“Do they have the other child?” Nyuk Tsin asked.
“They never spoke,” Apikela replied. Then the big woman noticed how frightened the boys were of their mother, and with a gigantic, embracing sweep of her huge arms she gathered them up as she had often done before. When they were huddled against her warm and ample body, she gave her belly a sudden flick, opened her arms and ejected a tangle of arms and legs at Nyuk Tsin. The scrawny little Chinese woman was engulfed, and then a strange thing happened. It was she who feared the leprosy, and instead of embracing her sons, she withdrew as if she were unclean, and the boys stared silently at their mother while she drew her hands behind her, lest she touch one of them.
“I am afraid,” she said humbly, and Apikela withdrew the children.
After a noisy meal during which the boys chattered with Kimo, and Apikela asked a dozen aimless questions about Kalawao, Nyuk Tsin said, “I must go down to look at my land,” and she set off for the four-mile jog back down the valley to where the boggy land lay, but again she passed it without stopping, for she was on her way to see the Punti and Hakka families, but none of them knew of her son. Because they were Carthaginian families, they felt obligated to help Mun Ki’s widow, so they scraped together a set of garden tools, some seeds, a bag of taro corns and a bamboo carrying-pole with two baskets attached. With these Nyuk Tsin returned to her land, and there she worked till nearly midnight.
The low and boggy section she enclosed in dikes, for there taro would prosper. Furthermore, building the taro bed also drained the intermediate land, uncovering good alluvial soil, which she tilled for Chinese vegetables. This left a smaller, but still adequate high area where vegetables for the haoles could be grown. Thus, from the first night, Nyuk Tsin stumbled upon the system she was to follow for many years: taro for the Hawaiians, Chinese cabbage and peas for the Orientals, lima beans, string beans and Irish potatoes for the haoles. For she knew they all had to eat.
At dawn each day she slung her bamboo pole across her shoulder, hooked on the two baskets, jammed her conical basket hat upon her head, and set out barefooted for her garden. As her vegetables ripened, she loaded her baskets and began her long treks through Honolulu, and no matter how much business she produced at any one house, she was never as concerned with the money as she was to see whether this family happened to have a Chinese boy about four years old. She didn’t find her son, but she developed a vegetable business that was becoming profitable.
When night fell, Nyuk Tsin continued working, putting her field in order, and after the stars had come out she would carefully place in her baskets those vegetables which she had not sold. Swinging them onto her shoulder, she would begin her four-mile trek back up the valley to the clearing where her sons were already asleep. There were many days when she never saw them, but as she sat in the night darkness with Kimo and Apikela she talked mostly of their future, and one night, when she had trudged up the valley in a heavy rain, she arrived home cold and wet and she was driven to recall the days in the lazaretto when the leper Palani told them of the world. So she woke her sons and stood before them, muddy and wet, and they rubbed their heavy eyes, trying to understand what she was saying. They could hardly speak Chinese and she was not adept in Hawaiian, but she explained: “Somewhere in Honolulu you have a brother, and his name …” The boys began to fidget, and she commanded them to stand still, but they could not understand.
“Eh, you kanaka!” Apikela shouted. “Shush! Your auntie speak you! Damned Pakes!” And the boys stood silent.
Slowly Wu Chow’s Auntie spoke: “Your father wanted you to share the entire world. He wanted you to study … to be bright boys. He said, ‘Work hard and the world will belong to you.’ ”
She took her first son by the hand and drew him into the middle of the room, saying, “Asia, you must honor your father by working hard.” The sleepy-eyed boy nodded, quite unaware of the commission he had been given.
To each of her sons she repeated this paternal command: “Work hard.” And when they stood at attention, she added, “And you must help me find your brother Australia.”
“Where is he?” Asia asked.
“I don’t know,” Wu Chow’s Auntie replied, “but we must find him.”
When the confused and sleepy boys returned to bed, the little Chinese woman sat for a long time with the two Hawaiians, trying to decide which of her sons promised to be the most intelligent, and this was important, for Nyuk Tsin realized that she would be able to give only one a full-scale education in America and it was essential that the right one be identified early and concentrated upon. Now she asked Kimo, “Which do you think is best?”
