When the Kees made up their fifth batch of poi, the white flag flapped outside for a long time before any customers appeared, but finally a big Hawaiian woman ambled in, dipped her finger into the purplish paste and tried it upon her tongue. With obvious disgust she grumbled, “I’ll take three bundles, for half price, in dimes.”
This was too much for Nyuk Tsin. Weighing hardly one third as much as her huge customer, she leaped forward and started shoving the woman back into the roadway, while the big Hawaiian started slapping at her as if she were an irritating fly. A considerable row ensued, which brought Dr. Whipple into the yard with an edict: “No more poi to be sold.”
This embittered Mun Ki, who foresaw the loss of much money, and he condemned his wife for being so stupid as not to know how to make poi; but a worse humiliation was to follow. The Kees now had several gallons of the ugly-looking paste and frugal Nyuk Tsin ordered everyone to eat it instead of rice. As her husband bravely gulped the unpalatable starch he made wry faces and then discovered with dismay that his sons preferred it to rice.
Banging down his bowl he cried, “This settles it! We’re going back to China as soon as our contract ends.”
“Let’s sign for five more years,” Nyuk Tsin pleaded.
“No!” Mun Ki stormed. “I will not tolerate the day when my own sons prefer poi to rice. They’re no longer Chinese.” And he made a motion to throw out the poi, but Nyuk Tsin would not permit this. “All right, Wu Chow’s Auntie,” he grumbled. “I’ll eat the poi, but when it’s finished, I’m going back to China.” Uncle Chun Fat had undoubtedly made a million dollars in California, but it was obvious that his nephew wasn’t going to emulate him in Hawaii.
However, one good did come from the poi fiasco. Nyuk Tsin, always an experimenter, discovered that if she cut the stalks of her taro plants into short segments and packed them in heavy brine, with stones loaded on top of the barrel to keep the brew compressed, in time the stalks became pickled. With steamed fish or pork they were delicious, and as a result of her invention she acquired unexpected funds from her taro patch. She sold the flowers as vegetables, the leaves for spinach, and the uncooked roots to the king’s poi factory on Fort Street. But the stems she kept for herself, and when they were properly pickled she loaded them into her two baskets and slung her bamboo pole across her shoulder. Barefooted, she went through the town hawking her Chinese sauerkraut. Dr. Whipple, observing her buoyant recovery from defeat, said to her one day, “Mrs. Kee, do you remember that field that I spoke about?”
Nyuk Tsin’s eyes grew bright and Whipple marked how eagerly she awaited his next words, so he said slowly, “I’ve looked it over, and it isn’t worth much, so I’m not going to sell it to you.” Nyuk Tsin’s face became a study in yellow despair, and Whipple was ashamed of his trick, so he added quickly, “I’m going to give it to you, Mrs. Kee.”
Nyuk Tsin was only twenty-two at the time, but she felt like a very old woman who had lived a long life, hoping for certain things that were only now coming to pass. Her almond-shaped eyes filled with tears and she kept her hands pressed closely to her sides. To herself she thought: “The land could have been mine, rich land in the Fragrant Tree Country,” and at this thought a pair of tears rolled down her cheeks. Aloud, she said as a dutiful wife, “Wu Chow’s Father tells me I must not bother with land in this country. Soon we shall be returning to China.”
“Too bad,” Whipple replied, ready to dismiss the subject as one of no importance.
But in the mind of the stubborn Hakka woman the land hunger that she had inherited from generations of her forebears welled up strongly. In a kind of dumb panic she stood on the Whipple lawn and watched Dr. Whipple walking away from her, taking with him her only chance of salvation—the promise of land—and in response to a force greater than herself she called, “Dr. Whipple!”
The elderly scientist turned and recognized the agony through which his serving girl was going. Returning to her he asked gently, “Mrs. Kee, what is it?”
For a moment she hesitated, and tears splashed down her sun-browned face. Unable to speak, she stared at him and her mouth moved noiselessly. Finally, in a ghostly voice, she whispered her decision: “When Wu Chow’s Father returns to China, I shall remain here.”
