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Pak, Gary (1952– )
Considered one of the most important Asian-
Hawaiian writers of the day, Gary Pak was born
and raised in Hawaii. His grandparents were
among the first Koreans to immigrate to Hawaii.
While Pak defines himself as a local writer whose
first language is pidgin English, he acknowledges
as one of the sources of his literary imagination
the stories his maternal grandmother, a picture
bride who immigrated to Hawaii in 1905, used
to tell him about Korea. His one-year sojourn in
Korea in 2002 as a Fulbright visiting lecturer at
Korea University might be seen as a fulfillment of
the childhood curiosity and interest raised in Pak
by his Korean grandmother.
Pak completed his B.A. at Boston University
and his M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of Ha-
waii at Manoa. His persistent interest in cultural
mixing, myth-making, narrative form, and story-
telling—all in the context of Hawaii’s complicated
history of negotiations with the West—appears
in his doctoral dissertation, in which he discusses
native Hawaiian historiography of the 19th cen-
tury and its influence on subsequent Hawaiian
literature. His first book-length publication, The
Watcher of Waipuna and Other Stories (1992), won
the 1993 National Book Award for Literature from
the Association for Asian American Studies. In the
short stories in this collection, Pak creates the fic-
tional community of Kanewai, to which he later

returns in his second novel, Children of a Fireland

(2004). Just as he combines the fantastic and the

realistic to represent the struggles of a colonized

community, Pak incorporates what he witnessed

in the lives of the first- and second-generation im-

migrants in these stories.

His first novel, A Ricepaper Airplane (1998),

links the lives of two generations of men in Ha-

waii as the nephew, Yong Gil, is summoned to his

uncle’s deathbed to hear the story of his life as a

laborer, revolutionary, and dreamer at a Hawaiian

sugar plantation. “Uncle... is like a book,” says the

narrator, Yong Gil, early on in the novel. Indeed,

the uncle’s wild dream of building a ricepaper air-

plane that will carry him back to Korea drives this

epic tale. A Ricepaper Airplane has been adapted for

stage by John Wat and Keith Kashiwada and pre-

miered at Kuma Kahua Theatre in Hawaii in 2002.

Pak’s second novel, Children of a Fireland

(2004), returns to the mythic community of

Kanewai. Pak continues to experiment with the

stream-of-consciousness technique he uses in A

Ricepaper Airplane. The novel starts out with the

characters trying to find a rational explanation

for the supernatural events that take place in the

community, but in the course of the narrative, the

quest for a rational explanation is abandoned as

the novel ultimately turns out to be a ghost story.

The past and the present are brought together in

the novel as Pak portrays the hold of history on