The police guards who patrolled Iwilei did their best to stop the rioters, but they were a bare handful of men and soon retreated, calling for reinforcements.
For the next twenty minutes, May and I were trapped underneath a house, unable to move in any direction, while bedlam reigned around us. Finally the mob moved on and we scrambled out from under the house, running in the only direction we could: up toward the workers' camp behind the Hawaiian Fertilizer Company. Some of the little cottages were closed tight as drums; others were guarded over by their tenants, who stood defiantly on their doorsteps with guns or clubs, determined to fight off the rioters if necessary. One of these was Joseph Kahahawai Sr., who saw me-heaven knows how he recognized me, covered as I was from head to toe with mud-and ran up to us. "Get inside! Hurry!"
In the temporary shelter of the Kahahawais' home, Esther helped us wash up and gave us a pair of clean dresses-"Mother Hubbards," May called them-to wear. Neither she nor anyone else in the camp knew what was going on, and when I explained what had happened, Esther just shook her head in disgust. "All these malihini haoles coming here," she said, "bringing their hate with them."
I appreciated their help, but it was not they who were the object of the soldiers' wrath. I whispered to May, "We cannot put these people in danger by staying here," and grudgingly she agreed. We thanked the Kahahawais, Esther made the sign of the cross on our behalf, and we ran out and up Iwilei Road. Dozens of other women were also fleeing this way, and barely a hundred feet into our flight we encountered the prostrate form of a neighbor, Jennie Barr, lying in the middle of the road. The back of her dress was torn and blood oozed from a gash between her shoulder blades. We pulled her to her feet, and though dazed she ran with us up toward King Street.
But as we neared it we were scarcely prepared for what we saw: a battalion of U.S. Army troops, most of them white, deployed across Iwilei Road between O'ahu Prison and King Street, with another contingent bordering 'A'ala Park. This was the Second infantry from Fort Schafter, which had been summoned to quell the riot. They stood in battle formation, with rifles at shoulder arms, facing us.
And not just us. Behind us we now heard voices, and turned to see that large parts of the rioting mob, having finished their near-demolition of the stockade, were now retreating the only way they could-up Iwilei Roadwith the three of us caught between them and the haole battalion ahead of us.
"Shit!" May cried, and as one we ran toward the soldiers ahead of us.
We ran as fast and as hard as we could, until Jennie slipped and fell. May and I picked her up, then carried her between us as we rushed toward the battle lines drawn ahead. Fortunately, one of the haole officers signaled two of his troops to come and assist us, and the men soon ushered us safely behind their lines.
Meanwhile, the rioters were headed straight for these same lines.
A soldier sounded a bugle, and the men of the Second infantry obediently attached bayonets to their rifles-but the mob did not slow.
Another blow of the bugle, and the Second began to load their rifles.
We braced ourselves for a battle, but the rioters finally seemed to comprehend the gravity of the situation. They recognized the second bugle call as the order to load and, apparently not prepared to meet the barrels of their comrades' rifles, they quickly retreated and dispersed into the back alleys and corners of Iwilei.
The riot, it seemed, was suddenly over.
A soldier took us to the Honolulu police station at the corner of Merchant Street and Bethel Avenue, along with most of the other displaced women of Iwilei. Many were barely clothed, railing about the ransacking of their homes and the theft of all their worldly goods. A handful of refugees had, like May, managed to escape with their money and jewelry and now entrusted thousands of dollars in cash with Chief McDuffie (notably not including May, who preferred to keep a closer eye on her funds).
The Second infantry quickly clamped down on Iwilei, closing the sole entry road and issuing permits to enter and leave so the last of the rioters could be ferreted out and damage to the stockade assessed. But May insisted to McDuffie that she be allowed back into Iwilei to look for her cat, and a determined May Thompson was not a force to be trifled with. Finally, another detective standing nearby-a short, wiry Chinese-Hawaiian in a neat suit, with an impressive scar bisecting his right eyebrow-volunteered, "I take 'em, Boss."