“Oh, no!” Dr. Whipple interrupted quickly. “A wife must stay with her husband. I wouldn’t think of giving you the land on any other terms.”
The shocking probability that she was going to lose her land after all emboldened the little Chinese woman, and she confessed in a whisper: “He is not my husband, Dr. Whipple.”
“I know,” he said.
“He brought me here to sell me to the man you saw that day outside the fence. But he grew to like me a little, so he bought me for himself.”
Dr. Whipple recalled the scene at the immigration shed and he sensed that what Nyuk Tsin was saying was true. But he was a minister at heart, and he now advised his maid: “Men often take women for strange reasons, Mrs. Kee, and later they grow to love them, and have happy families. It is your duty to go back to China with your husband.”
“But when I get there,” Nyuk Tsin pleaded, “I will not be allowed to stay with him in the Low Village. He would be ashamed of my big feet.”
“What would you do?” Whipple asked with growing interest.
“I would have to live up in the Hakka village.”
Dr. Whipple’s conscience had often been stung by the inequities he witnessed in life, but he was convinced that obedience to duty was man’s salvation. “Then go to the High Village, Mrs. Kee,” he said gently. “Take your sons with you and lead a good life. Your gods will support you.”
With cold logic she explained: “But my sons will be kept in the Low Village and I will be banished from them. They would not want it known that I was their mother.”
Dr. Whipple walked away from the Chinese maid, kicked at the grass for some minutes, and returned to ask her several questions: How did she meet Kee? Was it true that he had brought her to Hawaii to sell her? Was it true that if she returned to China she would be banished from both her husband and her sons? Where were her parents? When he heard of her kidnaping and of her bleak future he thought for some time, then said bluntly, “We’d better go look at the land.”
He opened the wicker gate and led the barefooted woman with the basket hat about a mile up the Nuuanu Valley until they came to a low-lying field, an ancient taro patch now fallen into disuse. Much of it consisted of a swamp running down to the banks of the Nuuanu Stream, but as Whipple and his Chinese servant looked at it that day they could visualize it as it might become: the far end would raise fine taro; the dryer land would be good for vegetables; in that corner a woman could have a little house; and in years to come, the city of Honolulu would reach out to encompass the area. It was an interesting piece of land, worth little as it stood; worth a fortune when energy and planning had been applied to it.
“This is your land, Mrs. Kee.” The strange-looking couple shook hands and walked back to the Whipple mansion.
Nyuk Tsin did not divulge this compact to her husband, nor did she tell him of her intentions to remain in Hawaii when he left, for Mun Ki was a good man. As long as he was with his concubine in a strange land he was both kind and considerate, but as a realist he knew she could share no part of his life when he returned to China, and it never occurred to him that this future fact would in any way influence his present relationship. He loved Nyuk Tsin and treasured her four sons. She was pregnant again and he was happy. He was doing well as a runner for the chi-fa game and had established himself as one of the principal mah-jongg gamblers in Honolulu. He particularly liked the Whipples, who were exacting but just employers, and once he observed to the doctor: “It looks as if my six-year cycle began with my arrival here.”
“What’s the cycle?” Whipple asked, for although he was appalled at the callousness shown by Mun Ki in his proposed treatment of Nyuk Tsin when they returned to China, he liked the brash young man and found him inter
esting.
“The Chinese say, ‘Three years of bad luck, six years of good,’ ” Mun Ki explained.
After the cook had passed along to other work, Dr. Whipple stood reflecting on this chance phrase, and it explained much about the Chinese. He observed to Amanda: “We Christians focus on the Old Testament: Seven fat years have got to be followed by seven lean ones. The world balances out. Good luck and bad equate. It summarizes the Jewish-Christian sense of remorseless justice, one for one. But the Chinese envisage a happier world: ‘If you can stick out three bad years, six good ones are sure to follow.’ That’s a much better percentage, and it’s why the Chinese I meet are such indefatigable optimists. We Anglo-Saxons brood on the evil that has to follow good. The Pakes know that good always triumphs over evil, six to three.”
