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Margo King Lenson is the owner of Tui Communications based in Vacaville, CA and known on the World Wide Web as www.tuicom.com. Margo started her business as a hobby in 1988 when she designed and created stationery items with Polynesian and Pacific Islander themes and sold them to friends and family. They were so well-received that she searched for opportunities to share her creations and became the first non-food booth at the Samoan Flag Day Festival in San Francisco. Her items, which had by then expanded to include her exclusively designed T-shirts, were a hit! Islanders in the Bay Area were introduced to a female entrepreneur appealing to their cultural pride. Margo then became a vendor at the annual San Francisco Aloha Festival in 1997 which has since evolved into the largest single gathering of Hawaiians & Pacific Islanders in the Bay Area for culture and music. Margo had always been an avid reader and bibliophile of Hawaiian & Pacific material and had accumulated a large book collection. In 2000, she turned her obsession into an aspect of her business and began selling duplicate copies of books from her own library. Soon customers were turning to her with lists of books they wanted her to find and Margo was transformed into a book dealer. In 2009, Tui Communications was the only bookseller at the Aloha Festival catering to thousands of happy and loyal customers and readers. Selling other people's wonderful books, though, was not enough for Margo. In 2001, she began her own book series of oral histories conducted with Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders confronting American life. Pacific Voices Talk Story: Conversations of American Experience, Volumes 1 - 4 was the result. Tui Communications was now not only a bookdealer, but also a publisher. Yet global collectors visiting www.tuicom.com will also find vintage Hawaiiana and Pacificana items to crowd their tiki bars and tiki collections, plus vinyl records from the Golden Age of Hawaii's Tourism Bureau when Webley Edwards' "Hawaii Calls" played on the radio across the USA. Margo received her first B.A. in Political Science from Cal State Univ., Fullerton in the Watergate era, then went to work in San Francisco at a publishing house/think tank that spearheaded Reaganomics. Obviously, her political consciousness, like many in the Left during the Vietnam War, had become disillusioned by the "Revolution." In 1996, Margo returned to college for a second B.A. in her first love, literature. She earned her degree in English and advanced to graduate work, only to be disappointed by the lack of resources focused on the area of research for her thesis: Literature of the postcolonial Pacific. It was then that Margo saw the need to gather conversations with Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders and convert their stories to text, accessible to Islanders, and Asian-Pacific Studies' academics alike, unaware of the experiences of transplanted Pacific Peoples in a land-locked world beyond island life. After moving from Southern California in 1976, Margo and her husband, Malcolm, have lived in Marin County, Sonoma, and now Vacaville. As she moves further north and west from the ocean, Margo yearns to return to the sights, smell, and sound of the beach. In continuing to work on the evolution of Tui Communications in a technological world, Margo, along with her customers and readers, keep the spirit and material presence of Island life, history, and culture alive in the American consciousness and in their own hearts. |
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