THE slice of Okinawan sweet potato and haupia pie was a test. I offered it to Kelly Hu after noting that on television, in her role as Chen Pei Pei in "Martial Law," she's been looking a bit thin.
Plus, I wanted to measure her "local" quotient after years of living in L.A. She was in town to spend Christmas with her family.
"Oh, is this what they're making now? So creative yeah!? Ooh, can I try? Ummm, it's good. Can I have another bite?"
After the pie, she proceeded to chow down on Ono Hawaiian Foods' -- she chose the restaurant -- combo plate, with its poi, laulau, kalua pig, lomi salmon and pipikaula, plus a few extras like chicken long rice, poke and macaroni salad.
"When I come home, all I want to do is eat," she said. "I always make at least one trip to Ono's, and I love Zippy's chili frank plate. I went there straight after coming home and I ate it in the car on the way to Ala Moana.
"And I always take a Zip Pac back to L.A. and eat it on the plane."
She passed all right. And even if she didn't, it would have been excusable. She's been away almost as many years as she's lived here. Hu was 16, a Kamehameha Schools junior, when she zipped into the fast lane after winning the Miss Teen USA pageant in 1985. The $75,000 prize money bought her the freedom to kick around in L.A. on her own once she graduated. It was enough to survive two or three years, "four if you're only eating saimin," she said.
She didn't anticipate any trouble finding work, but cringes at the reality. "I was so young. I had a schedule for myself -- I still have it written down -- where I would land a TV series in my first five months; I would be a movie star by the end of the year."I believed everybody who said, 'I'll call you. We'll do lunch!' It was hard to know who to trust. It took me a while to realize that in L.A. people talk a lot more than they know, because in Hawaii people tend to know a lot more than they reveal."
Hu did manage to work continuously over the years, landing bit parts in TV series, from "Growing Pains" to "Night Court" to "Sunset Beach." She was also one of Jason's victims in "Friday the 13th Part VIII."
But 1998 was her lucky year, having landed leading roles in the Don Johnson series "Nash Bridges," and in now what looks like one of the few hits of the fall season, "Martial Law."
This new year, she won't be making the kind of starry-eyed resolutions she made in the past. "Now I just look back. So much has happened to me this year I'm still catching up."
"I feel like this is a new phase, another turning point, as important as the time I left home."
The whirlwind began in summer when she was starring in both "Nash," filmming in San Francisco, and "Martial Law," which films in L.A. Some Hawaii readers were upset when her character was killed off in "Nash Bridges," but the series producer, Carlton Cuse, knew all along he wanted her in "Martial Law," where she works with the heavyset martial artist Sammo Hung.
"I met Sammo in Australia when I went to see Jackie Chan film 'Mr. Nice Guy.' (Sammo) could not speak one word of English. This was a year and a half ago. Now he does pages of dialog, whereas I panic whenever they give me one line in Chinese.
"My character's supposed to be from Shanghai so I have to learn to speak Mandarin. My family's Cantonese -- not that I speak that either -- but when I practice with Sammo he looks at me, like, 'What are you trying to say?' "
The series stars do most of their own stunts. Hu's training consists of two years of karate, and many years of jazz dancing. Her rules for stunts, are: "I don't jump off of buildings, I don't jump out of moving cars and I don't play with fire."
Otherwise, the general cast rule is: "If you're not getting bruises, aches and you don't have stitches, you're not working hard enough," she said. "Guest stars complain about little aches and we just look at them, like, welcome to 'Martial Law.'
"I don't think (the cast of) any show goes through what we go through. It's very demanding physically and mentally."
At one point, an axe was flung at her head. She said, "I had to duck just in time, and it had to be a real axe because it had to go through a wall."
With work on the series running 18 hours a day, five days a week through April, and acting and boxing classes Saturdays, Hu has arrived at the stage where she can no longer manage some of her business -- "even simple things like picking up my own dry cleaning." She's relinquished management of her fan mail so that she doesn't know how much she gets, only that, "I get a lot from prisons, which is strange because I play a cop."
Because Asian-American faces are still rare on television, actors who do make it are perceived as trail blazers obligated to set a good example for others of their race. For Hu, the pressure is doubled because she is a woman trying to hold her own "just me against testosterone. I refuse to fight in a skirt. I had to do it once, but they gave me a lot of hand movements, no kicking."
In another "Law" episode, she entered a strip club and it was not known whether she would pose as a stripper or not. "I was reading the script and I saw that coming and I said, 'Oh no.' "
It turns out, she was there to make an arrest. "If I had to do it I could have done it in a way that could have been funny. It didn't have to be embarrassing. There are ways to get around it, but I still had to swing around that stupid pole."
Even so, she's not one to bring politics to acting. Because her face is familiar after years of TV work, she's been spared the kind of rejection that other Asian-Americans attribute to racism.
"I've been asked to speak to the members of the Screen Actors Guild about my experience, but I don't think I'm qualified to be a role model. I never felt like I had a point to make. I've just done what I wanted to do. I'm lucky to have any kind of job at all.
"L.A. is full of people who think they're better than the jobs they are doing. I'm not one of those people. I loved doing "Nash," I love doing this show. If movies are in my future, great, but I don't need it. My plate is full."
