Hawaii

  The two women, neither of whom could read, studied the precious slip of paper, and Mrs. Ching asked cautiously, “Are you sure this is your son’s?”

  “It is.”

  “And it speaks well?”

  Modestly Nyuk Tsin looked down at her feet. In a soft voice she said, “Money, knowledge, a position even better than a scholar in China, a long prosperous life with many children—those were the words for my son.”

  The two women sat in silence, for each knew what a rare thing was before them. They stared at the premonitory paper and slowly Mrs. Ching rose. “My dear sister-in-law, I think I had better make some more tea.” With bounding joy Nyuk Tsin heard these words, for they erased any that had been said earlier, but modestly she kept her eyes down and did not watch Mrs. Ching as she brewed fresh tea—not the old stuff waiting on the back of the stove—and poured it into a fine China cup. This was, up to then, the moment of greatest triumph in Nyuk Tsin’s life, and she tasted the fine fresh tea.

  “Siu Kim,” Mrs. Ching began on a fresh tack, “is an unusual girl and she has been asked for by more than a dozen men, some of them with considerable wealth.” Nyuk Tsin sipped her tea and courteously allowed Mrs. Ching to run up the bargaining price for her daughter. Over the edge of her cup, the ruder-mannered younger woman studied the bag of candies and thought: “I will let her talk about her daughter for five minutes, and then I’ll explode my next cannon.”

  When Mrs. Ching finished explaining why, in common decency, she had to save Siu Kim for a wealthier man than Africa Kee was apt to be, Nyuk Tsin said bluntly, “It is not every day that an average Hakka girl like Siu Kim has a chance to marry a man who is going to graduate from a fine college in America and become a lawyer. I should think, as her mother, that you would jump at this opportunity and throw in a good dowry as well.”

  Mrs. Ching was stunned by this news, but she was no mean negotiator. She did not raise an eyebrow but asked in a silky voice, “How can a vegetable woman possibly send her son to America?”

  Meticulously Nyuk Tsin counted off: “We own the land up Nuuanu. We own the land in the forest. We own very fine fields in Manoa. Asia owns his restaurant and Europe has paid large sums toward the building where his vegetable store is. Each of my sons works, as do I, and I am sure that right now we have enough money to send Africa to Michigan.”

  Mrs. Ching was visibly jolted by this narration and she now wheeled into position her heaviest ammunition: “Your son’s prospects sound … well, interesting. But of course his father was a leper.”

  Nyuk Tsin did not flinch: “The main reason why I was able to make such a favorable marriage with the Hawaiian girl, who brought us so much land, was that the Hawaiians know me as the Pake Kokua, and they have said that if Africa does become a lawyer, they will send all their business to the son of the Pake Kokua.”

  The two tough-minded Hakka women glared at each other in mutual respect, and as they did so, Mrs. Ching made her decision. Imperceptibly, she allowed her right hand to steal across the table. She extended two fingers and slowly encircled the bag of brown candy dusted with poppy seeds. Noiselessly she pulled it toward her, and Nyuk Tsin, witnessing these climactic gestures, thought: “I must not cry.” And she fought back her tears, lest they spill out of her sloping eyes and betray to the Ching woman her great joy. With this acceptance of the candy, the marriage was agreed upon.

  Up to this time Nyuk Tsin had not yet seen Siu Kim, and of course Africa Kee was not even aware that his auntie was planning his marriage. Neither he nor Siu Kim was told anything, especially since the basic financial negotiations were to consume the better part of a year, but one day Nyuk Tsin saw the attractive girl for whom she had been bargaining, and she admitted to Mrs. Ching: “Your daughter, Beautiful Gold, is even more desirable than you told me.” But as she said these words, she happened to look past Siu Kim, who was then thirteen, and in the doorway behind, wearing a blue and gold Chinese dress, stood Siu Kim’s eleven-year-old sister, Siu Han, and Nyuk Tsin sucked in her breath with pleasure. “What is that one’s name?” she asked, and Mrs. Ching replied simply, “Siu Han, Beautiful Girl, but she will be saved for a very wealthy man.” Nyuk Tsin smiled at the little girl and remembered her name.

