Lucille Chung: A Kupuna Extraordinaire

By Paula Thomas

We sat in Short N Sweet Bakery and Cafe, Aunty Lucille and me, along with her first cousin, Kawepa Francisco, known on O‘ahu as Natalie. Not much later, another cousin joined us making a tidy crowd for the small café, yet a mere fraction of the extended Akao family.

Aunty Lucille talks about her life and her family in the framework of the family values instilled in her by her grandfather, Kuku Akao. A man who fathered eight children, Kuku held family gatherings every single Saturday to make poi. Lucille’s mother, Mary Viveiros, who was Hawaiian/Chinese, and her father, William, who was Portuguese, also had eight children. The family gatherings on Saturdays were large. Much poi had to be prepared, with people using spoons or ‘opihi shells to peel the taro root, so everyone could go home with a bag. The preparation and the ritual brought the cousins together to play and the parents together to talk story. Lucille remembers this as being such a force in her life, this connection to extended family. She also remembers Kuku as being very stern, a man of few words who kept a tight rein on people and reflects that her mother did the same; perhaps she, too, is a little that way now when it comes to the younger generations in the family.

Aunty Lucille shares that she isn’t quite sure if her grandfather realized what he was doing, bringing everyone together like that weekly. The outgrowth was that since 1978 the entire clan has been gathering every three years for a family reunion at Laupāhoehoe Point. Today, some 250 attend.

Perhaps it was because these huge reunions were down to a science, in addition to her intimate knowledge of the Laupāhoehoe community that Lucille found herself in the festival “business.” It was the late Braddah Smitty (Claybourne Smith), with his home overlooking Laupāhoehoe Point, who had the vision. He and Lucille met at a pool bash in August 2004, at which time he shared his idea. Lucille thought nothing of making it happen. “Braddah, you get the musicians; I’ll do the organizing.”

The first Laupāhoehoe Music Festival, purposed to take care of the keiki and kūpuna, was held the following February over President’s Day Weekend. It brought 1500 to the Point and raised over $36,000. Now going into its 11th year, the festival has been handed over to the Laupāhoehoe Community Public Charter School (LCPCS) and will serve as its fundraiser.

Aunty Lucille was long since retired from the police department by the time the music festival launched. She was working with Queen Lili‘uokalani Children’s Center as its Community Building Facilitator, helping families of Hawaiian ancestry, and recalls an event after which a young lady had called her home to be picked up, but distressed, told Aunty Lucille that she had forgotten to ask her family to put on water so she could bathe. Lucille realized the implication: the family had no hot running water. She quickly provided her phone so the girl could call back. This story brings a pang to her heart and tears to her eyes, still. “Some people have so little and are so humble,” she reflects. “Truly, I feel blessed. I have no complaints. My life has been a wonderful journey.”

Although she never did get a degree in social work, her efforts since 1994 have all been about working in communities to support families and children. From the Na Pua Mai‘ole (a school group in Pāhoa), the Neighborhood Place in Puna, working with Milly Kim on the Heritage Corridor that stretches from Hilo to Honoka‘a and supporting the Laupāhoehoe Train Museum, developing Hawaiian summer programs, helping to transform Laupāhoehoe Elementary into a charter school, to working with Hawai‘i County Parks and Recreation—all this work is about connecting the dots, building capacity in the community, and promoting community self-care. So much of her capabilities come from working with her extended family all these years. After all, if you can pull together a family reunion for 250 people every three years, and you can organize an annual music festival for 500-1500 people, surely you can organize the food and prizes for other community events.

Family is everything to Lucille Chung. Born Lucille Eunice Kalikolehua Moniz Viveiros, Lucille is now the matriarch of the Akao family, and when she speaks, everyone listens. There is humility, deep respect, an understanding of legacy, and a current of family values that runs very deep down to the essence and purpose of her life. “Know where you come from…know the meaning of your name,” she claims. “If you were named for someone else, understand that you have a responsibility to honor that name and bring no shame to it.”

From the age of three she went to work with her mother at the Laupāhoehoe post office, where mom served as postmaster. She got to meet just about everyone in the community there and found delight in knowing everyone’s name and even knowing where some of them lived because she delivered some of the newspapers. It was a deeply cherished familiarity.