One afternoon he entertained an insight that struck him like a vision: “In fifty years my descendants here in Hawaii will be working for the Chinese!” At the time when this thought came to him he was watching Nyuk Tsin rebuilding her waterways after a storm, patiently leading the runaway waters back home to her taro patch, and as he saw the muddy stream bringing richness to her soil, he pounded his fist into his palm and said, “I’ve been talking about it for nearly fifty years. Now I’m going to do it.”
He drove down to the J & W offices and summoned all the young Janderses and Whipples and showed them a map of Oahu Island. “Four fifths of it’s a desert,” he said crisply, reminding them of something they already knew. “It grows nothing but cactus and you can’t even raise decent cattle on it. The other fifth over here gets all the water it needs, but the land is so steep you can’t farm it, so the water runs out to sea. Boys, I’ve often talked about building a ditch to trap that water over there,” and he pointed to the rainy windward side, “and lead it over here.” And he banged his fist down on mile after mile of barren acreage. “This week I’m going to start.”
One of his own sons was first to speak, saying, “If God had wanted the water to fall on these dry lands, He would have ordered it, and any action contrary to God’s wish seems to me a reflection on His infinite wisdom.”
Dr. Whipple looked at his son and replied, “I can only cite you the parable of the talents. God never wants potential gifts to lie idle.”
One of the Janders boys, a profound conservative, argued: “J & W is overextended. There’s no money for chancy adventures.”
“A good firm is always overextended,” Whipple replied, but seeing that the younger men would surely vote against his using J & W funds, he quickly added, “I don’t want you to put up any of your own money, but I’m surely going to gamble all of mine. All I want from you is lease rights to your worthless land on the dry side.”
When he had control of six thousand acres of barren soil, he hired two hundred men and many teams of mules and with his own money launched the venture that was to transform his part of Oahu from a desert into a lush, succulent sugar plantation. With shovels and mule-drawn sledges, he dug out an irrigation ditch eleven miles long, maintaining a constant fall which swept the water down from high mountainsides and onto the arid cactus lands. When his ditch faced some deep valley that could not be avoided, he channeled his water into a narrow mouth and poured it into a large pipe which dropped down to the valley floor and climbed back up to the required elevation on the other side, where it emptied out into the continuation of the ditch. Water, seeking its former level, rushed down the pipe and surged back up the other side without requiring pumps.
When the ditch was finished and its effect upon the Whipple fortunes evident, he convened the J & W men and showed them the map of Oahu, with arable areas marked in green. “We’re bringing water about as far as we can in ditches. Yet look at this map. We’re using less than twenty per cent of our potential land. Ninety per cent of our rainfall still runs back into the ocean. Gentlemen, long after I’m dead somebody will think of a way to pierce these mountains and bring that water over to this side, where it’s needed. I beg of you,” the white-haired scientist pleaded, “when the project becomes feasible, and sooner or later it must, don’t hesitate. Pool your funds. Go into debt if necessary. Because the man who controls that water will control Hawaii.”
One of the more conservative Janderses, who chafed at working under Whipple, whispered, “They always get dotty in their old age.” And the firm became so preoccupied with making money from John Whipple’s ditches that they quite forgot his vision of a tunnel through the heart of the mountains.
WHILE NYUK TSIN and her husband were suffering reversals in the manufacture of poi, they observed that difficulties were also visiting their favorite guest. Captain Rafer Hoxworth, when he dined at the Whipples, showed in his face the strain that had overtaken him with the illness of his gracious wife, Noelani, the tall and stately Hawaiian lady whose charm was so much appreciated by the Chinese. In 1869 it became apparent to Nyuk Tsin, as she served the big dinners, that Mrs. Hoxworth needed medical care, and as the year progressed, the tall Hawaiian woman grew steadily less able to sit through a long dinner without showing signs of exhaustion, and Nyuk Tsin grieved for her.
