Walking in His Footsteps

The Post writes about how Barack Obama’s Hawaiian childhood shaped the man. The article helped me to understand him better. He was born in 1961 at the Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children. My Territory of Hawaii birth certificate refers to it more succinctly as the Kapiolani Maternity Hospital.

Barack sat in Mrs. Hefty’s fifth-grade class, while I had Mrs. Hanley for homeroom next door in the old Castle Hall. [Digression #1: Punahou School was founded in 1841 by New England missionaries, whose descendants ran the Islands (“they came to Hawaii to do good and they did well”). The names of Hawaii’s Big Five companies, such as Castle & Cooke and Alexander & Baldwin, adorn many of the campus buildings.]


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From Google Maps: Barack's walk to school.

Barack walked to school from his apartment on Beretania Street, a couple of blocks from the police station where my mother worked for over 20 years. [Digression #2: Hi, Mom, I hope the doctors figured out what’s wrong and that you’re feeling better.] Barack wasn’t a particularly distinguished student, nor did he identify strongly with any group. Like every teenager he felt out of place. His parents were absent, he wasn’t rich like many of the other kids, and being of mixed race unless you were part-Hawaiian was then relatively uncommon (now it’s more the rule than the exception).

Kids who enter Punahou before high school don’t have the perspective to realize how lucky they are. But neither do they manifest the Western-civ loathing that inhabits some elite enclaves. Barack Obama does not have a radical temperament. If he does have some extreme views, he picked them up where minds are corrupted, Columbia and Harvard. © 2008 Stephen Yuen