The film was based on a long-running mainland stage play called Rain, which itself was based on a short story by one W. Somerset Maugham. When I went to the public library and inquired if they had a copy of the story, I was given a collection of Mr. Maugham's fiction titled The Trembling of a Leaf.
The short story was titled simply, "Miss Thompson."
With a kind of baffled wonderment, I read the story of Sadie, who fled Iwilei after its closure. Maugham described her as blond, pretty in a "coarse" way, curvaceous, and wearing "a white dress and a large white hat," with white cotton stockings and white boots "in glace kid."
This was, I remembered, precisely what May had been wearing that December day in 1916 when she boarded the SS Sonoma.
What's more, Sadie Thompson not only looked like May Thompson, she spoke like her, with the same colorful blend of foul language and hard-boiled slang.
I went back to the library and asked the librarian if she knew what the "W" in Mr. Maugham's name stood for. "William, I believe," she told me.
William. "Willie"?
"Its nookie time, you bloody limey!"
Could it be true? And if so, how could I ever know for sure?
"You might try the `Passengers Departed' column," the librarian suggested. These were brief notices of passengers leaving, and arriving in, Honolulu-a quaint mainstay of the local papers for as long as I had been in Hawai'i.
I thanked her and, remembering quite vividly when May and I left Iwilei, I asked to see copies of the local papers from December 1916.
It did not take long to find. There on page eleven, column three of the Pacific Commercial Advertiser for December 5, was a list of travelers who had left Honolulu the previous day aboard the Sonoma:
"Somerset Maugham, Mr. Haxton, W. H. Collins, Miss Thompson."
Aigo-it was true! They had sailed together and, almost certainly, stayed together in that rundown little boardinghouse in Pago Pago.
Little had May dreamed that the "uppity Brit" in the room next door-who "looked down his nose" at her, and whose pomposity she took such delight in puncturing-would one day exact his revenge on her by appropriating her for a character in a short story. He had even used her real family name, though not her given one. Perhaps he never knew it.
The whole world knows "Sadie Thompson" now, but surely I am one of the privileged few who knew the real woman on whom she was based. I knew her cheerful vulgarity-her cunning, her wit, her generosity-and her sorrow, shared with few, perhaps none, but me.
Today, as I sit looking at the tarnished old brass morning-glory horn of May's gramophone-as brassy as May herself-I wonder whether she ever saw any of the three motion pictures inspired by this small but significant part of her life. In a way it is painful to imagine her sitting in a movie theater, watching as a private hurt of hers was laid bare, even in fictionalized, literally "whitewashed" form ... and with a happy ending that likely never graced her real life. But somehow I doubt she ever saw the movie, or was aware of the revenge Maugham had taken on her. Because if she had seen it, I can't help but envision her sitting in the theater in a righteous lather, as the lights come up and the last frame of film fades from the screen.
"Jesus H. Christ on a bicycle!" I hear her cry out, indignantly. "So where the hell is my piece of the take?"
The "Sadie Thompson" Iknew would have sued-and won.
Ten
ummer in Honolulu brings the sweet smell of mangoes, guava, and passionfruit, ripe for picking; it arbors the streets with the fiery red umbrellas of poinciana trees and decorates the sidewalks with the pink and white puffs of blossoming monkeypods. Cooling trade winds prevail all summer, bringing what the old Hawaiians called makani 'olu'olu-"fair wind." On one such radiant Sunday morning in July, I proudly slipped my silver wedding pin back into my hair as Jae-sun and I were married by Reverend Song. The ceremony was Methodist and our wedding attire American: My husband wore a dark suit and tie, and I, a white wedding dress I made myself. In other ways, however, it was a typically Korean wedding. Beauty and her husband appeared properly solemn, though Esther Kahahawai, here with Joey, was distressed by the wedding party's somber demeanor, taking me aside before the ceremony to ask if everything was all right. I tried to ex plain to her that smiles were regarded as bad form at Korean weddings, and assured her that I was happier than I had ever been before. She looked at me as if this were the saddest thing she had ever heard, then accepted it with a small shrug. I was happy that one of my first friends in Honolulu could be here today, though I was disappointed that Joseph Sr.'s new job as a streetcar conductor kept him from attending.
