A community’s culture is one of its most sacred and prized possessions; it is the thread that holds every member of that community together and gives each person common ground to stand on with his or her neighbor. In his short stories, Rodney Morales paints a cultural picture of a multi-ethnic Hawaii during the 1960s and 1970s; native Hawaiins, Japanese, and Puerto Ricans all live together in Morales’ world. The culture of this American sub-community is both unique and familiar to Caucasion readers (and most likely even more so to readers who belong to this community) as well as strange and foreign. Morales both includes and his audience as he writes about a culture that is at the same time all its own and influenced by the larger ideals of the United States. One of the most off-putting aspects…show more content… Shane, the leader of the protagonist’s friend group, is “the undisputed number one Elvis Presley fan” (71), and he forces his friends to go watch one of Elvis’ movies with him. The boys get in an argument over whether Elvis is Hawaiian, like them, or “haole”; Shane, the Elvis aficionado, argues successfully that his idol is indeed haole. Elvis Presley functions in this story as the mediator between two separate worlds; he is the bridge that allows members of both communities to find common ground with one another. It is comforting to know that in spite of the language and cultural barriers, pop culture is something that everybody can partake in. Elvis Presley connects readers to the characters in the story. Ship of Dreams and Under the Table are two short stories that highlight an often-overlooked culture and community. Readers who are unfamiliar with the Hawaiian sub-community may feel ostracized by Morales’ choice to include dialectal language, jargon, and the differences in cultural knowledge, but will ultimately find comfort in the similarities between the culture of Morales’ characters and their