“I like Europe,” Kimo replied.
“You like him,” Nyuk Tsin agreed, “but who is cleverest?”
“America is cleverest,” the big man said.
Nyuk Tsin thought so too, but she checked with Apikela. “Do you think America has courage for a fight?” she asked.
“Africa is the most stubborn fighter,” Apikela replied.
“But which one would you send to the mainland?”
“America,” Apikela replied without hesitation.
By 1875 Nyuk Tsin had saved nearly twenty-five dollars, and if such a rate of income were to continue, she could obviously afford to educate all of her sons, but she knew that there was heavy obligation upon this money, so when it reached the even twenty-five-dollar mark she bundled it up, took her four sons with her, and marched formally down to the Punti store. “I want you to understand what we are doing,” she said several times, and when she reached the store, she lined the boys up so that even six-year-old America could follow the transaction that was about to occur.
In those years the Chinese did not use banks, for there were no Chinese establishments, and what Oriental could trust a white man in the handling of money? Wealth was kept hidden until a responsible accumulation was made, and then it was carried, as on this day, to the Punti store or to the Hakka store, and there, in complete confidence, it was handed over to the storekeeper, who, for three per cent of the total, would manage, by ways only he knew, to transmit the balance either to the Low Village, as in the present case, or to the High Village if the recipient were to be a Hakka. Wars came and revolutions. Hawaii prospered or suffered loss. Men died and ships were captured by pirates, but money sent from the Punti store in Honolulu invariably reached the Low Village.
“This money is for the wife of Kee Mun Ki,” Nyuk Tsin explained to the storekeeper. When he nodded she said, “A widow in the Low Village. Tell her that as dutiful sons her four boys send the money. And they send as well their filial respect.” Again the storekeeper nodded and began to write the letter.
When it was completed, in strange Chinese characters that few in Hawaii could read, Nyuk Tsin proudly handed it to each of the boys and said, “You are sending money to your mother. As long as she lives you must do this. It is the respect you owe her.” Gravely the little pigtailed boys in clean suits handled the letter, and each, in his imperfect way, could visualize China, with his mother sitting in a red robe and opening the letter and finding his money inside. When the letter was handed back to the storekeeper for transmitting, Nyuk Tsin stood her boys in line and said, “Remember! As long as your mother lives, this is your duty.” And the boys understood. Big Apikela was like a mother in that she sang to them and kissed them; and Wu Chow’s Auntie was sometimes like a mother because she brought them food; but their real mother, the one that counted, was in China.
Since the day on which the money was taken to the Punti store was already ruined, Nyuk Tsin decided to explore something that she had heard of with great excitement. She led her four bright-faced boys back up Nuuanu Valley, taking them off into a smaller valley where in a field a large building stood. It belonged to the Church of England, for as soon as the Hawaiian alii discovered the gentle and pliant religion of Episcopalianism with its lovely ceremonies, they contrasted it to the bleak, un-Hawaiian Calvinism of the Congregationalists, and before l
ong most of the alii were Church of England converts. They loved the rich singing, the incense and the robes. One of the first things the English missionaries did was to open the school which Nyuk Tsin now approached, and to the surprise of the islands the Englishmen announced: “In our school we will welcome Chinese boys.” The idea of having Orientals in any large numbers in the big, important school at Punahou would in 1875 have been repugnant, and also prohibitively expensive to the Chinese, so the ablest flocked to Iolani, where Nyuk Tsin now brought her sons.
She was met by one of the most unlikely men ever to inhabit Hawaii, Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, a tall, reedy Englishman with fierce mustaches and a completely bald head, even though he was only twenty-eight. His adventurous Shropshire parents had been with a camel caravan heading across Outer Mongolia from the town of his first name to the town of his second when he was prematurely born, “jolted loose ere my time,” he liked to explain, “by the rumbling motion of a camel which practically destroyed my sainted mother’s pelvic structure.” He had grown up speaking Chinese, Russian, Mongolian, French, German and English. He was now also a master of pidgin, a terrifying disciplinarian and a man who loved children. He had long ago learned not to try his Chinese on the Orientals living in Hawaii, for they spoke only Cantonese and Punti, and to him these were alien languages, but when Nyuk Tsin spoke to him in Hakka, it sounded enough like Mandarin for him to respond, and he immediately took a liking to her.
