Multicultural life in Hawaii shaped Obama

The diverse culture of America's 50th state - and the island nature of Hawaii itself - shaped Barack Obama's view of the world and the politics he would practice.

Those who knew him as a child say that view and those politics click with the themes of his Democratic presidential campaign. For Obama, though, Hawaii is even more personal, the place where he picked up basketball and formed his racial identity.

"If you grow up here, where we have no majority and there's a complete ethnic mix, people have learned how to get along with others who look different and are from different places," said longtime family friend Georgia McCauley.

"In Hawaii, because we have a confined space in terms of being an island state, we perhaps have to learn how to cooperate and compromise more," McCauley said. "We learn how to listen to each other and work on things in a positive manner."

This weekend, Obama planned to return to the island where he spent his childhood as a pudgy kid called Barry who lived in a modest apartment with his grandparents. He planned to visit his maternal grandmother and sister for a few days of vacation before the Democratic National Convention in Denver at month's end.

Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961 to a white mother and a black father who had met in Russian class at the University of Hawaii. He was an island boy most of his first 18 years. His mother's charitable work, his multiethnic friends and the economic gap between his family and his classmates at the island's most prestigious private school - he attended on scholarship - helped forge Obama before he left for college on the mainland.

His father, also named Barack Obama, was a scholarship student from Kenya. His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an 18-year-old from Kansas who went on to become an anthropologist and helped set up loans for poor people to start businesses in Indonesia.

Their marriage didn't last long. When Barry was 6, he moved to Indonesia, the homeland of his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, another university student his mother met in Hawaii.

Obama's mother sent him back to the islands after four years in Indonesia to live with her parents. Obama entered the fifth grade at the elite Punahou School, where he was a minority among minorities, an out-of-place boy in a school of the privileged. He enjoyed the lifestyle of an island teen, playing basketball, body surfing and spear fishing, and he worked at a burger outlet and served on the school literary magazine's editorial board.

Agencies

(China Daily 08/08/2008 page56)