Haole Boy: The Adoption of Diversity

Copyright © 2008 by Lanakila M. Achong

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4401-0830-3 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-0832-7 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-4401-0831-0 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008942345

iUniverse rev. date: 11/19/08

Contents

CHAPTER 1:

CHAPTER 2:

CHAPTER 3:

CHAPTER 4:

CHAPTER 5:

CHAPTER 6:

CHAPTER 7:

CHAPTER 8:

CHAPTER 9:

CHAPTER 10:

CHAPTER 11:

CHAPTER 12:

CHAPTER 13:

CHAPTER 14:

CHAPTER 15:

CHAPTER 16:

CHAPTER 17:

CHAPTER 18:

CHAPTER 19:

CHAPTER 20:

CHAPTER 21:

CHAPTER 22:

CHAPTER 23:

CHAPTER 24:

CHAPTER 25:

LIST OF FIGURES BY CHAPTER

1. Oni’s first time at the beach with Daddy.

2. Michael Wester, age two.

3. The beginning of freedom.

4. Freshmen.

5. Senior in high school.

6. From the back, L to R: Michael Achong, Michael Wester, Joey Achong, Kekoa Achong, and Patricia Achong.

7. A day at the beach.

8. Bug, me, Kim, and Dean.

9. Home of Achong grandparents.

10. College football.

11. The beginning of braids.

12. SORT, day 1.

13. SWAT competition, Tucson, Ariz.

14. Hostage Rescue.

15. Federal Prison, Long Beach, Calif.

16. Rappelling tower used in the SWAT competition in Tucson, Ariz.

17. Burned-out building during the LA riots.

18. During the LA riots.

19. Saying goodbye to a beautiful woman.

20. Flooded streets of Ocean City, NJ.

21. All grown up. L to R: Kekoa, me, Joey.

22. The Achong Family. From the back, L to R: Kekoa, me, my father, my mother, Joey, my grandmother.

23. Lanakila and Adrian on our wedding day.

24. Oni and Daddy.

25. My favorite picture of Oni.

Oni's first time at the beach with Daddy.

CHAPTER 1:  

A Letter to My Daughter, Oni

This is what I remember of how my life began. I was three and I got punched in the face by my mother. The blow sent me down some concrete stairs outside an apartment building and broke my nose. It was very late in the evening and I had probably interrupted a drug buy or some other nefarious interaction in which my mother was involved. I spent the first seven years of my life getting the shit kicked out of me by my mother and her various low-life boyfriends and the next three years learning how to avoid human touch or interaction of any kind. My mother once told me that I was a mistake, an unwanted child. She hadn’t needed to say it outloud, she had already made sure that I knew it every moment I was with her, until the day I left her for good at the age of ten.

But this isn’t a pity party for me. In fact, I’ve never asked anyone to feel sorry for me, not ever. This is the story of how I ended up fulfilling my dreams and enjoying a pretty wonderful life, despite starting it out with a broken nose at three and knocked-out front teeth at five. A kid who spent his first ten years living in poverty with his drugged-out mother, resided in many different decrepit homes, and even spent time in foster care. A kid who was suspended from every school he attended through high school for fighting, and was arrested at fifteen for carrying a concealed weapon with intent to use.

Yet through it all, I somehow managed to keep dreaming of a better life. I have always been a dreamer. Growing up, I never let anything, not even my biological parents or the life into which I was born, stop me from dreaming or prevent me from pursuing my goals. I achieved much for a child with my background, and lived a lot longer than I would have ever thought possible. If you had asked me at twelve how long I thought I would live, I would have told you no longer than eighteen. I actually believed that. I survived for much longer and achieved some pretty remarkable things along the way, mainly because of the many truly wonderful people I came across and all that I learned from them.

It is amazing how each experience and each interaction with another person can have the potential to be the worst thing we’ve ever done or the most sublime. I was lucky enough to take what I could from every experience and find some truth in it. I’ve seen the worst of what people can do, experienced it first hand, and learned what I did not want to become from those people. I’ve also been extremely lucky to have seen the best of what people can do and these remarkable people provided me with some of my greatest lessons.