The ceremony was a sunny antidote to my first, bleak dockside wedding. Afterward, Jae-sun and I toasted with a wedding wine called Jung Jong, and our guests feasted on a banquet that my husband himself had prepared, as well as Esther's delicious pineapple cream pie. Joey gulped a little of the wine and got very light-headed. Gazing at the jolly smile on his face, I thought of my tipsy grandmother back in Pojogae and wished that my mother could have been here today. But of course I could not tell my family in Korea of my second wedding, any more than I could tell them of my divorce: they would have been mortified for me, and deeply shamed. Easier to simply let them believe, when in the future I would mention "my husband" in letters home, that I had had the same one all along. And we were forced to maintain a similar fiction-that of my "widowhood"-with Jae-sun's church, or else we would not have been allowed to marry here at all.
Since our wedding coincided with the height of the summer pineapple harvest, and thus the busiest time of year for the cannery, our honeymoon was limited to a single day and night-most of it spent moving my belongings out of my tenement room in Kauluwela and into a slightly larger tenement room Jae-sun was renting on Kukui Street. I could not bear the thought of another wedding night at the Hai Dong Hotel, so we simply retired to our new shared home and suppered on leftovers from the wedding banquet. What this may have lacked in finery it made up for in feeling. I had longed for some trace of tenderness that night, three years before, at the Hotel of Sorrows; tonight I felt it in my husband's every touch. For the first time I felt as though a man were actually making love to me, rather than merely drawing some selfish pleasure from my body. To finally know such joy and intimacy-such gladness of heart-was a bounty I had never expected, and afterward I wept for my good fortune, for the gift I had been given in Jaesun.
Then the next morning we arose, packed our lunches, and reported to work at the cannery.
Strange as it may seem, I liked this. I liked the fact that the happiest night of my life was followed by a day like any other. It seemed to say that such happiness, so long denied, was now a part of my everyday life.
"I will see you at lunch, yobo," my new husband told me before heading to his job on the loading dock. I smiled. I liked the way he called meyobo- "dear." I had never felt as though I were truly dear to anyone before.
In summer the cannery was in operation twenty-four hours a day, with three rotating shifts of workers to accommodate the tons of pineapple being processed. Jae-sun and I were soon assigned different shifts, and often the only time we saw each other was in passing on our way to and from work. But the end of the summer harvest also marked the end of my employment at Hawaiian Pineapple. By October I was pregnant; Jae-sun fretted over my being engaged in manual labor, and in truth we were both tired of seeing so little of one another.
I applied for work as a seamstress at tailor shops, dry-goods stores, dressmakers, laundries-all enjoying robust business in the wake of America's entry into what was then being called the Great War. Honolulu was the base of operations for America's Pacific fleet, and a major port for American allies like Japan-the presence of whose warships, slipping into the harbor like fat gray sharks, infuriated Jae-sun and other Korean nationalists. But it meant boom times for Honolulu's tailors, who were kept busy fitting, repairing, and replacing uniforms for the men of the American, Australian, and Japanese military.
I was hired
by a tailor named John Ku'uana, an affable Hawaiian with a small shop on King Street, directly across from the O'ahu Railway terminal. Since it was a short walk to the cannery, Jae-sun and I were able to continue our occasional custom of sharing a bento at lunchtime. At my new job I soon found myself doing everything from hemming ladies' skirts to patching bullet holes in a seaman's cap. The work was no less demanding than my job at the cannery, but it was far more satisfying and even paid somewhat better, close to a dollar a day.
I also learned much from Mr. Ku'uana about the history of clothing here in Hawai'i. For the many centuries Hawaiians had lived in serene isolation from the outside world, they had woven fabrics from the inner bark of the paper-mulberry tree-kapa, or "bark cloth." Women and men alike had worn only a kind of loose wrap around their waists, but the missionaries quickly put an end to that. After trade with the rest of the world was established, Hawaiians enthusiastically began to import foreign fabrics-calico, cotton, gingham, satin, velvet, muslin-and adopted more Western-style dress. Women took to wearing long gowns called holokus outside the home and yoke-necked mu'umu'us inside it. Affluent men favored Western-style business suits, while laborers wore the rugged, checked palaka work shirts and "sailor mokus," blue denim pants. Also popular was a Filipino shirt called the barong Tagalog, which was of lighter weight and usually worn loose over one's trousers. At Mr. Ku'uana's shop I often found myself assembling palakas from bolts of checkered cotton, but I was as likely to be asked to mend the collar on a Mandarin jacket, or to fashion a kimono from colorful yukata cloth that a customer had purchased from a dry-goods store like Musa-Shiya Shoten.