McDuffie acquiesced with a sigh. "Okay, okay. They're all yours, Apana. Get a pass from the provost marshal and a uniform to drive you." Sternly he told May, "In and out in an hour, Maisie, cat or no cat-you got that?"
May assured him that she did and we obediently followed the Chinese detective. "We go bumbye, one stop," he told us, leading us to his desk where he retrieved not a gun or a billy club but a coiled black bullwhip made of braided rawhide, hanging from a hook on the wall.
I glanced uneasily at May and whispered, "Do all policemen here carry whips?"
"Naw, only this one," she said, apparently recognizing him. "Apana, huh? Ain't you the guy who shut down that the fa lottery in Chinatown last week? "
He nodded matter-of-factly and led us out of the station house.
May told me, "We got us a four-star escort, kiddo. This is Chang Apana, who holds the department record for most arrests." She turned and asked, "You rounded up, how many, seventy guys at one time, single-handed?"
"Oh, no, no," the detective objected modestly. "Only forty."
I looked at this little fellow, even shorter than I-no more than five feet tall, perhaps a hundred and thirty pounds-and could hardly imagine him subduing so many men. "How many guns did you need?" I asked.
"No gun. Just this." He hefted his bullwhip, then smiled slyly and added, "Cool head, main t'ing."
Apana said something in fluent Hawaiian to a uniformed officer, who left to get a patrol car. Then the detective spoke with the Army provost marshal, who reluctantly signed a pass and handed it to him. In minutes we were in the patrol car, on our way to Iwilei. The uniformed officer drove; Detective Apana did not have a license to operate an automobile, apparently liking cars only slightly better than he liked guns.
As we turned a corner, Apana noticed a group of young men loitering under a street lamp. He yelled out the window, "'Ey! You no savvy curfew? Go home!" For emphasis he swung his arm out the window and snapped his whip, which uncoiled like a snake and cracked the air like a gunshot, scattering the young men.
Amid the wreckage of Iwilei we drove to May's cottage, which had fared a little better than its neighbors. May and I got out of the car and I began calling sweetly, "Little Bastard? Poor Little Bastard, where are you, Little Bastard?"
Detective Apana laughed uproariously and kindly shared with me the meaning of the cat's name. I blushed, I think, down to my toes.
It was Apana-who told us he had begun his law enforcement career as an officer for the Hawai'i Humane Society-who finally found the miserable little feline dozing contentedly under a neighboring house. May scooped him up and stuffed him into a canvas bag. I half expected him to claw her to pieces for this indignity, but with May he was remarkably compliant.
She also took the opportunity to rescue her gramophone, which had survived the riot unscathed, as had the sewing machine. She asked me to carry the cat, but I offered instead to transport the gramophone, which was heavier but far less hazardous.
The damage to the stockade was evident all around us: broken windows, smashed porches, shredded wire screens, gutted furniture upended in the street. All told, it would total some five thousand dollars in damage-not counting the money, jewelry, and clothing also lost in the riot.
Back at the station house, May and I took note of a dazed Lena Stein sit ting on a bench in the lobby, a blanket wrapped around her, nursing a cup of hot coffee. May tossed her a sarcastic smile as we passed.
"Thank God we preserved your white maidenhood," May said acidly.
Lena muttered an obscenity; we left the station to check into a hotel.
or the next
two days we rented a room at the strangely named Silent Hotel in downtown Honolulu-at least until the managers got wind that May was entertaining men in her room and summarily ejected us. We then hastily checked into the Railroad Hotel on King Street, where I persuaded May to behave herself until we were allowed back into Iwilei.
I found the entire experience frankly terrifying, and seriously considered finding other quarters in a less colorful-and less volatile-neighborhood. But the grim reality was that I still barely had enough pocket money to rent a room for a single night, and so I instead brought up the matter of salary with May as we sat at a table in our room, playing a card game called "gin rummy.
