On the eve of the election, I spoke with the writer Tara Bray Smith, who grew up in Hawaii, where Barack Obama spent most of his childhood. Smith wrote about Hawaii for “State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America,” edited by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (Ecco). (I also spoke with the novelist Lydia Millet, on Arizona and John McCain.)

LIGAYA MISHAN: You graduated from the same school in Hawaii as Barack Obama—which I attended as well—and, like Obama (and I), live elsewhere as an adult. What is your relationship to Hawaii now?

TARA BRAY SMITH: I called my stepmother last week from Berlin. She is a passionate Obama supporter, as am I, and we were discussing Linda Lingle, the state’s Republican governor, who has recently been stumping for McCain. In a quiet voice I have heard my stepmother use only when she was about to ground me, she said that Lingle had suggested that Obama wasn’t really from Hawaii. According to news reports, what Lingle actually said was that Obama’s claim, made while campaigning in Colorado, that he understood some of the issues facing Western states because he too was from the West was “amusing” and “not genuine.” The executive director of McCain’s Hawaii campaign, Andy Blom, took it a step further, saying, “We certainly don’t feel that Barack Obama represents Hawaii or shows any particular interest or concern for Hawaii that we would expect from a true Hawaii native.”

This goes to the heart of my own relationship to Hawaii. It has something to do with authenticity and belonging—the Hawaii version of Sarah Palin’s “real America.”

When Blom speaks of “a true Hawaii native,” whom is he talking about? Lingle, who was born in Missouri, lived in California, and made her way to Hawaii in the late seventies? My late father’s hundred-per-cent Japanese girlfriend, a strong Lingle supporter, whose family came to Hawaii in the eighteen-eighties to work on the sugar plantations? My cousin Cari, a Native Hawaiian, Filipino, and Chinese hapa (mixed) woman who now lives in Seattle? Or maybe Blom himself, who has come out against the Akaka Bill—the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act of 2007, now before the Senate, which authorizes indigenous Hawaiians to begin the process for federal recognition—because, as he stated on a panel at the Cato Institute this May, “Aloha means hello, I love you and goodbye. After the passage of the Akaka Bill, it will only mean goodbye, because you will not be welcome any more.” (Obama has said that he will sign the bill.)

MISHAN: Do you think that Obama is representative of Hawaii?

SMITH: Yes. But so is my cousin in Seattle, and so is my brother-in-law from Kansas, a Marine and Iraq veteran stationed at K-Bay, in Kaneohe, who will probably be voting for McCain. Obama was born there, he was raised there, his sister and grandmother still live there. To the extent that I understand Hawaii, he is expressive of its paradoxes, its opposite-of-monolithic character, its ethnic nuances—at least thirty per cent of all marriages are interracial there—and its colonialist past, in which generations of Hawaiian residents were on the receiving end of American power. This summer, when Cokie Roberts blithely said that Obama should have gone on vacation to a less exotic, less “foreign” place—Myrtle Beach—I was ashamed. I’m like, hey, Cokie, remember Pearl Harbor?

MISHAN: Hawaii is a minority-majority state, with more Asians than Caucasians, and a sizable percentage of the population claims mixed-race ancestry. How do you think this might have shaped Obama, and might shape the country if he’s elected President?

SMITH: Obama embodies America at its best: a country where the concepts of native and foreigner, “pure” and “mixed,” black and white, hapa and hundred per cent are so complex that the claim of belonging because of blood quantum or family tree must be set against the argument that what defines an American is not the place or the circumstances of his birth but his allegiance to his country’s laws and ideals. Hawaii, by virtue of its exceptionally diverse population, is a place where these questions are explicit. I am consistently heartened by Obama’s hope for union in the face of seemingly irreconcilable differences, and his deep belief in the human capacity for change.