  These were exciting years in the Kee house. The original grass shack had been replaced by one of the ugliest buildings in Honolulu: an unadorned two-story bleak wooden house, to which had been appended as afterthoughts a collection of lean- to sheds. A mango tree and a coconut palm gave some shade, but there was no lawn nor any flowers. Pigs were kept in the yard and chickens in the kitchen, but the dominant occupants were enormous Kimo, who did all the cooking for the family, and sprawling Apikela, who did the washing and made the poi. There was a running battle between Nyuk Tsin on the one hand and everyone else on the other: she liked rice and Chinese food; they insisted upon poi and American-style food. When, at the end of a long day’s work she begged for rice, big Kimo at the stove shrugged his shoulders and the boys yelled, “Oh, Auntie! Who wants rice?” If she did, she had to cook it herself because Kimo refused to bother.

  Her two married sons lived with her, of course, one family to a room, and Apikela took care of the babies that began to arrive regularly. What with the pigs and the chickens and the babies it was a noisy, happy island home. There were many like it, for Chinese and Hawaiians lived together easily. At the poolroom one day Kimo came upon a new importation from Portugal, a ukulele, and like a boy he badgered Nyuk Tsin until she bought him one. Then Apikela demanded one, and Europe’s wife, and songs from the Chinese house filled the valley.

  In the middle of 1886, when Africa Kee was eighteen, it was announced that early next year he would marry the wealthy Hakka girl, Ching Siu Kim. He started looking about the city to see who she was, and one day he saw her walking in Aala Park, but he could not be sure that she was the girl picked out for him, and he thought: “It would be pleasant if she were a girl like that one.”

  The wedding was an impressive affair, with many guests, for the Chings were important, and before Africa Kee finally climbed aboard the ship to go to Michigan, he was already the father of three children. Dutifully he took the family genealogical book and the poem to the scholar in the Punti store, and there the man gave his sons their names. The poem showed that the name of this fourth generation must be Koon, Earth, and accordingly the two boys’ names were Koon Chuk, the Center of the Earth, and Koon Yuen, the Essence of the Earth Which Produces All, but their parents called them simply Sam and Harvey. The Chinese names were duly forwarded to the Low Village, so that when twenty-one-year-old Africa finally enrolled at Michigan he was not only head of a burgeoning family left behind in Honolulu, but also the member of a powerful clan whose existence had continued in the Low Village for thousands of years, but the memory which recurred most often to Africa as he studied law in Michigan concerned an event which took place on his last morning in Honolulu.

  Nyuk Tsin assembled her five sons and led them to the letter-writer at the Punti store. There she delivered fifty dollars that the family in Honolulu desperately needed for its various ventures. Asia and Europe gasped to see this amount of money being stolen from the Kees, and certainly Africa could have used it in Michigan, but Nyuk Tsin said, “Your mother in China may need this money. It may be a bad year for the crops. It is your duty above everything else to pay respect to your mother.” If, at Michigan, Africa Kee excelled at law it was partly because he understood the fundamental fact that law directs the ongoing of society. It is rooted in the past, determines the present, and protects the future. Better than any other student in the law school, Africa appreciated these conservative principles.

  On the day he sailed to America on the H & H liner Molokai, Nyuk Tsin climbed aboard a little island steamer and made her first pilgrimage to her husband’s grave at the leper settlement of Kalawao, for she, too, was imbued with this sense of continuity, and if her ablest son was that day setting forth for a new world, it was only because the dead gambler K
ee Mun Ki had been good to her. This time the island steamer did not swing around the peninsula and throw its passengers brutally ashore into the cold and unprotected hell of Kalawao. The vessel sailed directly to the pier at Kalaupapa, on the kindly side of the peninsula, and discharged its cargo decently. Doctors and nurses were on hand to assist the new lepers, and the big white Missionary Home for Lepers provided them a place to sleep. At the Missionary Hospital they still found no medicine that combated the disease itself, but they found charitable care that protected them from pneumonia and tuberculosis, which had once been so prevalent.

  Nyuk Tsin walked through the clean new settlement and up past the volcano crater. Then she stopped and an ache past understanding assailed her, for she looked down upon the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. It was more dramatic than the hills of China, lovelier than the valleys of Honolulu. In the distance rose the soaring cliffs of Molokai, with white spray beating upon their rock bases and gossamer waterfalls leaping from their summits to fall three thousand silvery feet. The ocean was blue and the small islands that clustered offshore formed handsome patterns. The fields of Kalawao, now empty of lepers, were soft and green as they had been a thousand years before that horrible disease was known in the islands. Two vacant churches, one Protestant and one Catholic, stood where once there had been terror. The house she had built with her own hands no longer had a roof. “How sweet,” she thought, “were the days Mun Ki and Palani and I spent there. Oh, how I wish I could see those two good men once more.” In her mind’s eye she saw them not with noses and lips falling away and with stumps of hands, but as men. “How I would like to see them once more playing fan-tan on the shore.”

