Miss Hawaii Filipina 2009

My prominent Honolulu FBI lawyer pal emailed the results of the 2009 Miss Hawaii Filipina pageant at the Hawaii Theater -- he made sure to secure good seats since he grew up with the mother of one of the contestants from his home island of Maui and home parish of Good Shepherd Episcopal Church in Wailuku. Miss Maui Filipina Celina Macadangdang Hayashi swept the pageant judging and I played a small part by attending one of her mock interview practices (her mom embarassed me by mentioning that in an earlier interview session for the preliminary event, when asked for a role model, she apparently included me -- when I hear someone refer to me as a role model, I feel pretty old).
While it sometimes seems like there's a different Filipino beauty and scholarship pageant every weekend, in the 50th year of the United Filipino Community Council of Hawaii, this might be a fitting end to the Miss Hawaii Filipina contest -- there's talk that the Miss America folks may add cultural pageants as preliminary events to the Miss Hawaii Pageant as early as next year.
Celina's mother Agnes and her aunts, I believe, all participated in the various cultural pageants while we were growing up.
Celina's grandfather, I believe, arrived on Maui the same year as my dad, a member of the Sakada generation. Agnes, now the Deputy Finance Director at the County, has now been in public service under the last three Mayors (Kimo Apana, Alan Arakawa and current Mayor Charmaine Tavares) after working in corporate finance and accounting after college.
Celina will be going to either Scripps (or an Ivy League school which has her on its wait-list). She wants to be a doctor and participated in so many high school activities I wonder when she time to sleep.
I sometimes think that my own generation -- the one immediately following the Sakadas -- limited our dreams somewhat. Our parents' goal was to at least spare us from working in the fields -- a nice office job or teaching or, if we were really ambitious, a professional degree (so we would received the honorific of being addressed as "Doctor" or "Attorney" or "Engineer" at gatherings). The children of Filipinos who came after Statehood didn't limit themselves in the same way.
I get the sense that Celina's generation doesn't necessarily self-edit their aspirations at all.
And I think that's a good thing that even role models can think about.