Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #681546 in Books
• Published on: 1996-11
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 226 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Debut novelist Tyau presents a coming-of-age tale set in Hawaii.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Mahi is the young protagonist in Tyau's warmly rendered novel featuring a delightful (and vast) Chinese-Hawaiian clan living on the island of Oahu. Tyau tells her tale in a series of vignettes that occur after World War II, developing a vivid, enveloping portrait of the girl's formative years surrounded by a loving group of uncles and aunts, grandparents, siblings, and devoted parents. Each family member contributes a valuable link to precious traditions that will shape the adult Mahi is destined to become. Tyau's sparkling dialogue reveals the cadences of a spoken English influenced by both the Hawaiian and Chinese languages, especially when depicting rituals revolving around the preparation of food. Even though the experience is vicarious, it is still satisfying to share the lively meals in Tyau's often poignant narrative. Alice Joyce

Customer Reviews

Eat and grow up
"A Little Too Much Is Enough" may not be a novel, but it is a delightful, imaginary memoir of growing up in Hawaii in the '50s.
Mahealani Suzanne Wong is a bright, observant girl in a Chinese-Hawaiian-American family that is in a generational transition from more Chinese to more (Mainland-style) American. This is neatly encapsulated in the short chapter (they are all short) "Still the Same Saimin," in which Mahi recalls the fragrance and taste of saimin (noodles) throughout the years, first at home, then at the fair and the movies, finally at McDonald's in Waikiki.
Food serves the function that plot performs in most novels. There is no problem, leading to a crisis and a denouement. Rather, life for the Wongs is divided into sections marked by nine-course Chinese dinners commemorating weddings, funerals, graduations.
Mahi, clever child, uses these occasions to observe the social maneuverings of her women kin. Aunty Nona, the sensualist who can sell crackseed (local snack, not related to cocaine) to anybody; and Mahi's mother, full of platitudes and pretty good advice; and a host of cousins.
All the Wong women, and eventually Mahi, want to travel, to get beyond the wonderfully supportive but also smothering influence of family.
The men, barely limned compared with the vigorous women in the book, are completely content with life in late Territorial Hawaii. They never leave, or if they do, it is by force, as when Mahi's father, Kuhio, is "shanghaied" to grow up in China. Mahi's brother Buzzy sums it up:
"I could never be like you, Sis. I can never go away from here. I don't care if I never eat sweet pineapple again. But everything else I'm going to keep. They can't charge me fifty dollars for the beach and the sun and the surf. Hawaii no ka oi [is the best], that's what I say. Nobody can make me pay for that."
Nothing much happens in Buzzy's Honolulu. Members of the family and friends go to school, change jobs, marry and divorce, start businesses that succeed or fail. The only novelistic touch is the story of the adoption of Uncle Wing, an extraordinary and touching tale, but that happened long before Mahi was born.
The lack of storm and stress does not at all mean that "A Little Too Much Is Enough" moves slowly. Though it is quickly apparent that all that is going to happen is that Mahi will grow up and move to Oregon (as Tyau did), getting there is all the fun.
Tyau manages a doubly difficult task: She transfers the cadence and lilt of local speech to the printed page without awkwardness (though the non-English words will baffle Mainlanders). And she also manages to do so without slowing to the pace of loquacious local talk.
Plus, Tyau has a way with a phrase. "It's not easy to hold onto poi." "Her skirt rides on her hips like a boat in a storm."
"A Little Too Much Is Enough" is charming, graceful, sentimental and, with one exception, accurate.
This is an Oahu book. When Tyau goes to Maui, there is a serious mistake.
In "Ocean Is for Drowning," Mahi's best friend's cousin goes bodysurfing on Maui and breaks his neck. "Roy's sister told us that a lot of people have broken their necks at Makena, but nobody puts up a warning sign, because the hotels don't want to scare away the tourists."
Wrong all around. At the time of this novel, there weren't any hotels in Makena or anywhere nearby. Oneloa (also known as Big Beach, where I suppose this incident occurs) has a fearsome shorebreak, but there never were any signs, so the hotels cannot be responsible for their absence. (There still aren't any hotels at Big Beach; it is now a state park.)
( I did not like Tyau's second novel, Makai, nearly as much.)

A memorable, heartwaring novel of post WW II Hawaii.
This is Kathleen Tyau's second novel about life in post WW II Hawaii. Like it's predecessor, A Little Too Much is Enough, it conveys a sense of what life in Hawaii was like foe the native, local Hawaiians through the eyes and experiences of one family.

This is a much more expansive book than it predecessor. It introduces elements of the impact of mainland society into the picture through expatriate's returning home for a visit, providing for a comparative look at shared memories that begin in Hawaii during World War II and continue to a present in the 1970s from divergent viewpoints.

Alice's best friend, Annabel Lee, is coming back to Maui after years in Florida, but she has been preceded by her son, Wick, who is romancing Alice's daughter. Alice is beside herself with the preparations of Annabel's return and flooded with memories of their lives growing up together at St. Andrew's Priory after the war. As if all this weren't enough, Alice's daughter has announced she's broken up with her husband and is now seeing Annabel's son after a visit to their family in Florida.

Like it's predecessor, this is a book rich in detail and evocative of a time past that not too many people really know about. It stands as both a fascinating character study and history lesson as well.

On the whole this is a better written and more sophisticated book than A Little Too Much, but I thought the earlier effort was a better story as it captured much more effectively the spiritual and mystical side of native Hawaiian culture, which is almost totally absent from this effort. Nonetheless, both are excellent and I would recommend either in a heartbeat.

A rich, passionate novel about growing up in Hawaii.
Set in post WW II Hawaii, "A Little Too Much is Enough" chronicals the life experiences of a young Chinese-Hawaiian woman growing up in Honolulu from the perspectives of various members of her extended family. A very rich, colorful, highly ethnic portrayal of Hawaii's development into a major tourist location and that development's effects on the native population. Several core incidents and experiences are told, and re-told, through severl different voices and perspectives, yeilding a rich texture in which one comes to savor the totality of the experiene's effects on the entire Wong family. Delivered in a highly vernacular Hawaiian voice throughout, "A Little Too Much is Enough" in the end stands as not just a wonderful story, but also as a rich, multicultural experience