Do not eat until you are full; eat until you are tired,” calls Chief Sielu Avea, a Polynesian entertainer who, according to his bio, is “internationally known as the Coconut Man.” Making our way to the plastic table, paper plates wilting in our hands, we are tired already.
Here at the Chief’s Luau, “Aloha” means last to the buffet. The feeders in the “Royal” service tier ($159 per ticket) got first crack at the chafing dishes. And then team “Paradise” ($119) went at the sheet cake and roast pig. And if we stragglers in the Aloha group are not enraptured with our feast of sweetly lacquered chicken chunks and puffy dinner rolls, the fault is ours for booking steerage at $87 a head.
But you do not come to the Chief’s Luau for the food. You come because you have traveled thousands of miles only to fetch up in Waikiki Beach, a concentrated zone of souvenir dealers and luggage-dragging hordes that feels like a cultural protectorate of the airport. Hankering after something incontestably Hawaiian, you end up on a charter bus bound for the Chief’s Luau at Sea Life Park 15 miles east on the Kalanianaole Highway. Never mind that what is most purely Hawaiian about the luau is its proficiency at extracting tourists’ dollars. The luau leaves no doubt: You are in Hawaii now.
Beyond the buffet, there are traditional activities. Under the instruction of shirtless men in sarongs, you can fling a plastic spear at grass. There is the weaving station, where the spectacle includes a pregnant woman shoving her young daughter for trying to horn in on her work at a frond headband. And there is a fire-starting clinic where we rub sticks on logs in the hope of making flame. This proves no more possible than it was in the forests of our childhoods, but we go on rubbing in the faith that we are in a magical land where the laws of physics bend toward human satisfaction.
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And for many of us, it is a magical evening. The magic has to do with the moon, the thud and rustle of the surf. The magic is working on Jed, my 1½-year-old son. He is off to the side of the action, trying to seduce a girl of 7 or so. She is engrossed with her tablet. A cultist of the night sky, Jed touches her wrist, points overhead and says, “Stars.” The girl’s eyes do not flicker from her screen.
My wife is similarly resistant to the enchantment. “This luau is making me feel bad about myself, and it is making me feel bad about humanity,” she says. We are now watching an entertainment where Hawaiian women in grass skirts dance the hula, and Hawaiian men with painted faces do a grunting spear-dance and stick their tongues out tikistyle. To my wife, this smacks uncomfortably of minstrelsy, which, yes, it does. But at least it is a two-way minstrelsy. The dancers pretend to be tiki warriors, and when the chief, in parting, bids us officially welcome to “the land of happy people,” we pretend to believe that such a place exists.
Can it be true? The aloha spirit is real? Paradise on earth? An Eden of happy Americans moated from our national ravages of malevolence, contempt, uncertainty and fear?
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Poolside escapism at the Sheraton Waikiki. CreditDina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times
Not until 2017 has Hawaii held for me even a vague temptation. The 50th state has always seemed to me a meretricious luxury product whose visitors bring happiness with them in the form of money. I am not constitutionally geared for paradise. I am not one for cocktails containing patio equipment, for lazing on talcum-soft sand, eyes gone to pinwheels, grinning madly at the sun.
Hawaii is notoriously nice, and unremitting niceness is what I do not want out of a vacation. This is because I’m cheap. I want a maximum memory harvest for my travel dollar, and a trip rarely sticks in my long-term storage cache without the sharp edges of mishap and discomfort to snag on. I do not, for example, remember nice meals I have eaten so clearly as the wet duckling I disgorged on a street in the Philippines, and the delight this brought the locals. I cannot recall the nice hotels I’ve stayed in half so well as the New Zealand jungle cabin where I inadvertently slept on the rotting carcass of a rat and woke up with a heart murmur.
But in a political moment so well supplied with nastiness, I don’t need to bunk with carrion. Give me a slack-keyed, macadamia-dusted holiday where things are pretty and people are smiling, if only because it’s in their job description. In a gesture of spiritual surrender, I have booked a five-day stay in the Hawaiian Islands with no greater hope for the voyage than that it may be merely nice.
