, even if we can’t, the flakes of shave ice falling through the air. These are the ones that miss the cup. To the lepers, the Mynah exhales more loudly. To the lepers, the Mynah has a snowstorm in its mouth.

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As opposed to the pellets of a sno-cone, shave ice demands a finer, thinner grain, aims more to mimic the texture of actual snow. That our islands have never seen snow, does nothing to deter the shaving. In this act is wish-fulfillment, some silly stab at empathizing with the weather systems of the mainland, or, a retroactive reclaiming of weather that was never ours, the stories of which we heard whispered in the sleeps of the generations of occupiers, before they mutilated the tongues of birds who were then permitted to sing, and warble, and call, rather than pronounce words like blizzard, and—here, to us—other useless terms.

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Here, certain words also miss the cup, melt down to their water on leaves and in dirt.

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Here, actual snow, like shave ice, recalls the strips of epidermis, peeled from our sunburns. When we look through this veil of skin, the bird can resemble the squirrel, and our history, anything generous.

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The Softbill Mynah eats only soft foods. This is only nature, and speaks nothing to the delicacy of the bird’s heart.

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Shave ice is so soft, it melts. Strange that it takes such a formidable blade to cut it. Strange that, were it really the weather, and not just another hopeless mimic, it would have the power to kill us.

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Here, we imitate even the weak things that can kill us. A flake of ice that melts on contact with skin, even as it resembles that skin. Enough of these flakes, and we can have dessert, shelter, something large enough to call a disaster, a whole body.

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...Deportation that imitates concern. The howitzer that sounds like the wind. In this life, coconut shave ice recalls the coconut. In death, Louis H. Stolza mimics the leper.

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When the imitation encounters the original, which melts first?

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Is the mimicry of the weather systems of the mainland an act of empathy, reverence, or, in the turning of said systems into dessert, in staining them with syrups flavored with native fruits, one of condescension, reclamation? Above us, the Mynah mimics the sound of the shave ice machine, which is to say, a wail of blades.

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Too much of a soft thing can suffocate us. Just look at that sunset.

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Here, we make the weather in our mouths. The Mynah repeats it back to us with its scabbing tongue.

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...so desperate are we to be acknowledged, which is not exactly the same as being answered.

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At Haleʻiwa Beach Park, on Oahu’s north shore, a hunchbacked old woman peddles shave ice that she tops with blue vanilla syrup, azuki bean paste and sweetened condensed milk. She calls this a Snow Cap. Thawing, the azuki beans remember their days as an annual vine whose fibers were so strong, it was used, in ancient Japan, as a noose.

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In the plant as a gallows, is either a comment on mimicry, or ingenuity, or desperation, but definitely intersection—intersection as two things that not only meet, not only cross, but impale themselves onto each other.

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Sometimes, we have to force the impaling. Ask the Mynah. It now can answer.

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In the 1920s, Japanese expats working the sugarcane and pineapple plantations would celebrate their Sundays off by using their work machetes to instead shave ice into cups, over which they poured the juice of the cane and the pineapple. Their children eventually moved off the plantations, some opened grocery stores and peddled this treat, as their parents did, only on Sundays. In this way, shave ice became sacred, elemental, meteorological. A 100-year storm turned weekly tradition. As much a stain on us as the diseases we carry, the shades of our skins. Even when the sunsets became rote, the children would still order their shave ice not by the flavor, but by the color.

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Here, our colors and our coughs precede us, act as greeting. In this way, we are just like the rest of the world.

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Even the prettiest sunset here is a prelude to darkness and other weak metaphors.

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Next to that mountain of banana peels and horseflies, the Hyatt Regency clears some space for a new poolside bar at which you can buy “authentic Hawaiian” shave ice that is way, way too expensive. At night, in the browning phloem bundles, each horsefly lays its eggs in a sound that recalls water dripping—the sort of melt that predicts infestation.

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Here, authenticity is the sword. In this way, dessert, like the weather, can cut your head off.