I began by telling her that I very much appreciated her hospitality and kindness to me, but that I needed to begin earning money of my own so that I might eventually be able to bring a family member here to Hawai'i. I started to tell her about Blossom, but halfway through my explanation she interrupted: "Wait a minute. This kid's parents ... sold her to your family?"
"There is a Korean word for the custom, but-yes."
"And she was only five years old?"
I nodded.
May stared at me, and for the first time since I had known her, she seemed genuinely at a loss for words. In lieu of them she stood up, went over to her tin of money, and took out a thick wad of currency. She came back to the table and laid out in front of me approximately fifteen dollars in cash.
"What is this?" I asked her.
"It's the money the other gals have been paying me for your sewing."
I looked up at her, and it was my turn to be shocked.
Defensively, she said, "Hey, I've got expenses like everybody else, okay? But go on, take it. From now on, I'll have the gals pay you directly, and only the work you do for me will be charged against my overhead."
Embarrassed, she got up and put a record on the gramophone, which began playing a familiar tune as I stared at the wrinkled bills in my hand and smiled.
Honi kaua wikiwiki You have learned it perfectly On the beach at Waikiki.
Seven
n hindsight it is easy to see the riot as the beginning of the end for Iwilei, but it hardly seemed so at the time. It was true, in the wake of the violence the local newspapers published heated editorials calling for the closure of the red-light district. There were even a few "citizen's committees"-mostly white society women from the "better" neighborhoods-formed to lobby for its closing. But with the sailing of the USS Sheridan a few days later-and no apparent action taken against the soldiers who had participated in the riot-the whole incident seemed quickly forgotten by the public at large. Carpenters were already busily repairing the damage to the stockade's houses, and by the following Monday Iwilei was once again open for business.
Also back in business were the saloons, arcades, pool halls, and other seamy establishments that benefited from the sex trade at Iwilei. Among these was a boardinghouse on Iwilei Road in which interested parties could find games of poker, craps, and the illegal lottery known as the fa. Each time I passed this house I was asked by someone loitering outside whether I wished to place a wager on the the fa-but even if Mr. Noh had not gambled away his salary I would hardly have been tempted to part with the few dollars I earned each week from my job, which now included the making of entire dresses or sarongs from patterns and fabrics provided by Iwilei women.
I also took time to make some new clothes for myself: Western-style dresses like the ones I saw being worn by haole and Hawaiian women on the streets, replacing the traditional bright red, blue, or orange blouses and skirts that immediately (I feared) identified me as Korean. In my first few months in Honolulu, I had been afraid to venture far outside of Iwilei lest someone might recognize me and Mr. Noh-now relegated to the province of nightmares in which I felt again the lash of his hand, and the pain of losing our child-might come and reclaim me as his wife. I even avoided shopping at a conveniently located general store in Iwilei run by a Korean named Kim Yuen Tai.
Eventually those fears abated somewhat, aided by the camouflage of my white shirtwaist dress: I might have been Chinese for all anyone here could tell. So now in my free time I began to explore my new home, while still avoiding areas like adjacent Palama, where resided a greater concentration of Asian immigrants.
My first impression of Honolulu from aboard the Nippon Maru had been of a tropic backwater barely qualifying as a city. This was not, it turned out, a fair assessment. Downtown Honolulu-with its staid bank buildings, impressive government offices, and beautiful churches-could certainly lay claim to being as modern an urban center as anything I had seen in Korea or Japan. But then I walked only a mile farther down King Street-to where it intersected with Kapi'olani Boulevard-and found myself gazing out upon acre after acre of duck ponds, rice paddies, banana groves, taro patches, and pig farms. It was almost as if I were back in Pojogae. I had never before seen a city give way to country quite so suddenly and unself-consciously, and I found it quite charming.
