Finding Home in Mochi and Hawaii Powdered Starch

Mochi would be apart living with one another, outside forces would make things unbearable for all who lived in the islands while painting it as paradise, but people would have their contributions to mochi making as it strayed farther and farther from its original form. Looking from the market shelves or a snack that was at mom or dads office, there was always mochi somewhere to be found, but this was also beside malasadsa and kulolo that were the sweet staples. It's typical in Hawaii that people tend to have a race related identity crisis as they learn that they have become something far different than what they have been told from their supposed home-country, so they dive deeper into things like mochi. Even if they did a study on their family history, the blood lines, and the journey the family has been on its the mix that keeps things sticking together, because it's about understanding what they have become a part of, not what they gave up, and that it's about understanding home rather than being convinced what home is. Home is about building on history, not centering a blood-quantum.

The home kitchen and the professional kitchen might be different places, but with enough know-how, understanding of what makes the home mochi maker, the techniques can be translated over to make a tasty chewy treat in due time. Standing beside a mochi master the sight becomes clear that it is to preserve the heart of the practice, rather than a business that goes international to claim a sort of national phenomena that brings in the money. When people are so close to a mochi master they see them making it, thinking it looks easy, but without even making it they think they have done it, but that's okay. It's a step in the direction of interest in the technique, future challenges would go away, and a need to know how it works as they meet those challenges would inevitably arrive. It might not be a journey about the perfect mochi as much as it is the most satisfying, so while it is similar it's more about the appreciation of the food in a way that makes us become part of it, the rice, the process, the steaming, the mochi. A tasty, chewy treat that requires a person who respects the craft.

If the ancestors could look down from the clouds and see what mochi has turned into, they would be very surprised, because it might not even be recognizable in its taste. The treat started as white in color, made with rice flour, and turned into daifuku as it was stuffed with azuki beans, which is the traditional mochi, before it became Hawaiian mochi. The land itself, when a person looks around there is desert, there is snow, and birds that migrate across the ocean and it's always alive. People came to Hawaii during the plantation era to work the cane fields and seek a better life with people from all over the world, so sharing in this sort of life-style is how things converged with sharing food and transformed mochi. This is why when people taste mochi they are transported back to a time that they had come from and with recipe books having their own varieties of mochi the upbringing would be attached to the tastes they had as a child. 

The physical form of Mochi started as a traditional Japanese sweet, but it was been adopted by people all over on all the islands to transition from Japanese Mochi to Hawaiian Mochi. The Authentic, the Realist of the real, and the Japanese version of a food isn't the one from the Hawaii past, but the past of Japan—it’s the one that best serves the people living in the present to understand the present form of Mochi made from people in Hawaii. 

The word "mochi" isn't just a noun—it's a metaphor for the family itself. Family is the mochi, and the stickiness is the love that refuses to let go. They are defined by their refusal to be separated, so that builds resilience, and community culture. One person is rolling the dough, another is wielding a metal rod to pinch the shapes, and another is dusting off the excess potato starch like they’re cleaning a precious relic. This is the Family of Mochi. When the Japanese brothers and sisters came to work the cane, they brought mochi as a survival food. But when the plantation camps became communities, that mochi started feeding everyone. It fed the Hawaiian families in the next place over; it was shared at the baby lūʻau and the graduation parties and gifted to those on other islands. When a sort of food becomes the mainstay of Hawaii celebrations, it’s because it's generous, it’s humble, and it doesn’t have a prestige to them; it’s a 'neighborhood' item.

Mochi is a part of people's life in Hawaii with eating all sorts of things that travel outside of the world of Japanese Mochi. When going to a Dim Sum house that serves the really famous sesame balls called, a crispy outshell contains glutinous mochi like taste with a hollow center and bean paste filling. These were called “Jin Dui”, but as many were unaware about other Chinese dishes with a similar name they would fall under the sort of Fried-Mochi category, which made any sort of similar dish a sort of Jin Dui. The Golden Palace was known for its Jin Dui and would one time celebrate Chinese New Year with a Gigantic Jin Dui that showed the stickiness of family sticking together as well as the beloved dish that was often ordered and oftentimes be sold out. The front of the Golden Palace had an older peppered-hair man with an apron near the register with younger folk filling up the display case in the front with baked, fried, and steamed dim sum. This sort of gelatinous and crispy choice would not be for those counting carbs, but the payout would be a good-blast of flavor. 

Some families would create Jin Dui and Mochi Mooncakes as influenced by Sing Cheong Yuan for New Years as part of their tradition with mango, green tea, sweet potato, chocolate, melon, and soursop. This would just add on to the authentic ways for those families that had already been hard at work making Gau and Moon Cakes. Many customers that were middle aged and mixed Chinese-Hawaiians who grew up with all sorts of local foods had been eager to eat more local takes of traditional dishes for years, but oftentimes those who kept on coming from mainland China would mark it as blasphemous. As a display of community togetherness they would share their treats with others and show that there could be two truths going on at the same time: being local as a show of togetherness with community, while still honoring the Chinese ancestry of the plantations through a form of glutinous rice dish.

The store in Hilo that was a cramped place that would have a line of customers out of the small downtown Hilo would be the most famous of the mochi shops on Kilauea Avenue called Two Ladies Kitchen. There would be artisan mochis, baked-manjus, fruit filled delights, and several types that utilized other things people desired in the ways of sweet things. An artistic stamp is on the top of a mochi that has brownie inside, another mochi has the appearance of a peach as it has the fruit inside, meanwhile the flower shaped mochi is what symbolizes Hawaiian mochi at its essence with its petals. A look at representing the colors and the shape of a flower from Hawaii, while maintaining its beautiful fluffy curves. It represents the land (the flowers), the technique (the shaping), and the people (the soft, welcoming texture).