The Mana Of Waikiki
Wes Kaiwi Nui Yoon, a self-described ‘lua guy,’ is using his traditional training to make the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center the most Hawaiian place in Waikiki
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Wes Kaiwi Nui Yoon, left, with his lua
teacher, Mitchell Eli
other forms of entertainment, which have been so heavily influenced by Western culture that they’ve lost their protocol.
“When you have a lua person like myself in business, that person is charged with the responsibility to 1) protect native Hawaiian people, 2) protect our children, and 3) to be pono in business.” Then to show just how much lua has influenced him in his occupation, he says, “When I go into meetings, I don’t answer to anybody - and I say that in a respectful way. You may be the CEO or president of blah-blah-blah, but so what? Who are you? Me? I descend from Kahekili. Now I don’t say this out loud, but knowing this does keep my chin up.
“A lot of our Hawaiians always talk like this,” Yoon adds, dropping his head and not making eye contact with this writer, “and that’s how they express their ha’aha’a, their humbleness, and I love that, and it’s good to be humble.
“But still, we were once chiefs, you know?
“Look at me: I’m young, I have long hair, tattoos and I’m in shorts. Usually when I show up for meetings with executives and general managers of other companies, they don’t look at me the same. They pass their business cards to those they feel most comfortable with. And that’s OK. For a lua guy like me, it’s like whateva! But I guarantee you this: By the end of the meeting, they know exactly who I am.
“Usually, everybody wants to talk first at these meetings. Talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. They choose to give their mana right away, to throw all their spears. But me? I’m quiet. I’m just listening and observing and gaining their mana. I’m figuring out all the pieces. I’m strategizing at all times. And then when they ask me what I think, whether it’s two sentences or 30, the mana shifts because I now have their undivided attention.”
Anna Leiululani Winchester was somehow always able to maintain her son’s attention. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that she was a sergeant in the U.S. Marines, and therefore, a strong disciplinarian. Maybe it had a little to do with the fact that she, a banker, believed in hard work, and because of that, she had to convince her youngest of two children, who was just 15 at the time, to work the early morning hours as a mail sorter at Liberty Bank in Chinatown.
Whatever the case,Yoon would not be nearly the man he is today without her constant guidance.
“My childhood was actually pretty boring,” he admits with a chuckle. “We had very little. We weren’t a very affluent family. But my older sister and I were rich because of the aloha and love of our mother. There wasn’t a thing she wouldn’t do for us. She was a disciplined mother. If I argued with her, she would always say, “Son, I know where you going with that ... Later, I better understood that answer, which is a very Hawaiian answer. She would engage me to think and not just give me an immediate answer.”
When Yoon was 20, his mother passed away, leaving him utterly depressed.
“I hurt and cried and was hating the world for what was about to happen to her,” he explains. But then came a watershed moment. “Just before my mother hala - she passed - she told me a key thing. She said, ‘I goin’ go a little while. You go do what you gotta do, and then you come meet me later.‘At that point, it all began to make sense to me what I should do. My mother, in her own way, challenged me. And lua guys love that word, challenge! After that, I made my malo tighter, sharpened my spear and decided to get out there and do my best for the Hawaiian community.
“There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about my mother,” he continues. “But things happen for a reason. And I always look back upon her passing as a time of strength for me. We Hawaiians understand that with death comes life, and that we’re going to see our family again.”
Yoon loves his native homeland, so much so that he claims his finest tattoo is the dirt that accumulates under his toenails.
“I never clean out the lepo,” he states with pride. “To the Westerner, dirt is filthy. But to me, it’s cleansing.”
Much of his free time is spent in his own yard in Kaimuki, farming dryland taro with his 5-year-old daughter, Keaowena, and pounding kalo for the family. “There’s nothing like being in the lo’i, to be in complete silence with your family and having time to reflect on the things you’ve done wrong and the things that you’ve done right,” he explains. “And for my daughter, I think it’s important that she learn why we put such hard work into our land.
“When I was growing up, I always loved to draw and build things,” he continues. “And so, if you want to talk about perfect, undisputed Hawaiian architecture, all I have to say is one word: aina. We always forget that our land is the most perfect architecture in the world. After that it’s just built environment, or local sense of place. Hawaiians didn’t have pitched roofs with stucco siding and glass, you know.”
He catches his breath before continuing this lengthy wala’ao session.
“I’ll take it one step further: Hawaiian architecture is also about people. In other words, why would anyone want to put employee parking farther than guest parking? Now the Westerners would say, well, it’s because the guests are most important, and I can see that to a certain degree. But if our workers are coming in from Nanakuli, and they just had to drop off their three children at grand-ma’s, school or whatever, and they gotta park three blocks away, and now they’re sweaty, tired and stressed out, and then I tell them, ‘Oh, go out there and share aloha today’ - how could they do it? You can’t share what you don’t have.
“The point is, you gotta take care of your people. The roofs, the glass and the trees are all wonderful things to look at. But they’re not as beautiful as the land and the people.”
It’s now 9:41 and Yoon is 11 minutes late for a meeting. Before parting, however, he leaves this final thought on what he looks forward to happening at not only the Royal Hawaiian Shopping Center, but in all of Waikiki - where nobility once roamed, where excellence once flourished unrestrained.
“I hope in time, our people and our guests will begin to give back to Waikiki, because this is the place where the chiefs were,” he says. “Greatness happens in a place because it started off with greatness, not because it was created. This place has always been great. Mana has always been here. There is a special heritage here in Waikiki, a special history. And it’s about time that our guests got the best.”
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