I would wander from Iwilei to Kapi'olani Park, from Waikiki to Punchbowl and back again. (A streetcar cost five cents to ride, a waste of a nickel when I could just as easily get there by foot.) On these travels I made a point of stopping at every school I saw-public or private, from McKinley High School to Kawaiaha'o Girls School-to inquire about the possibility of my enrollment. But I was now nineteen years of age: far too old for primary school, lacking the requisite education for middle school, and college was out of the question. Mrs. Kim had told the truth, as far as it went, when she said that girls in Hawai'i had the opportunity to attend school. What she did not tell me-perhaps did not know-was that that opportunity was already long past for girls like myself.
But then, not all education is received in schools. One morning, on one of my walking tours of downtown Honolulu, I noticed a rather long line of people standing outside the wrought-iron gates of a palatial private home on Beretania Street. It was a white coral-block house with rows of tapered white pillars forming colonnades on split-level balconies wrapping around both upper and lower stories. It stood at a modest remove from the street, graced by greenswards and flower gardens. A lush arbor of palm and monkeypod trees shaded it from the tropic sun. I assumed on first glance that it was the home of some wealthy haole, to judge by the architectural style (French Colonial, I was told later).
But what were all these people doing queued up outside? The line extended from the street through the wrought-iron gates, down a long driveway, and into the home itself. These were not the sort of guests one would expect to find on the doorstep of some rich haole: men, women, and children of largely Hawaiian descent and obviously modest means were proudly dressed in their best Sunday apparel even though it was a weekday. Many held fragrant leis strung of plumeria, carnation, or jasmine blossoms; some carried bouquets of ginger, lilies, and anthuriums; others had come bearing fruits, poi wrapped in ti leaves, sweets, even the occasional live chicken. There was a festive air to the crowd, as if today were some kind of holiday, though I was relatively sure it was not.
I followed the queue halfway down the block until I came to its end, where a Hawaiian man in a dark suit was holding a toddler as his wife quieted a fidgety six-year-old. I asked him politely what he and the others were waiting for. He seemed surprised that anyone would have to ask.
"We're here for the levee," he said.
"'Levee'? What is that?"
"The reception. To see the Queen."
I was nonplussed by this: "I did not know America had a queen."
The woman responded coolly, "We are not Americans by choice," which only confused me all the more.
Her husband, however, laughed good-naturedly. "Hawai'i's queen. From before the revolution." He looked me over, amused. "You a malihini, eh?"
Yes, I admitted, I was a newcomer, and apologized for my ignorance. The man explained to me how Hawai'i had for centuries been a kingdom, ruled by the ali'i, the royalty. For most of its history each island was ruled by separate chieftains, until unit
ed by Kamehameha I more than a century ago. Then in 1892 a thousand years of autonomous rule came to an end when a cabal of greedy businessmen-aided by the collusion of the American ambassador-seized control of the government, and under the implicit threat of American military might, forced Queen Lili'uokalani to abdicate. Twenty-five years later, this "haole elite" of businessmen still ruled Hawai'i, now a territory of the United States. They were known as the "Big Five" companies-sometimes called "the invisible Government," owing to their power behind the scenes of the Republican Party that dominated Hawaiian government and politics.
All this was a revelation to me, stirring feelings I had not considered in many months. I thought of our murdered Queen Min, and of King Sejong, deposed by the Japanese a decade later. Suddenly I saw this place where I was living, this Hawai'i, in an unexpected new light: as a country that had suffered as Korea had suffered, lost face as a people, lost sovereignty to foreign occupiers.
Of course these Hawaiians would not think of themselves as Americansdid I consider myself Japanese?
"The queen lives in this house now?" I said. "And you may come see her?"
"Yeah, sure. Used to be she gave levees all the time; not so much since she been sick. People come, pay respect, bring her ho'okupu-tributes. Show her she's still our mo'i wahine, our queen. Always will be." The depth of feeling in his voice as he said this was quite the opposite of what a Korean might show on speaking of our royal family-but it was a feeling we shared in common.
"May anyone pay their respect?" I asked. "Even a malihini?"
"Yeah, sure thing."