The haoles, as Caucasians were called in the islands, were not able to understand what had brought their beloved friend so close to death, but the kanakas, as the Hawaiians were known, understood. Of their declining sister they said, “Ho’olana i ka wai ke ola.—Her life floats upon the water.” But if Noelani herself was aware of this sentence, she betrayed her reactions to no one. She gave the appearance of a placid, pleased Hawaiian woman, graceful in motion and relaxed in countenance. She seemed like a secure brown rock facing the sea and richly clothed in sunlight; about her whispered the waves of her husband’s affection and that of her friends.
Like a true alii, Noelani slept a good deal during the day in order to conserve her strength, but as evening approached she came alive, and when her two-horse carriage with its imported English coachman drove up to the big Hoxworth house on Beretania Street she displayed all the excitement of a child. Stepping grandly into the carriage she commanded the Englishman: “You may take me to the Whipples. But hurry.” When she arrived she was a figure of striking beauty. Already tall, she accentuated the fact by wearing high tortoise-shell combs in her silvery white, piled-up hair and a dress with a train of at least three feet which trailed as she entered. In the middle of this train was sewn a loop which could be passed over the fingers of her left hand, the kanaka loop it was called, and guests enjoyed watching how deftly Noelani could kick her train with her right foot, catching the kanaka loop with her left hand. Her dresses were made of stiff brocade edged with delicate Brussels lace. She wore jade beads that blended marvelously with her dark skin, jade rings and jade bracelets, all purchased in Peking. Near her heart she wore a thin gold watch from Geneva, pinned into place by a jeweled butterfly from Paris, while in her right hand she customarily carried a Cantonese fan made of feathers and pale ivory. Over all, she wore her Shanghai stole, four feet wide, embroidered in red roses that stood off from the fabric, and edged with a two-foot fringe of Peking knots. Captain Hoxworth, who loved buying her gifts, once said, “A smaller woman would be dwarfed by such an outfit, but Noelani’s always been a giant.” When she entered a room, her dark eyes flashing, she was a very noble lady, the symbol of a valiant race. And she was dying.
She loved her clothes and parties and having her children about her, for if an evening passed when less than a dozen friends were in attendance, she felt lonely, as if in her last days her Hawaiian friends had deserted her. Then she would tell her husband, “Rafer, drive down to Auntie Mele’s and see if there’s anyone having a talk.” And if there was, the entire group would be brought up to the Hoxworths’ to visit with Noelani, who found breathing increasingly difficult.
Her children had married well, and she found great delight in her fourteen grandchildren. Malama, her oldest daughter, had of course married brilliant Micah Hale. Bromley and Jerusha had each married one of the Whipple children, while Iliki had married a Janders, s
o that when the Hoxworths were assembled, most of the great island families were represented, and there was much talk of Lahaina in the good old days. In these autumnal hours Noelani enjoyed most her discussions with Micah Hale, who now played such an important role in Hawaii, for he was not only head of H & H, he was also a nobleman with a seat in the upper house of the legislature, a member of the Privy Council, and the administrator of the Department of Interior. Often Noelani reminded him: “I was recalling our first conversation, Micah, on that Sunday in San Francisco when you and I were both so certain that America would absorb our islands. Well, it hasn’t happened yet, nor will it in my lifetime. Kamehameha V will not sell one foot of land to the United States.”
“We will unite,” her bearded son-in-law assured her. “I am more positive than ever, Noelani, that our destiny will be achieved shortly.”
“You’ve been telling me that for twenty years and look what’s happened. Your country has been torn apart by civil war, and mine has drifted happily along, just as it always was.”
“Do not believe it, Noelani,” Micah reproved, stroking his copious beard as if he were addressing a legislature. “Each wave that reaches the shores of these islands brings new evidence that we will shortly be one land. I expect it to happen within ten years.”
“Why are you so sure?” Noelani pressed.
“For one simple reason. America will need our sugar. In order to safeguard the supply, she will have to take over the islands.”
“Are you working for that purpose, Micah?” the elderly woman asked.
“Indeed, as are all men of good sense.”
“Does the king know this?”
“He appreciates the problem better than I do. He prays that Hawaii will remain independent, but if it cannot, he prefers that the United States absorb the islands.”