“So you want to enroll these four budding Lao-tses in our school?” he remarked in expansive Mandarin.
“They are not Lao-tses,” she corrected. “They’re Mun Ki’s.”
Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, and he demanded of his acquaintances his full name, looked down severely at Nyuk Tsin and asked, “Is there any money at all in the coffers of Mun Ki, y-clept Kee?”
“He’s dead,” she replied.
Blake swallowed. He liked this practical woman, but nevertheless he tried to smother her with yet a third barrage of words: “Have you any reason to believe that these four orphaned sons of Mun Ki have even the remotest capacity to learn?”
Nyuk Tsin thought a moment and replied, “America can learn. The others aren’t too bright.”
“Madam,” Uliassutai Karakoram cried with a low bow that brought his mustaches almost to the floor, “in my three years at Iolani you are the first mother who has even come close to assessing her children as I do. Frankly, your sons don’t look too bright, but with humble heart I welcome Asia, Europe, Africa and America into our school.” Very formally he shook the hand of each child, then roared in pidgin, “Mo bettah you lissen me, I knock you plenty, b’lee me.” And the boys did believe.
In later years, when Hawaii was civilized and lived by formal accreditations, no teacher who drifted off a whaling boat one afternoon, his head shaved bald, no credentials, with mustaches that reached out four inches, and with a name like Uliassutai Karakoram Blake could have been accepted in the schools. But in 1872, when this outlandish man did just that, Iolani needed teachers, and in Blake they found a man who was to leave on the islands an indelible imprint. When the bishop first stared at the frightening-looking young man and asked, “What are your credentials for teaching?” Blake replied, “Sir, I was bred on camel’s milk,” and the answer was so ridiculous that he was employed. If Blake had been employed in a first-rate school like Punahou, then one of the finest west of Illinois, it wouldn’t have mattered whether he was capable or not, for after Punahou his scholars would go on to Yale, and oversights could be corrected. Or if the teachers in the school were inadequate, the parents at home were capable of repairing omissions. But at Iolani the students either got an education from the available teachers, or they got none at all, and it was Blake’s unique contribution to Hawaii that with his fierce mustaches and his outrageous insistence upon the niceties of English manners, he educated the Chinese. He made them speak a polished English, cursing them in pidgin when they didn’t. He converted them to the Church of England, while he himself remained a Buddhist. He taught them to sail boats in the harbor, contending that no man could be a gentleman who did not own a horse and a boat. Above all, he treated them as if they were not Chinese; he acted as if they were entitled to run banks, or to be elected to the legislature, or to own land.
In these years there were many in Hawaii who looked apprehensively into the future and were frightened by what they saw. They did not want Chinese going to college or owning big companies. They were sincerely afraid of Oriental businessmen and intellectuals. They hoped, falsely as it proved, that the Chinese would be perpetually content to work on the plantations without acquiring any higher aspirations, and when they saw their dream proving false, and the Chinese entering all aspects of public life, they sometimes grew panicky and talked of passing ridiculous laws, or of exiling all Chinese, or of preventing them from entering certain occupations. What these frightened men should have done was much simpler: they should have shot Uliassutai Karakoram Blake.