One morning in November, however, Mr. Ku'uana came to work with an unusually somber cast to his face. When I asked him what was wrong he grimly informed me that the waters of the harbor were filled with schools of 'aweoweo-a bright red fish whose appearance inevitably tolled a death knell for Hawaiian royalty.
Tears came to his eyes. "It's her time," he said softly, and I did not have to ask who he meant; she had been in ill health for quite some time. On the following Sunday, November 11, as the red fish had augured, Queen Lili'uokalani passed away at the age of seventy-nine. The islands were draped in mourning for a week as the queen's body was borne by hearse from Washington Place to Kawaiaha'o Church, to be viewed by thousands of grieving visitors who came to pay their final respects.
I was privileged to have met Lili'uokalani in life and felt obliged to bid her farewell now. I joined a long procession of mourners who filed through the coral-block church for one last glimpse of this woman who might have lost a kingdom but never the hearts of her subjects. They paid homage to her with ceremonial wails and chants, visceral expressions of grief unlike any I had ever heard. Finally, I neared the casket on its funeral bier, surrounded by attendants bearing the distinctive royal staffs. I gazed down at the queen in her ivory silk holoku-at her white nimbus of hair resting on a yellow pall-and I bid goodbye to this woman who had, by the grace of her dignity and courage, become my queen as well.
On Saturday, her body was taken to'Iolani Palace and to a place she was able to return to only in death: her former throne room. It was here that her state funeral took place the following day. Government officials who had conspired to depose Lili'uokalani now eulogized her amid the enshrined beauty of a monarchy that safely existed only in memory. Later, kukui torches lit her way to the Royal Mausoleum in Nu'uanu Valley, where she was laid to rest, the last of the reigning ali'i, near her brother David in the Kalakaua Tomb.
Seven months later, when the time came to name my newborn daughter, I had occasion to think of Lili'uokalani. Jae-sun and I agreed that since our daughter was to be born an American, she should have an American name. But I wanted her to have a Korean name as well, and one in particular: "Eun," which means "blessing." And as I lay abed with this tiny, precious newborn at my breast, I promised her that she would never, ever feel that she was anything but a blessing to her parents.
But "Eun" can also mean "grace," which reminded me of Lili'uokalani; and so it pleased me in many ways to christen our daughter Grace Eun Choi.
ow, in accordance with Korean custom, I, too, became known by a different name. As strange as it may sound to Western ears, from this point on my husband would usually address me as "Grace Eun's mother." Even in identifying myself to others I would most often tell them, "I am Grace Eun's mother." Admittedly, this was an antiquated holdover from Confucian tradition, in which a woman was defined by the children she had borne. But as someone who had had many different names already in a relatively young life, one more did not particularly bother me ... especially when it held within it the name of my daughter.
Like the Japanese women on the plantation who carried their babies into the cane fields, I now brought Grace Eun with me each day to the tailor's shop. Mr. Ku'uana enjoyed having a little keiki around, and at first Grace merely dozed amid swaddling in a cardboard box as I stitched away beside her. When she started to crawl, I constructed a playpen for her out of wardrobe racks on rollers.
The tailor shop was not far from Mr. Yi's general store; I would sometimes go there to meet Beauty and we would eat at an excellent Chinese restaurant next door. On one such day she was shelving some yard goods when I arrived, and upon seeing me enter the store holding Grace, she waved to me, picked up her purse, and started for the door.
How I wish I had looked away just then! Had I glanced out the window, or down at my feet, or anywhere else, I would not have seen the young stock clerk, Frank Ahn, as he caught Beauty's eye from behind the counter and smiled fondly at her. Nor would I have seen her smile back-so tender a glance that I blushed to witness it. Flustered, I turned away and earnestly began considering some tableware stacked in a display near the door.
When Beauty joined me moments later, I said nothing about what I'd seen. Nor did she say anything to me, which was a source of great relief. The matter was none of my business, after all, and thereafter I did my best to ignore, if not quite forget, the whole embarrassing moment.
