The "Bad Boy" and The "Swordtail"

Turn on the radio and count the number of love songs that comes on or think about the number of romantic comedies released each year. We humans are all looking for love and the idea of love is one that has fascinated us for centuries. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is a classic and tragic one at that, the couple take their lives, because of their feuding families. Chris McKinney’s book the Tattoo is a modern Romeo and Juliet love story, taking place in Hawaii. It seems like the romantic setting with the blue ocean, the pink sunsets and the Pina colada’s did not help the main characters Ken and Claude or any of the Romanic relationships mentioned in the book. Maybe it only works for people that are in Hawaii for a vacation!

In the last part of McKinneys book we follow the relationship of Claude and Ken closer. We see how people around them are trying to break up this relationship, how the cultural differences between the two of them are surfacing more and more and how the “rules” of the Hawaiian society are working against them.

We often want to think we are free to love whomever we want and that race, gender, and sexual preference are a matter of choice in the 21-century and nothing else. But as we see in the book and so often around us, love is about more than the two people falling in love. As Aristotle’s said “ We like those who resembles us, and are engaged in the same pursuit.”  In parallels to the book this quote is dead on. Ken has been working as a money collector, bouncer and living a hard life on the windward side. Claude is an only child that has an arts degree and has been sheltered from the shady business her mother makes great money of. They are in love but their race and culture is so different that when trouble comes their way the norms and value differences make this relationship break.

Our society has a pattern, a social structure, and it defines how relationships between people are. The social class Ken belongs to is a different one than Claude belongs to. At first she sees the Windward side of Oahu as a beautiful, lush and magnificent place, it is first when she experience this place that she sees the hardship, the poverty, and the sorrow this side of the Island has. As many things in life we only see what we want to see, what our experience and culture has taught us to see, and for Claude I think seeing windward side with out “sunglasses” on must have been like stepping onto a different planet all together. Here she was constantly harassed for her Korean and Caucasian ancestry and Windward side became her prison.

One can wonder if Ken was doomed to end up where he did, in prison from the start or that circumstances placed him there. One thing is for sure; he had the odds against him from the start. He loses his mother young, an alcoholic violent father raises him and he is living in one of the harder areas of Oahu when it comes to poverty and crime. The road to drugs and crime was an easy one; it was a ticket out of the Windward side and economic hardship. Ken’s best friend Koa falls victim to a drug habit, whereas Ken’s personality makes him sell instead of using. At the end Koa dies and Ken ends up behind bars for killing his father. Was this even preventable one could ask?

We are a product of everything in our life. Humans have the ability to asses and to conclude and that makes us unique, but at the same time our history and our place in society might make it difficult to make the right choices. Ken and Claude were the story of the “bad boy” and the “swordtail” that ended with a child and the imprisonment of Ken. Like so many others, the hope of “happliy ever after” never happened, like for so many others today. We know that the divorce rates are about fifty percent so one could wonder why anybody even bother looking for love. Or maybe it is the social construct of what a relationship should be that is the problem. Maybe if people started letting others fall in love with whom they want, with no social pressure, no prejudice for gender, race and sex, then maybe we would see happier people and a lot less lawyers. But then again what do I know? Nobody asks me anyway!