Escaping Is Not a Form of Understanding
In the internet age, travel essays are shared far and wide—and they aren’t always well received back home.
The little transgressions are the forgivable ones. Local knowledge in any place is earned with time. So it’s understandable why someone who is only visiting Hawaii might think to describe poke as “sashimi salad,” for example, though that’s not quite right.
But then there are the big transgressions, the characterizations of a place that are so unmoored from a sense of history that it’s almost shocking.
Almost. But Hawaii has seen it all before.
“,” a feature published March 21 by , treads a well-worn path of colonialist tropes as a writer indulges his escapism fantasies with a trip to Hawaii. That’s nothing new. Yet in the internet age, a lighthearted essay can travel quickly back home and elicit a scathing response from the people who live in
