Hawaii is noisy. Noisy, noisy, noisy. Winds sweep the palm fronds just outside this house until. Just before dawn, a veritable din of birdsong swells such that it's impossible to distinguish any one call. "I wake up when the birds sing," says my cousin's four-year-old. Not a bad way to go, really, and somewhere between the lovely symphony and running on eastern standard time I've been waking at dawn too.

Hawaii is also a place where I'm invisible -- where I look just like the next girl, and the next, and the next. I don't think I've ever been in a place where this is true, and I didn't realize how different this can feel until now. It's a neat feeling. In the mainland U.S. I'm obviously asian, though I sometimes get mistaken for filipino or even sometimes hawaiian. In Taiwan where I last visited five years ago, I had a distinctly different -- American -- body structure, a different way of walking, a different way of looking at people and things.