“What the fuck happened?” Not a quote I expected to find in a memoir from a petite, modest, and soft-spoken Asian lady. Said lady, Senator Mazie Hirono, was explaining to Hillary Clinton what she thought was missing from the title Clinton’s recent memoir of the 2016 elections entitled What Happened? It’s a moment that typifies both the spirit and the evolution of this shrewd and fiery Hawaiian as she battled her way from her poverty-filled and a non-English-speaking childhood to a seat in the U.S. Senate, sitting among the highest elected officials in the land.
Hirono’s parents labored in the cane and pineapple fields of Hawaii in conditions that approached slavery. Her father made things worse with his drinking and philandering. It was a situation scripted for failure. What happened, indeed? I have a friend who contends that if you want to change a culture and economy, forget about the men. Support and educate the women. That’s where strength of the family, and by extension, the society, lies. Hirono’s mother proves the point. I won’t catalogue the times and ways that she saved that family. How? Certainly not with a $200 million gift from daddy. Daddy was mostly absent and drunk. In fact, there was no money at all most of the time. So little that one of the children had to live apart from the rest in his earliest years, and everyone paid a high price for the separation. That circumstance fostered her all-out assault on Trump’s child separation policy. But Hirono’s story does raise in my mind an even bigger question. How do you go from a semi-literate Japanese speaker toiling in the fields, married to a useless and even destructive husband, to an English language typesetter and raise and educate three kids at the same time? Read Heart of Fire and find out. However, if you’re like me, even after reading the story you might still wonder how such a thing is possible.
But I guess the how of it is not as important as the fact of it, and the fact is that one of the strongest and most authentic voices for compassion and liberty in the country is one we can hear and treasure regularly in print and on the small screen. From her finding ways to change the lives of her constituents to her skill in helping shepherd the Affordable Care Act through congress, her story is one that defines the idea of public service. Public service, not self-service. She became one of Trump’s fiercest critics not because she wanted to make headlines but because she was one of his “others.” A woman, first of all. A woman whose family were immigrants. A woman who knows from personal experience what it means to be poor with all the demonic forces of a hostile society arrayed against you and yours and still come out on top.
Heart of Fire is an astounding story, and once you read it, you’ll understand the title and it will give you hope.