Now that I was no longer living in dread of revealing my whereabouts to Mr. Noh, I wrote to jade Moon at Waialua Plantation, telling her of my new life in Honolulu, my husband and daughter, and my job at the tailor shop. In her return letter she expressed an interest in knowing how much I received in salary. This discussion of money made me somewhat uncomfortable, but I dutifully responded that I made between fifteen and twenty dollars a month depending on the hours I worked. "But of course, these are poor wages in this wealthy city," I added, trying not to seem as though I were bragging.
There followed a lag in our correspondence, and the longer I did not hear from jade Moon the more I worried that I had offended or embarrassed her.
Then one afternoon I was in the midst of mending an Australian naval uniform-I'd had some trouble matching its coarse, canvaslike fabric until I hit upon the idea of using sail-cloth from a sail maker's shop down the street-when Mr. Ku'uana came into the back of the store and told me, "'Ey, you got visitors. Look like 'ohana." I had no family here, of course, other than Grace and Jae-sun. Thinking perhaps it was Beauty and her daughter, Mary, I went out to the front of the shop to greet them.
But it was a different picture bride who was waiting: I was startled to find Jade Moon standing there in the shop, a baby in one arm and a suitcase in the other. Her husband, Mr. Ha, was carrying in three more pieces of luggage, including a large steamer trunk.
"We have come to live in Honolulu," Jade Moon announced with no preamble. "Can you recommend a place to stay?"
I was dumbstruck. Mr. Ha turned to his wife. "Yobo, we've disturbed her during working hours. Perhaps we should come back later."
"Don't be ridiculous," Jade Moon chided him. "Let me handle this."
Her husband acquiesced quickly, meekly: "Yes,yobo."
I finally found my voice. "It ... it's wonderful to see you, dear friend, but-what made you decide to come to Honolulu?"
"You did," she declared. "You make as much money here in
a month as my old man and I do combined! So why in heaven should we stay on the plantation?"
The phrase Jade Moon used to denote her husband-"my old man"was common idiom in Korean for one's husband and not a deliberate slight concerning his age. Or so I hoped.
"I liked Waialua," Mr. Ha said wistfully. "I liked our little house."
"Don't talk nonsense. For thirty dollars a month you do not have to like where you live."
The smile that came to Mr. Ha's face was a very Korean smile of embarrassment. He had the look, it seemed to me, of a man who had awakened one day to find himself clinging to the cattle catcher of an express train: under the circumstances, all one could do was to hang on.
Mr. Ku'uana generously gave me the afternoon off to help settle my old friend and her family in Honolulu. As we all struck up Nu'uanu Avenue in search of rooms, with jade Moon and I both hoisting our children aloft, I inquired of the toddler in her arms, "And what might your name be, little one?"
"His name is Woodrow," Mr. Ha said proudly, "after President Wilson."
His wife said, "I wanted to call him Screaming Voice in the Night, or perhaps Endlessly Hungry and Teething, but I deferred to the boy's father."
"He's very sweet."
"Yes, I suppose he is," Jade Moon allowed. "And another is on the way."
"That's wonderful," I said.
"Yes, I suppose it is," she said with a sigh. "We'll need at least two rooms.
They had sufficient funds for a two-room flat in one of the less ramshackle tenements in Kauluwela, but even so Mr. Ha appeared appalled at the living conditions. When he started to object, jade Moon threw him a look that cowed him into silence. She negotiated the price with the landlord and paid the first month's rent in advance. After the landlord had left, she told her husband, more gently, "We won't be here long,yobo. We have to start somewhere."
He nodded, clearly hoping she was right.
Though the tourist trade had slowed to a trickle due to the war, the military presence, as I've noted, created many new jobs. Mr. Ha found work in a rice mill and jade Moon was soon employed as a laundress in a hotel (one that also housed one of the city's ubiquitous billiards parlors). Like me she brought her young keiki with her to work, finding ways of keeping him occupied as she soaked and wrung dirty laundry. On one of my visits to her workplace I was struck by how different she seemed from the woman I had met at the inn in Yokohama-her fair complexion darkened by a pitiless sun, her hands rough and chapped from field labor. Yet she still held herself like a proud yangban, even when stringing sopping wet shirts on a clothesline. "Have you been able to send any money home to your mother?" I asked her.