Karalyn Henderson, Salt Lake City, UT: an interview by Savani Aupiu, 6 November 2008: Pacific Islanders Oral History Project, U-1951

Transcript (21 pages) of an interview by Savani Aupiu with Karalyn Henderson of Salt Lake City, Utah, on 6 November 2008. Part of the Pacific Islanders Oral History Project, Everett Cooley Collection tape no. U-1951

Karalyn Henderson (b. 1983), of Honaunau, Hawaii, was born at LDS Hospital in Salt Lake City. Her mother is Hawaiian and Filipino, and her father German and Tongan. Her parents met at Sea World, where they both worked, married, and her mother, raised Catholic, soon converted to her father's Mormonism. Ms. Henderson spent most of her childhood in Utah, until her family briefly moved to California to help her father's old band, the Jets, get together. After only a short stay she moved to Hawaii because her grandfather was dying. She remembers being a tomboy as a child, and relates a story her mother told her, that her grandfather blessed her before she was born and told her mother she would have a boy. She loved moving to Hawaii, and felt much more at home there. Ms. Henderson relates having some trouble reconciling her religious and cultural identity, but feels that thanks to an LDS mission she went on (because she didn't feel it was fair to require boys but not girls to go on missions) she understands herself much more completely than before. She attended BYU in Provo, Utah, because, as she relates, since the seventh grade she has wanted to make movies and BYU-Hawaii had no film program. However, Ms. Henderson is far more comfortable in Hawaii, wants to help Hawaiians patriotically, and soon returned to Hawaii. She discusses her parents' lives, her family relations, and her sense of ethnic otherness at some length. Her future goals are to make films, have a family, and most of all, be happy in the gospel and helping Hawaiians. Project: Pacific Islanders. Interviewer: Savani Aupiu