They shaped me, helped me and quite literally saved me.

I learned that there is always hope and that hope originates from within. Our happiness is our own choice. We cannot blame the world for our troubles, and it is up to us to find our own truths and achieve our dreams. Mistakes and poor choices along the way are inevitable, but as long as we remain steadfast, learn from our experiences, and work to improve, our dreams will always be within arm’s reach.

Onipa’a, my beautiful daughter, I don’t want you to know a single moment of that heartache I call my childhood, but you’ll need to hear the truth and you’ll need to know what I lived through if the story of my life is going to mean anything to you. Perhaps you can learn something from it that will help you someday.

My story begins with a very difficult childhood, and although I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone, it did provide me with a unique ability-the ability to see and accept the truth. This ability allowed me to see things clearly, and later on, succeed in nearly all my endeavors. Seeking out the truth just happened to provide me with a pretty interesting life and what I think is a unique perspective. If you are able to seek out and learn from the truth in all things, especially yourself, you are going to have an interesting life. Remember, I didn’t say great life; I said interesting life. I’m not a famous soul singer with a warm sultry voice that makes women swoon-despite a lifelong wish to the contrary. But I can tell bullshit when I hear, see, or smell it.

To begin to understand my story, you’ll need to know that I don’t remember feeling any love as a child, just fear, pain and hatred. I feared for my physical safety through much of my childhood. I feared that nobody cared about me as a child and I was made to fear that I wasn’t worth being loved. I felt pain from my abusers. There was the physical pain, but no pain is deeper than when the person hurting you is a parent, someone whom you deeply trust and who is supposed to love you unconditionally. I felt hatred. Hatred for how it made me feel to be looked down upon by children and adults alike, for simply being born into my life. Hatred for being judged because I wasn’t kept clean, because I had long dirty hair and poorly patched clothes. Judged for my appearance, not as a person.

You will need to know that when I was seven, my mother and one of her boyfriends, started beating me after I fell asleep, because it was easier to catch me when I wasn’t awake. I didn’t know a good night’s sleep until I was an adult.

You’ll need to know that the father who took me away, at the age of ten, from the awful life I had been living with my mother, killed himself three days before my thirteenth birthday.

I also want you to know that a family adopted me when I was eighteen-suddenly I had an Irish mother and a Hawaiian father, and siblings. They are the two most amazing parents a person could have. They are my first and only mother and father, and they gave me the precious gift of family.

As an abused child, one of my first lessons was that I needed to determine who was a possible threat to me, and to observe the actions of others in order to know the truth of their intentions. My instincts told me that the abuse was bad, and my defiance of the life I was born into provided me with a desire to rebel against it. Being able to seek and accept the truth, no matter how painful, allowed me to survive my childhood. You can either take being abused or you can fight back, no matter what your age. In some manner of way, physically, mentally or both, you can fight back. That was my first major lesson and I carried it forward throughout my entire life.

The second lesson was that truth is an ally. It became my best friend when I was a child. As I got older I began to use it to understand myself better, and in doing so, I learned to understand human nature better. I learned to understand people better. It is very true that you cannot truly understand another person, until you truly understand yourself. When I was eighteen, the woman I respect the most in this world once told me that at times I was too honest. I proved her right many times, and unfortunately it was a lesson, a truth, that I couldn’t just correct by knowing of its existence. That’s the truth of truth. It isn’t what we always want to hear and mere knowledge of it can’t always correct a problem. We can, however, learn from the experience and apply the lessons in the future in hopes that we don’t make the same mistake again.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a lot about my childhood and blocked out some of the worst of what happened during my earlier years, but the memories I do have are crystal clear. What I’m about to relate are the facts of my life, as I remember them. Some of my memories are just short moments in time, like clips of a home movie-those are mostly the memories of my childhood. Other memories are much more detailed, such as: how playing sports kept me in school and the incredible experience of being adopted and having a family for the first time, how I got to college, and my immersion into the Hawaiian culture, and the time I spent working in federal law enforcement and on a special operations response team.