She was six when the tsunami hit the island in 1946 and devastated the Hāmākua Coast, including Laupāhoehoe Point. “People were talking about “big waves” that morning, she recalls, and didn’t put two and two together until the kindergarten teacher, Lucille’s kindergarten teacher, brought the news that her mother and nephew were gone, washed away. Lucille had been named for the teacher’s mother, whose body was found up the coast in Pa‘auilo the next day. The news hit her like a brick. The nephew’s body was never recovered.

As she was growing up, Lucille set her sights on moving to the mainland. Her older sisters had gotten jobs on the mainland—one was a stewardess, one a secretary—and Lucille had every intention of finishing up secretarial school and joining her sister in Utah. It was never her plan to stay on Hawai‘i Island. (She had wanted to be a social worker, and was discouraged because it was a low-paying profession.) Before she finished secretarial school, though, a manager had spoken to her mother about having Lucille work at the Laupāhoehoe Sugar Plantation. A job was available because the secretary had left. When Lucille found out about it and told her instructor that she had a job offer, the instructor’s response was, “Lucille, if you take that job, you will never leave the island.” Nah, thought Lucille. That won’t happen. She took the job, and as fate would have it, never did leave Hawai‘i Island.

After two years at the plantation, Lucille became the Police Operations Clerk at the Laupāhoehoe Police Station, where she served for 33 years before retiring in 1994. “I could really take care of the community in that position,” she said. “I knew what was going on. I was there to hug the crying parents when their kids got into trouble…I was there to chide the young ones when they came in for making mistakes and poor choices.”

In 1962, Lucille married the love of her life, Walter Chung, proprietor of Walter’s Electric. She and Walter raised four children: Kaimi, Kaleo, Valerie, Anela, who themselves are now married and collectively gave them 17 grandchildren. Kaimi now runs the family business.

The home she was raised in has been in the family for four generations now and “will never, never be sold,” she says. It’s part of the Akao legacy, that home, and Lucille is the matriarch of the family. When they all gather, the women sit at the table with Lucille to work through family issues, and it’s Lucille’s words that are followed when decisions need to be made. True to her family name and history, her decisions come from a deep sense of connection to the values instilled over the course of her life. What would mother do and why? she thinks. What is good for this person and for the family? An approach they take for family members who may be disgruntled or disagreeable is to love them even more. “Open the heart and overwhelm with kindness,” notes Kawepa, as Lucille nods. “We accept everyone.”

Kawepa arrived with Lucille because she was on-island, not by her choice—the family had called and told her she was needed. That’s all it took for her to get on a plane within the day. The Akao family shows up in force to assist when there’s a family emergency. It’s a central role that family plays in all their lives. It gives them security, a safety net, a sense of belonging to something much larger than themselves.

The cousin, Tevai Huangma, who arrived at the café in a bright striped dress, her dark hair pulled up on her head, talked about how unique her sense of family is compared to her college peers on the mainland. “They have taught us a lot about family, and we have a sense that no matter what happens, together we find a way to push through,” she says. Lucille nods, “It’s your turn,” she says, “to step up and put into practice all the lessons.”

Her career, spanning close to six decades, has been about community building and facilitating growth and development, truly social work, which she accomplished through both her employment as well as volunteer work. For her tireless giving and contributions, she received the YWCA 2015 Remarkable Person Award at an event held last April, alongside Barry Taniguchi of KTA Superstores, Inc.

It couldn’t be a more fitting award for Lucille. Humble and giving, caring and compassionate, and doing for others with not the slightest notion of getting anything in return, Aunty Lucille understands what it takes to bring people together and move a community forward. Selfless acts well intentioned, founded on values, embracing everyone, and holding yourself and others accountable—these are the things that Kuku Akao was modeling all those years ago when he gathered his family on Saturdays.

For matriarch Aunty Lucille, four key tenets form how she leads her family:

• the value of your name and not bringing shame to it
• the value of hard work that establishes your self worth
• the value of education and constantly learning
• the value of family and of being respectful to all with whom you come in contact

At age 75, she still goes to her office at Walter’s Electric and surrounds herself with family. A wonderful life, no complaints, for a kupuna extraordinaire. ❖

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Contact Lucille Chung: 808.935.1868

Contact writer Paula Thomas