Oregon ever since. After college she pursued sev-
eral careers and interests including working as a
hand-weaver, freelance journalist, and legal sec-
retary. Nearly two decades after graduating from
college, Tyau returned to literature and writing
and found institutional and critical support for
her work. She received fellowships from the Na-
tional Endowment for the Arts, the Oregon Arts
Commission, Literary Arts, and Fishtrap. She has
taught creative writing and has been a guest lec-
turer and reader at numerous northwest colleges
and universities. Tyau has published two books,
both of which draw from Tyau’s personal expe-
riences and her family history, reflecting on Ha-
waii’s postwar society.
Tyau’s first book, A Little Too Much Is Enough
(1995), is a series of vignettes about an extended
Chinese-Hawaiian family living in post–World
War II Oahu. The vignettes are loosely tied together
through protagonist Mahealani (Mahi) Suzanne
Wong’s youthful experiences with eating, pre-
paring, buying, and working with food. Whether
Mahi is learning how to cook the perfect rice from
her mother, or her extended family is ritualistically
feasting on a banquet, food provides their everyday
connection to one another and past family history,
as well being the means through which Mahi and
her family negotiate the difficult terrain of Hawai-
ian society for natives and Asian immigrants. In
this way, food is not only a metaphor for the im-
perative to assimilate into Hawaiian and American
culture but also a marker of class and race differ-
ence and a reminder of the enduring influence of
the past on the present.
A Little Too Much Is Enough is innovative in
that its 40-some stories are narrated by multiple
characters and in different modes. Even though
Mahi’s growth remains at the center of the novel,
there is no single perspective or a single charac-
ter’s voice to which the novel attempts to draw
our attention. Tyau also uses different narrative
modes, from dialogue to internalized monologue,
which exemplifies the postmodern technique of
showcasing different modes of being. Moreover,
the novel’s nonlinear narrative challenges any ide-
alized notion of the protagonist’s proper growth
and development. Critics have also pointed out
that the narrative strategy is an attempt to por-
tray the multivocality of the Chinese-Hawaiian
community.
Several critics have criticized the novel’s lack
of coherence, some even arguing that it is more
a collection of short stories than a novel. In in-
terviews, however, Tyau has stated that she drew
inspiration from Sandra Cisneros’ novel House on
Mango Street. She hopes that the stories, although
nonlinear and at times disjointed, come together
to tell a complex story of an extended immigrant
and mixed-race family living in Hawaii. By featur-
ing Mahi and her family’s intergenerational and
multiregional relationships in terms of the ritual
of eating and preparing food, the novel shows how
intimate and immediate the connections between
these characters and places are.
Instead of a single dominant plotline or narra-
tive development, the novel is structured around
themes and ideas, several of which emerge as par-
ticularly predominant. In the first story, “Moon
Baby,” Mahi’s mother, Anna, worries that Mahi’s
non-Anglicized name will limit her daughter’s
chances of success and acceptance on the main-
land. In this story and others, the mainland rep-
resents a place where a “real American” success is
possible. Another important theme throughout
the vignettes is the coexistence of the past with the
present. While this is implied by the novel’s non-
linear narrative style, it is also explored specifically
in several stories. For example, in “Red Paper,”
Mahi’s father tells us how the ghost of his father-
in-law shadows his everyday life.
Another predominant theme is that of a para-
dise lost. Hawaii’s image as an idyllic and lush
tropical paradise is countered by the difference in
wealth and prestige between whites and Chinese-
Hawaiians like Mahi’s family. This is represented
in several stories such as “All Lips,” in which Mahi
attempts to erase her “Hawaiian” lips from a school
picture, and in “Fifty-Dollar Pineapple” and “Pick
Up Your Pine,” which show Mahi and her brother
Buzzy engaged in brutal and dangerous work in
the pineapple fields and canneries. Mahi’s painful
growth in Hawaii and her subsequent move to Or-294 Tyau, Kathleen