Whether it’s the chicken-skin feeling you get reading about Victor and the sugar cane field, or the immediate sense of claustrophobia settling in when sifting through Zoo’s mind, Darrell Lum is able to capture a feeling in time and bring the reader deep into his stories. The archetypes in the book no longer embody the simple, nameless stereotypes that we come to expect, but they have been portrayed with an identifiable human face that you can’t help but identify with. Just how the hippy lady tells Coco that he liberated the wall for everybody, Darrell Lum takes these human portraits that we encounter everyday and liberates them from our own meager generalisations. Lum often lent a humanizing perspective to these archetypes, transforming them into real people you can identify with, replete with strengths, flaws and emotions that shape their choices and personalities. Some of my favorite stories in the book were about characters that embodied these traits such as the Moiliili Bag Man, Coco the graffiti artist and Alfred the junkest classmate. Notably, these stories often peel back the skin on many simple attitudes and stereotypes we may have about Hawaii and people in general as Lum mixes the fond familial memories with characters that come from the margins of society.
Many of these stories take you back to a simpler time in the islands when getting toadshet on your skin gave you warts along with other ooh-gee stuff and five cents worth of kakimochi bought your innocence so long as it was the kind with nori and plenny shoyu on top. Lum at the Hawaiian Book & Music Festival–and consider it a cherished part of my book collection.ĭarrell Lum writes about what it is like to live and grow up locally in Hawaii. I was lucky enough to pick up an autographed copy recently from Mr.
Pass On, No Pass Back! was originally published in 1990 by Bamboo Ridge Press, the local book publishing company co-founded by Darrell Lum in 1978. Lum is well known for providing a prominent voice to the art of Hawaii’s Pidgin English storytelling, and most of the short stories in this book are told in this narrative style. Pass On, No Pass Back! is the award-winning collection of nine short stories by local author Darrell H.Y.
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