Sublime

As ambassadors of aloha, Hawaiian women have been susceptible to the eroticization of their bodies and the insistent commodification of their aloha.

Conventional physical beauty takes time, money, and effort, and it is expensive for all women, but it is cruelly so for women without resources.

Like most upper-crust Hong Kongers, Eddie also possessed what was perhaps the ultimate membership card—Canadian Permanent Resident Cards for his entire family (a safe haven in case the powers that be in Beijing ever pulled a Tiananmen again).

prostitution was another necessary wartime service requiring gendered labor in Hawai‘i, but it was unofficially sanctioned by the U.S. military.

"Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.