Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life

Moving to Honolulu as an eighth grader, Finnegan found himself part of a disliked minority as an “haole,” or white person, at his new school in working-class Kaimuki. He was felt intimidated by his Hawaiian and Asian classmates and out of place as a newcomer with no friends at the school. Finnegan recalls being bullied by a classmate and not having the confidence to confront him. His parents assumed that the school would provide a good education, since the public schools in California, where the family had previously lived, were always adequate. Instead, Finnegan remembers how his new school days were “occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way […] in a racialized world” (3).

Despite his difficulty at school, Finnegan was thrilled to be in Hawaii and had high expectations about the surfing scene. He recalls surfing at the Cliffs for the first time, carefully watching how the locals approached the waves. Determined to surf twice a day, Finnegan would arrive at the beach at dawn, surprised by the roughness of the morning water compared to California. None of the other surfers bothered him, so he calls his surfing time “the opposite of [his] life at school” (8).