Yeah, Hawai'i really is a different world: the history, demographics, cultural milieu, are such that you really can't view it through the lens of the assumptions you might be used to from mainland US history. The Asian experience in the islands vs. the mainland U.S. was a very different thing from the very beginning -- you have to remember that in Hawai'i, the first immigrants from China, Japan, Korea, and the Phillippines (along with folks from several non-Asian countries, especially Portugal) were coming in when it was still a sovereign kingdom. There was a huge demand for more warm bodies to work in the early boom sandalwood industry at first, cattle ranching, and later the better-known pineapple and sugar cane plantations; and while even in the pre-annexation days there was already a small but politically and economically powerful oligarchy of white American business and land owners, the population of the islands was (and still remains) predominantly non-white. The islands had rapidly growing industries and not enough workers, so the various waves of immigration weren't subject to the same sorts of limitations they faced on the mainland, where there were protectionist immigration quotas meant to keep cheaper immigrant labor from taking jobs from native-born citizens, and restrictions on immigration of women, families, pretty much anything beyond young able-bodied men, spawned by "yellow peril" racist fears of being overwhelmed by "inferior" races. Asian immigration to the islands was much more inclusive of women and families -- married laborers might come to the islands alone initially, then send for their wives and children or other relations as they saved up enough money to do so; single men might save up and work with matchmakers to have brides brought in from their homelands. And even after the kingdom's illegal overthrow and annexation, it was in the oligarchy's interests to continue bringing in the cheap labor they needed...territorial status, rather than full statehood, was in the best interests of these white landowners, because it allowed them to bypass the immigration quotas and restrictions imposed on the mainland U.S.! (The eventual post-WWII statehood movement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Revolution_of_1954_%28Hawaii%29) was essentialy a populist uprising, with much representation from the descendants of this non-white immigrant labor force, against the minority of wealthy white plantation owners who in the annexation and territorial years had pretty much run the islands as their own little fiefdom.