Our itinerary is at risk of proving mindlessly splendid: Oahu for two nights, before we board a prop jet for three nights on Hawaii Island to the east. But a 19-month-old, as it turns out, is excellent insurance against a frictionless travel experience. Our first morning on Oahu, Jed does me the kindness of waking up at 4 a.m. He insists that we dress and begin making the most of our day. I put on an algae-print shirt I have lacked the courage to wear since I bought it years ago in Thailand.
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Sea-life encounter at Carlsmith National Beach Park, Hawaii. CreditDina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times
We are staying in a room at the Waikiki Beach Hilton, which, with its ocean views and high-pressure shower head, is dangerously close to nice. But in the corridor I am pleased to meet a fat and saucy cockroach, thoughtfully dispatched, perhaps, by a concierge who has gotten wind of my preferences. In live-and-let-live aloha spirit, I do not molest the animal. My wife, however, in consideration of the sleeping guests the roach might visit, bruises the creature with a sack of dirty diapers before it jogs off down the hall.
In the lobby, we lay down $12 for two coffees and one banana and browse the morning paper, which proves a clemency from anticipated horrors. The front page of The Honolulu Star-Advertiser bears not a single presidential headline. “Legislature Considers Funding to Combat Rat Lungworm Disease” is the story of the day.
Dawn finds us waterfront on Oahu’s North Shore, downrange of the Banzai Pipeline. The sand has a forthright cornmeal consistency. The water is the blue of telegraph insulators. The waves transmit a disaster-movie feeling with every crash, even after you have watched a thousand of them land. The young and barely clad are out in force, demonstrating physiques that can come only from long and rigorous hours of ignoring national politics. Just up the shore, two young women are seriously engaged in the business of aiming a big professional camera at the tanned, professional butt of a third young woman who, I’m guessing, is a big deal in a modeling niche I didn’t know existed. One thing is sure: No way will I be bathing here.
My son gives not a damn. He uncloaks fully his cloudlike body and hits the sand like an oyster in a breading dredge. The day is perfect room temp with a breeze. In the distant shallows, surfers shoot the tube or gleam the curl or whatever that amazing thing is called. My wife and I breakfast on fresh coconut — neither sweet nor flavorful but fun to gnaw, for the feeling that you’ve acquired termite superpowers. Jed squats and tumbles and packs his nethers with 20-grit. “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” is his ecstatic report on the sensation. I am right there with him. It would be overselling things to claim that I’ve achieved rapturous mind erasure my first morning in Hawaii, but this is, well, rather nice.
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Aloha Time

Aloha Time

CreditDina Litovsky/Redux, for The New York Times
For lunch we motor clockwise down the coast to the Kahuku Superette. The Superette is a homely liquor shop/convenience store that from the outside is easily pictured in a newscast with police lights flashing on it. Inside, they dish out poké of world renown. Poké is sashimi salad doused in soy and sesame and other things. We get a tub of traditional shoyu poké and a tub of limu poké with crunchy bits of seaweed. The place to gobble the Superette’s poké is in your hot rental car in the muddy parking lot. Gemlike blocks of tuna nearing a full cubic inch are bright and salty as the sea.
Back in Honolulu, the Pearl Harbor Visitors Center is out of tickets to the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial site, so we resolve to take in our ration of history with a trudge around the Makiki neighborhood, where Barack Obama grew up. It is an area of cinder-block buildings and auto-parts shops well off the luau trail. On the sidewalks, hard-luck people push baby strollers full of cans and bottles because the redemption center forbids the use of grocery carts. Parking is free on the street, one of Makiki’s practical concessions to the paradise theme. No plaque marks the Punahou Circle Apartments, where Obama lived during his middle- and high-school years, and where, just before the 2008 election, he returned to visit his maternal grandmother as she was dying. It is as regular an apartment building as you could find anywhere in America, a putty-colored tower whose minute balconies hold garbage bags, golf clubs, a vacuum cleaner and one (small-size) American flag.
Nearby on King Street, we nip into the Baskin- Robbins where I heard Obama worked in high school. It is the sort of cramped little parlor that, if you had a job there, would make you sink into despair or go on to be president. I ask the young woman on scooping duty if it’s true that Obama used to dip cones at this very counter, and she says, “Yeah.” No plaque in there either, just a newspaper clipping taped to the sneeze guard next to the smoothie machine.