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My father cools his sunburnt feet with an ice cube. Everything on his body is too soft to shave it.

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Of course I want my father to nod, and of course I want my father to wave, even as he turns away from the shave ice stand to the ocean where the whales have no idea that this blank-faced man is looking at them with green eyes, lips.

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Though the beans are so red, they leave no stain in my mouth. That’s the syrup’s job. When my lips are this color, they tell the world that I am a corpse, frozen. If my lips are this color, then why am I still sweating? Overhead, the Mynah invades another coconut palm, plays dead in its fronds.

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Today’s flavors: lychee, guava, cherry, lime, mango, passion fruit, coconut, kiwi, pineapple, and li hing mui, the dried salted plum, a flavor that the hunchbacked old woman describes, like speech to a maimed bird, like these islands themselves, as acquired.

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“...soft, largest, short tail, includes more than half of all living birds,” says Mynahbird.org, though “This is not a complete list.”

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In completion, is the sort of water that makes a circle around us—the sort of shave ice that has trouble gelling.

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Ice, when shaved, so easily accepts the syrup. In this way, acceptance is another state of matter.

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According to Mynahbird.org, in the Hill Mynah is “the most magnificent, magnetic, and majestic, the absolute champion of mimics!” Prayerfully, we lend the bird the trinomial nomenclature, Gracula religiosa religiosa, the subspecies mimicking the piety of the species.

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Here, majesty is the ability to dupe us into believing that something else is us. Here, religiosa survives in our caves. Still, we’re not sure if it’s the second one, or the third.

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Li hing mui does stain the mouth red. I thank God for the satisfying of this expectation, though I don’t have the speech with which to mimic it.

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Q: What is desperation?

A: What is desperation?

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The Mynah can’t keep up with the glaciers, and other ever-melting things, confused as to whether to retreat or advance.

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In shave ice, is longing for salutation. In a cold mouth in a hot climate is a plea for confirmation that we exist. Sunburn, frozen throat, a communication between two unbearables... If we can feel two things like this at once, we exist.

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In the reshaping of the Mynah’s tongue is a sort of deportation. The cut-away parts of us repurposed as fertilizer, growing the fruits we use to flavor a dessert that evokes the kind of weather we’ll never see here. A wedging of the foreign into the crevices of the indigenous. All it takes is a razor sharp blade...

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We need hard things to make other hard things soft.

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Here, our history is packed into a paper cone, is quenching our thirst, cooling us down, even as it leaks from the bottom, runs from our hands.

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We all know: Hawaiʻi is the 50^th state, the last. We know: the last state before insanity is mimicry.

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There’s always a stronger hard thing...

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In mimicry is reproduction, a confirmation of something that’s already happened. In 1815, the Russians overtook Hawaiʻi. In 1843, the British overtook Hawaiʻi. In 1898, the U.S. did. All the blood looked the same. The heart of the Mynah, the li hing mui, cherry...

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The Mynah can’t keep up...

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In a melting dessert is an incomplete dessert. We can never eat all of our shave ice. It adapts to this weather so much faster than we do. This is to say nothing of a sense of home, and other volcanic detritus.

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Here, the birds pronounce our dripping desserts, confuse this with the sound of the egg pressed from the horsefly’s body.

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My father says something in his sleep about my never having should have been born... I chase after this, and after that, I chase this with a Snow Cap.

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So, we retreat to our caves with our sweetest, melting things, stain our tongues calico, tell ourselves that those cannons are a new thunder, a jubilee. When we finally feel it’s safe to step out into the light, the thickest of the vegetation will be so affectionate, that the birds here won’t be able to distinguish our mouths from the flowers, emerge from emergency.

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The Mynah is red and the Mynah is black and the Mynah is white, and the Mynah is Pale-bellied and Golden-breasted and Yellow-faced, and Rose-necked, Common and Great, starling and passerine. They eat the insects from the fruits we flavor our shave ice with. They sing clearly into the wind. They say hello.