Although this is a story that I have always meant to write, the inspiration to finally sit down and write it came from having a child of my own; a beautiful little girl. I want to give you, Oni, a sense of what it feels like to have determination, to work hard and to accomplish a goal, no matter how many obstacles are in your path. I want you to experience fulfillment and happiness. I want you to realize that dreams can be achieved, and that it’s important not to let anyone else set your path for you, not even your father.

I also want you to understand that you can have the strength to walk away from a dream if it stops being healthy or good for you, whether the dream involves a career or a person. I’ve walked away from both more than once, and I’ve become a better person for it-not because every choice I made was the correct choice, not by a long shot, but because I continually looked for the truth in all things, good and bad. I took those lessons and applied them to my life, and in so doing, learned what to look for in life and in people. I learned to surround myself with true friends and real love, and found my own happiness.

I want you, my daughter, to know everything about your father, everything that I’ll never know about my own biological father. I want you to know everything I can teach you about life and I want you to know that you are the most important person in the world to me. You’re at the top of a very distinguished list. I want you to know that my heart fills with joy every single time you smile. I want you to know what I went through in order to be able to love you so much, to be able to love at all. I want you to know that even though your father didn’t experience love as a child, he would one day learn to accept and give unconditional love. When unconditional love is real, it is the most wonderful truth of all.

Michael Wester, age two.

CHAPTER 2: 

First Principles

I was born Michael Wester, in Portland, Oregon on February 11, 1967, at Woodland Park Hospital. I weighed seven pounds, thirteen ounces and was born at 7:13 in the morning.

I lived with my biological mother until I was ten years old. My biological father and mother were not together and I don’t remember anything about my father before the age of ten.

My mother was into drugs more than she was into caring for her kids. Throughout that first decade, she was either high, drunk or both. Her addictions put me and my elder sister at physical risk, not to mention the mental and emotional harm it did to us every day. She physically abused us, and so did her drugged up boyfriends and an uncle. My nose was broken at the age of three (when I was punched in the face), and then I fell down a flight of stairs.

My two front teeth were knocked out at the age of five by an uncle, because he thought it was funny to stand me up, get down on his knees and punch me in the face as hard as he could. These beatings would have felled an adult.

The longest I remember living in one place during those years was for about six months. I spent time in foster care, and when I was with my mother, we usually stayed with people I didn’t know. When I was around five or six, she took us to a foster home. The outside of the house was surrounded with a chain link fence topped with barbwire; it was like a prison for children. All the children were housed in two large rooms on the top floor of the house, boys in one room, girls in another. We didn’t know why we were there or when we were going to leave. I didn’t see much of my sister except when they let us out on the playground. I sometimes saw her when we were doing chores, which was most of the day. The other children in the home seemed as depressed as I was, and like me, didn’t talk much. The distraught expressions most wore as they trudged around the home would melt even the coldest of hearts.

After a couple of months, my mother came and picked us up. My life with her had been horrible, but I was so happy to get out of the prison that I was bursting with joy the day she came to get us. I remember riding in the car, one of the beat-up drive and run cars she had from time to time. These were cars that she hadn’t paid for, weren’t licensed or insured and when they quit running, she would just leave them on the side of the road and walk away. I remember looking out of the window of that car as we drove away, thinking that the world looked incredible. The scenery jumped out at me-everything looked new, like some kind of miracle. It was like I was seeing the sky and the trees for the very first time. I remember taking a deep breath of the wind as it raged through the window, and how the anxiety and uncertainty left my body as I exhaled. Free. It was a wonderful feeling, even though I knew I was probably going back to the same terrible life with my mother that I had known before. I had hope that things had changed, or at the very least, that someone wanted me.

