He Inoa Mana (A powerful name) | Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu (Kumu Hina) | TEDxMaui
[Applause] e [Music] for for for hello Hal [Applause] aloh in the language of my mother's ancestors I not only bring you greetings but I invoke the essence of my kpuna the essence of the ancestor ERS of this land to be here in these few minutes it is these ancestors that I derive my name hin Moana guong wongu as I reflect on how hin Moana came to be I also think about these past 42 years that it has been the culture of my mother's family that has sustained and supported me it has allowed me to Pride over Affairs that concern ancestral burials over the land of Oahu it has enabled me to teach children from kindergarten through 12th grade the history the chants and the dances of what our people know as our culture and I think to myself I hope that the time that I spend with the youth that come to halah Public Charter School I hope that it will serve as a Guiding Light for it is the light of our ancestors the ancestors of this land that will help to pave the way for when we know where we come from we shall know where we go if you can imagine though some of the inner to turmoil that I don't always get to share with people and only people that really know me will truly understand May 15th 1972 Born Into the world was Colin gu kuang Wong and this child was born to a Hawaiian mother who was also part Portuguese and English and Born To A Chinese father this child grew into the person that stands before you today and what a wonderful Journey it's been so far ladies and gentlemen I've connected with my mother's ancestry for all this time and it took me to reach this point in 2010 after transitioning and going from my my family's son to my family's daughter I being the last of my father's four children was the first to get married can you imagine what that was like telling my father that I do have a brother and I have two sisters and uh as the baby of the family I said aha got married before all of you but bringing my husband home from Tonga the Kingdom of Tonga through Fiji and here to Hawaii enabled me to um have part of my story documented and this documentation was called the kumina film project and as a part of the tour of this film I got a chance to see the land of my father's ancestors so in preparation for this trip I gathered up my family genealogy and I gathered photos and one photo in particular as you can see in thep top all the way to what would be your right second to the last is my father in this photo are my grandparents and my great grandparents and all of the look family clan that lived in Honolulu thanks to my dear friend Dean and Joe we put our minds together and Dean said hey Hina I'm going to look for your family's Village do you have the writing in Chinese and I'll look for it on Google Maps what a wonderful thing technology today and so I said okay well here's the writing and so we eventually reached China got on a taxi and drove all the way to this little bitty spit of a village and lo and behold we started to to get out of the car and I looked around and I said this is the end of the road where are we going but lucky luckily I had my folder in my hand and the taxi driver went ahead of me and started to knock and the first door that he knocked at an elderly man came to the door and said yes of course he's speaking in Chinese and I can speak the language of my mother's ancestors I can't really speak the language of my father's ancestors but he speaking in cantones and he says yes who are you looking for so we explain and he started to say the name and I rushed over and I said here's the photo and he looked and he said oh this is the photo and and I'm standing there like uhoh okay okay hold on to shorten this story we proceeded up to a cousin's house and there sitting on the shelf was the very same photo we proceeded from that house down to this house my great great grandparents home and there up on the wall was the very same photo ladies and gentlemen this family that I connected with after three generations of not being connected to our heritage in the great land of China the Middle Kingdom the Middle Earth it took hin Moana 42 years before I got a chance to connect with this side of my Heritage can you imagine the tremendous feeling that this was for as I mentioned when my name was Colin and now my name being hin Moana my middle name never changed I kept it as gu Guang I denied myself the privilege and the honor to live and be a part of what this wonderful name means I'm not just going to tell you just let just yet I denied myself because just the sound of it was unusual to the students that I went to school with although many of them were Asian they just didn't quite take to it so they ended up calling me everything from King Kong W to all of the other unkind things that could be said to a child on top of the fact that my fellow students knew that I was different for you see in the the world of the West we have the word called transgender but in Hawaiian we have the word mahu and if anyone knows the Hawaiian language the true definition of mahu is not a source of contention it is not a source of disdain it is not a source of negativity it is simply an adjective to describe the attributes of someone who doesn't necessarily have to look like this but to describe someone somewhere in the middle between Kane and wah between male and female back to China here I am exactly as you see me today standing before my family and I asked one of my cousins who's pictured here I said do you think that our family will understand do you think that they'll accept me coming from Hawaii not speaking Chinese and immediately her response as well as the response of the men seated in this picture they said of course of course we accept you why wouldn't we accept you you're our family family is far more important than anything else it rises above all of these other insignificant other little details what makes this story so special is that this family is my father's mother's family and I affectionately call her popo I spent every day with my poo for the first 25 years of my life if I wasn't with her I was with my Hawaiian grandparents but often I was with my popo and she was one of the most sweetest and kindest women that one could ever meet never had an unkind word to say to anyone so it's no surprise that going to China and tracking my ancestry I was able to C upon this family it is through my Chinese family that I obtained that name Guang which means precious brilliance [Applause] precious Brilliance or precious light everyone and to think for 42 years I denied myself the privilege and the honor I had to disguise it in what I thought was going to be okay what I thought was going to be accepted here in Hawaii so hence h l Moana came into being and for those of you who may know in Hawaiian lore and history Hina is the goddess of the moon she presides over the moon and it is that light that is cast Upon Us in some of the darkest of times ladies and gentlemen I ask each and every one of you to take away from the story that I have shared with you regardless of whether you're multiethnic Multicultural or you have one ethnicity regardless of your age regardless of your sex regardless of any of all of these things and these variables do change regardless of all that our ancestry never changes so if you have the opportunity to either discover or perhaps ReDiscover that precious Brilliance within you I ask that you do so I challenge you to go out and find out to search the path that we have all come down so that we know the road that we will travel and never forget that it is that inheritance from our kpuna it's not only a Hawaiian belief but it is a Chinese belief and it took me 42 years to find a complete circle come all the way around the theme of our sharing is a brilliant life so the Second Challenge I have for you is that once you are able to potentially discover or ReDiscover that light that lies within each and every one of you it doesn't matter that your name isn't guong what matters is that you realize that you and I have the potential we have the capacity for greatness and with that said you and I have the capacity to invoke and to light that spark of Brilliance within the next person be it our friend or our family mahalo [Music] okay