For when the first Chinese plantation worker saved, through bitter labor, the few pennies needed to send his son to Iolani, a kind of revolution was launched which nothing in world history had so far proved capable of reversing. When Blake taught the first Chinese boy the alphabet, the old system of indentured labor was doomed. Because a boy who could read would sooner or later come upon some book that would give him an idea, and a boy with an idea could accomplish almost anything. During these years in Hawaii, the Chinese were not particularly well treated. Hell-raising lunas on the plantations—gang foremen—often thought it hilarious to tie two Chinese together by their pigtails and abuse them both at the same time. Other lunas, on a drunk, found delight in tying the pigtail of a passing Oriental to the tail of a horse, and lashing the horse into a gallop. The Chinese retaliated until it became a standing rule among lunas: “Never go into a field where more than six Chinese are working with cane knives. Never.” And one night an infuriated Chinese, for no reason that anyone ever developed, screamed into the bedroom of the French consul and with a long knife massacred him. These were not easy years, and the Chinese were by no means the docile Orientals that the Honolulu Mail had reported on their arrival. They were apt to be mean, fearfully quick to revenge insults, and positively unwilling to extend their contracts at three dollars a month for fourteen hours of hard work a day. Deep tensions were created, and the Chinese experiment might have failed, except that Uliassutai Karakoram Blake was quietly teaching his boys: “The same virtues that are extolled in China will lead to success in Hawaii. Study, listen to your parents, save your money, align yourselves with honest men.” He also laid great emphasis upon the wisdom of conforming to the mores of the majority. “Cut your pigtails,” he counseled, “and dress like Americans. Join their churches. Forget that you are Chinese.”
A boy asked, “But if we ought to drop Buddhism, why don’t you?” And Uliassutai replied, “When I leave Hawaii, I shall return to England, where freedoms of all kind are permitted. But you will not leave these islands. You will have to live among Americans, and they despise most freedoms, so conform.” He was a difficult, opinionated man, and he transformed a race.
In these days, when Nyuk Tsin came to work in the early morning twilight, she led her four sons with her, and for the hours before school opened, they labored in the field with her. As schooltime approached, she dipped a rag in the muddy water of the taro patch and cleaned her sons, sending them off to their lessons. When day ended, they were back among the vegetables, and after nightfall they all reached home, where big Kimo had a hot supper waiting for them. After a year of this severe regime Kimo, exhausted by the amount of work the Chinese were doing, suggested, “Why don’t we all leave this house and build a little house down the valley? We’ll keep this land for a vegetable field. Then nobody will have to walk so far, and I’ll be close to the poolroom.”
Nyuk Tsin considered this for some time and said, “I don’t like to give up even an inch of the vegetable field for a house.”
“But look!” Kimo argued. “For a little corner of the vegetable field, you’ll get a whole lot of land up here.”
“If we do that,” Nyuk Tsin countered, “Apikela will have to walk great distances for her maile. And I can walk better than Apikela.”
“What I had in mind,” Kimo explained, “was that Apikela should stop bothering with the maile and help you with the vegetable field down there. That way, the boys can study longer for their school.”
The plan was so reasonable that next day Nyuk Tsin invited Kimo to accompany her to the vegetable field, and the huge man explained how little land would be taken off by the house, and he reminded her how much forest land she would be getting in exchange, and on the spur of the moment she said, “Good.”
They took down the upland house and for several nights slept in the open while the lowland house was building, and after a while the first of the famous Kee houses stood on Nuuanu Street. This one was a ramshackle affair, neither waterproof nor tidy, but it comfortably housed five Chinese and two Hawaiians. In a way, it was also responsible for the good fortune of the Kees, for one day when Nyuk Tsin was trudging up the valley toward her new fields, which because they were so high did not produce as well as the lower, she was stopped by a handsome young man of twenty who was riding in a gig and who called, “You the Pake who has the field in there?” She said that she was, and he reined in his horse, climbed down, and extended his hand. “I’m Whip Hoxworth,” he said, “and I’d like to see your field, if I may.” He tied the horse to a tree and tramped in with her, kicked the soil, rubbed some through his palms, and said, “Pake, I’d like to make a deal with you. I brought back with me from Formosa, nearly lost my head doing it, about a hundred pineapple plants. I’ve tried growing them in low fields, and they don’t work. Seems to me a field at this elevation might be nearer to what they knew in Formosa. Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give you all the plants that are now living. And if you can make them grow, you can have them. All I want is some of the fruit and some of the seed.”