Americans have long been enamored with Hawai‘i as paradise: lush flora and fauna, dreamy topography, and temperate clime. Beyond these natural splendors, Yankee fantasies have also latched on to the exoticism of the islands’ people and their putative culture, especially the notion of a welcoming, feminized, and sexually available aloha spirit. This imagination has operated to justify the United States’ continued domination of the archipelago since the mid-nineteenth century.¹
By the early twentieth century, this fascination had come to encompass the idea of Hawai‘i as aracialparadise.² In the 1920s and 1930s, intellectuals began to tout the islands’ ethnically
}, bookauthor = {Ellen D. Wu}, booktitle = {The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority}, pages = {210-241}, publisher = {Princeton University Press}, title = {The Melting Pot of the Pacific}, year = {2014} }