  That night she spent at Kalawao in the home of a kokua she had known years before, and on the next morning at cockcrow, in the third hour, she left the house and went to her husband’s grave, so that she would be there when his spirit rose to walk about the valley. In the moonlight she carefully replaced any rocks that had fallen away, She brushed the earth and pulled weeds. Carefully she erected a slab on which his name, Kee Mun Ki, had been printed in gold letters. Then she undid a bundle and ceremoniously placed a fine set of new dishes about the grave, putting into them the three required delicacies: roast pig, chicken and fish. On saucers she placed oranges, boiled rice, little cakes with caraway, and brown candies with poppy seed. Then she lit a small candle, so that its incense would infuse the atmosphere and make it congenial to the ghost, and when these preparations were completed, she waited for the dawn.

  When her husband’s ghost appeared he found no tree to roost in, as he would have expected in China, where trees were plentiful and where they were kept near graves for just that purpose, but he did find a perching place on the rocky cliffs that rose behind his grave, and there in the warm sunlight, away from the cold ocean breezes, he sat with his dutiful wife.

  She explained in a quiet voice: “Three of the boys are married, Wu Chow’s Father, and although I was not able to arrange perfect marriages with huge dowries, I did as well as could be expected. Mrs. Ching, as you would expect, argued very strongly against me, and at the last she even brought up an unpleasant fact. ‘Your husband died of leprosy,’ she said, but I didn’t lose my temper, for there was more important business at hand, and at last she gave in.

  “Ah Chow has four children, Au Chow has three and Fei Chow three. I am going to try very hard to get Mrs. Ching’s youngest daughter to marry Oh Chow, but I may have a good deal of trouble there, for the girl is a beauty and will be able to command a high price.

  “At the house things go well. Kimo and Apikela look after things for us all, and they are precious people. The fields yield as before, and pineapples continue to sell well. Ah Chow has a fine restaurant that is always busy and Au Chow has a good vegetable business.

  “But the good news, Wu Chow’s Father, is that your son Fei Chow is already on a ship going to Michigan to study to be a lawyer. When I put him aboard the vessel I could see you and Palani in our little house down there, dreaming of going around the world and seeing strange places.

  “Think! Think! Our son, our own child, is going to be a scholar!”

  In gratitude for this great boon Nyuk Tsin fell silent and tears trembled on her lids, and the sun rose higher in the heavens, and she stayed by the grave. At eleven she asked, “Is it not hot on those rocks? You really ought to have a tree, Wu Chow’s Father.” And in the later afternoon she left the grave and the meal she had set for the ghost.

  On her walk back toward Kalaupapa she passed the old graveyard and saw a new stone, larger than the others, and she wondered who of her friends lay buried there, so she waited until a Hawaiian leper came by with hardly any face, and she asked him, “Who lies in that grave?” And the man said, “Father Damien. He died one of us.”

  When she reached Kalaupapa she found that while she was talking with her husband the settlement had discovered who she was, and she returned to see many people waiting for her. “Pake Kokua!” they called, and many came to greet her who had known her in the evil days. Some she recognized, for the disease had been kind to them, but others no eyes but God’s could see as human beings. “Pake Kokua!” they all cried. “It’s good to have you back.”

  She sat down on a rock, a little Chinese woman with a sunburned face, and they gathered around. A priest came up and asked in Hawaiian, “Are you the one they call the Pake Kokua?” She said that she was, and he said, “You are remembered in this place.” She asked if it was true that Father Damien had died of leprosy, and the priest said, “Only last spring.” “Did he suffer?” Nyuk Tsin asked, and the priest replied, “Here everyone suffers.” She said, “Kalaupapa is better than Kalawao used to be,” and the young man said, “When the people in Honolulu wakened to their responsibility, it had to become better.” She asked, “Have you found any drug that cures?” And he replied, “The infinite mercy of God has not yet shown us the way, but He will not permit a thing like leprosy to continue without a cure. Meanwhile, we pray.”

  In late 1889 Nyuk Tsin spent most of her spare time arguing with the Ching family about terms on which their youngest daughter, Ching Siu Han, might be given to her youngest son Australia. She told Mrs. Ching frankly, “The boy is very good at school, and I don’t worry about him in that regard, but having grown up with Hawaiians he is more like them than a Chinese. He’s got to marry a Chinese girl. Otherwise he will be lost to us.”

  Mrs. Ching pointed out: “You allowed Au Chow and Mei Chow to marry Hawaiian girls.”

