This landmark collection, published in 1980, is the first fiction and drama collection by a local Chinese writer. The stories include classics such as "Beer Can Hat" as well as experimental pieces and "Oranges Are Lucky," a one-act play that revolves around the generational differences between a Chinese-speaking grandmother and her English-speaking grandchildren. This collection established Lum’s signature pidgin narratives that have since become favorites among Hawai‘i readers. "In a world that is forgetting and rejecting its past, separate voices may preserve what little is left or create a new heritage. Darrell H.Y. Lum’s work demonstrates that mainlanders can comprehend pidgin and that island writers, in either pidgin or standard English, have something to say to everyone."—The Paper
Author and playright, Darrell Lum, was born in 1950 in Honolulu, Hawaii. With Eric Chock in 1978, he founded Bamboo Ridge Press, a small literary press devoted to publishing work that reflects Hawaii's multicultural people.
Lum's own work draws on the humor and heartbreak of growing up in Hawaii speaking pidgin English (Hawaiian creole English). It explores the formation of a "local" identity, one formed by grandmothers who arrive in Hawaii as children at the end of the nineteenth century and of whom he was ashamed as a child, longing to be "all-American"; by a grandfather who wrote classical Chinese poetry in an outdoor gazebo he called "Lum's Pavilion of Filial Piety Inspirations"; and by all the stories that continue to weave in and out of his life.
He has published several works for children and two stories, Sun: Short Stories (1980) and Pass On, No Pass Back (which received the 1992 Outstanding in Fiction from the Association for Asian American Studies and the 1999 in Literature.