She took us to a donut shop and told us we could have any kind we wanted. I must have asked for six different kinds and she bought all of them for me. My sister and I were stuffing our mouths full of donuts and telling her about our experiences in the child prison, talking over one another in an attempt to explain how bad it was and how happy we were to be free. We told her about the chores they made us do and how we didn’t get to eat if they said we did something wrong, how we weren’t allowed to watch TV and had to go to bed and get up at the same time. We were so excited to be out of that place! As we sat eating the donuts in furious jubilation, I noticed that my mother looked healthier. She had me at the age of eighteen and she was still a young and attractive woman. She didn’t have the dazed look in her eyes or the slurred speech that usually accompanied her horrible temper, and even her temper seemed to have subsided. Her long dark hair shimmered in the sunlight, her skin was no longer pale and she didn’t have the heavy bags under her eyes any longer; she looked more her age. Even though her dark eyes were brighter and she seemed more alert, there was something unemotional and detached about them and she rarely looked up at us while we told our stories through mouthfuls of donut.

After a little while, she gathered us up and put us back in the car. I was so very happy. I started dreaming about having a real home and wondering where we were going to live and I just knew that everything was going to be all right. My childish optimism deflated when I realized that she’d pulled back into the driveway of the child prison. My sister and I started crying and screaming that we didn’t want to go back. All she said was that she would be back for us, and dragged us back into the home by our wrists.

Because I was moved around so much, my grades were poor and my social skills were horrible. At the age of around seven I started learning how to get away from my mother and her boyfriends, who were usually high when they tried to hurt me. I was adept at avoiding physical contact with other people, because I would practice at school. I made a game out of seeing how many kids I could sidestep while I walked down the halls. I’d count how many people I could avoid, and if somebody managed to brush my shoulder or bumped into me in a classroom doorway, the game started over. And I believe to this day that my childhood mental games are one of the reasons I became such a good running back for the high school football team. After a while, I could sense where everyone was in relation to my body.

I rarely spoke and I looked like a bum. Kids, being kids, made fun of me-there was the time another boy in third grade shouted to his pals, as I was bending over a water fountain for a drink, Hey, look at the little girl! I shot up and chased him down the hall.

I may have never started fights, but I never walked away from one either.

When I was about eight, I was living again with my mother. My sister and I shared a place with one of her biker boyfriends, plus his friend, his German Shepherd, and a Labrador Retriever named Rooter. My bed was in the back corner of an unfinished basement, separated from the rest of the space by thick plastic sheeting nailed to the ceiling. The rest of the basement contained huge marijuana plants and grow lights.

I came home from school one day, and the biker was mad because I hadn’t fed his dog. I hadn’t been home for more than two minutes. He yelled and tried to hit me, and started threatening to kill me. He was high on something, and he couldn’t catch me; I ran out the front door and down the street to a path thick with bushes that led to the local bar where they hung out. I got into the bushes before he could collect himself and make it out of the house. I huddled down and tried to control my breathing so he wouldn’t hear me. I peered through the leaves and saw him step outside, stomp around a little, then finally go back inside, slamming the door.

When my mother came home later that night, I was still hiding in the bushes; she didn’t even come out to look for me. I slept outside that night. The next day, after Biker Boyfriend had left, I went back into the house and took a hard slap on the face for making him so mad. The slap was all that my mother could get in before I got away again, and the slap was only possible because she caught me by surprise.

I was given a coat that winter, a hand-me-down from someone else’s kid. I didn’t know where it had come from, but it didn’t matter, it was the best coat I had ever owned. It was blue, my favorite color, and it was thick and warm. It was the best piece of clothing I had ever been given and it actually looked like something the other kids would wear. I loved it. There was this one bigger kid at school and he and all his little followers used to make fun of me whenever they got the chance. Hardly ever to my face, but I could always tell when they were doing it, because they would stand around in a group and point and snicker at me. One day on the playground, I was leaning against the fence in the far back, wearing the coat when he and his friends ran by me. They ran in a circle around me and the big kid reached out and grabbed my coat pocket. The pocket ripped off.

He waved it around like a trophy and they all laughed and started running away. Although I rarely spoke at that age, at that moment I let out such a roar of anger, that I could literally see the big kid’s eyes shake in his head. I chased him all the way back to the school and caught up to him just as he reached the asphalt-paved play area. I jumped on his back and rode him all the way to the ground. His face skidded across the asphalt. When he turned over I began pummeling his face and kept hitting him until some teachers pulled me off. I ended