  Nyuk Tsin argued: “Those girls brought much land with them, and the marriages were good for the boys. But Oh Chow’s problem is different. He doesn’t require land. He requires a strong-minded Chinese wife.” But her antagonist felt that Siu Han, being rather prettier than average, ought to be saved for a better prospect than Australia.

  At this time Siu Han, who was now a sparkling Chinese girl of fifteen, had begun to show her headstrong nature and had broken away from the severe old Chinese custom which required girls to hide at home. While her sister, Africa’s wife, tended her three babies, Siu Han liked to walk up and down Hotel Street, and because she was unusually attractive this caused much comment in the Chinese community. On one such trip she met Nyuk Tsin, who said to her, “Have you ever seen my son Australia?”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “He’s in his brother’s restaurant. Let’s have a bowl of noodles together.”

  So Nyuk Tsin and the pretty young girl went into Asia’s place and sat down, and in a moment Australia appeared and was astonished to see them, for Wu Chow’s Auntie had never before entered the place. He sat down with them, and Nyuk Tsin asked bluntly, “Don’t you think your brother’s wife’s sister is attractive?” Obviously, Australia did, and after a few minutes Nyuk Tsin found occasion to leave the table and talk with her son Asia, who said, “It’s disgraceful to bring a girl like that in here.”

  In the weeks that followed, Nyuk Tsin often asked Australia, “Why don’t you help
your brother at the restaurant?” And whenever her only unmarried son did so, Nyuk Tsin managed to find Siu Han somewhere in Chinatown, and she would bring the two together, so that before the year was out it was not Wu Chow’s Auntie who was arguing with the wealthy Chings that they permit their only remaining daughter to marry Australia; it was the daughter herself who did all the talking. “My rascal girl,” Mrs. Ching called her. Nyuk Tsin prudently dropped out of the picture, and in early 1890 a marriage was announced.

  At the wedding Nyuk Tsin, then forty-three years old but looking closer to sixty, sat silent and thanked the Hakka gods that they had been so good to her; then her attention was attracted to a Hakka woman who had brought as a gift a small sandalwood box, carried from Canton, and as Nyuk Tsin smelled that aromatic present she thought: “This is indeed the Fragrant Tree Country.”

  BY THE TIME the last decade of the nineteenth century opened, Wild Whip Hoxworth was concentrating his considerable energy on two projects: women and making Hawaii part of the United States. For a while his performance in the former field was the more spectacular, for after his divorce from the Spanish woman Aloma Duarte he spent his free time with a strange assortment of creatures who could be counted upon to drift ashore from passing ships. They were women without faces, but with memorable bodies, and it was uncanny how as soon as they touched shore they made a direct line to Wild Whip, as if he had the capacity to send out messages that he could be found lolling on the porch of the Hawaiian Hotel. Quickly, these drifting women moved their luggage—they never had much—into the rooms Whip occupied and after a while each moved along to Manila or Hong Kong. Many would have enjoyed staying, but Whip was too smart to allow that.

  From time to time he spent his weekends in Rat Alley, across the river in Iwilei, and one of the most common sights at the Hawaiian Hotel, built by the king for the entertainment of important guests, was the deferential appearance of some Chinese brothel keeper with news for Whip that a new girl had come in or that an old one wished particularly to see him. It was understandable that women liked Whip, for at thirty-three he was tall and lean, with knife scars across his left cheek and black hair that rumpled in the wind. He had flashing white teeth and slow, penetrating eyes. He was careful of his appearance, and when he rode horseback along the dusty roads of his sugar plantations, he could speak to his hands in masterful pidgin, with appropriate touches of Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian or Portuguese to fit the individual workman with whom he talked, but for all sentences, regardless of language, he adopted the lilting accent brought to the islands by Mexican cowboys, so that each statement ended with an upward song: “Eh, you Joe! What you theenk? You holo holo watah?” The words think and water were heavily accented and given an ingratiating melody. While his men were in the fields, tending the cane, Wild Whip often stopped by their homes to talk with their women, and it naturally happened that occasionally these women would appreciate his courtly manners and he found great pleasure in suddenly leaping into bed with them and having a wild few minutes, after which he called, as he rode off, “Eh, you Rosie, ne? Take care you boy he come home, he one fine man I theenk.” Twice he had been slashed at with machetes, and when he reflected upon that occupational hazard he supposed that some day he would die in a scene of wild brutality and the sanctimonious newspapers of the islands would scream the scandal, and at the prospect he laughed, thinking: “What a great way to die!”