I freshened his coffee, and after another five minutes he had sobered up sufficiently to go home and face his mother. When he stood, he was steadier on his feet. "Thanks, Aunt Jin. Sorry to keep you up past closing."
"You know you can always come here, Joe. For anything."
He smiled, hugged me, and I saw him to the door. I watched him head up the street with less liquor in his step. Esther would no doubt smell the beer on his breath and wouldn't be happy. But I hoped she'd make allowances.
Shortly afterward, Joe did join the Hawai'i National Guard. It seemed to agree with him. He took well to military discipline and began competing on the Guard's boxing team, under the nickname given him by his teammates on the St. Louis College football squad: "Joe Kalani." I was hopeful this might be the first step in turning his life around.
Chester Nagle was sent to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco to begin his ten-year prison term, but observers at his trial seemed to think that the military board of review in Washington would reduce his sentence.
Joe was right. A soldier never hangs.
Myles Fukunaga, on the other hand, would die on the gallows a year later. I think all of us in Hawai'i hoped that his death would somehow cleanse us of what we had just been through-that his brutal actions were, in the words of one newspaper editorial, merely an "aberration" in the life of Honoluluand that nothing so terrible could ever happen here again.
Sixteen
ade Moon and I hardly spoke to each other anymore except at meetings of the kye, and then only on matters of business. These were painful occasions for me, as I was also forced to listen to Beauty's excited accounts of her wedding preparations and jade Moon's inquiries about its profligate expense. Or at least it seemed profligate to me. Beauty appeared confused and distressed by the hostility between us, and in those moments she seemed the sweet young girl I had always known. Then in the next moment she would eagerly display the large diamond ring her fiance had given her, or I would hear her eagerly confide in jade Moon, "I bought Mr. Ko's son a new kite. I think he's starting to like me," and once again I would feel angry and heartsick.
Work was a welcome distraction from such matters, and around this time a new "wrinkle" in fashion appeared on the local scene. Some of my customers-students at secondary schools like Punahou-had begun bringing in bolts of yukata cloth they had purchased from C. K. Chow's next door. But rather than asking for it to be made into kimonos, they desired that shirts be fashioned from the fabrics. These were printed in bold Japanese motifs-birds, mountains, streams, pagodas-and often riotous in their colors. Men in America, even in Hawai'i, did not normally wear such bright garb, but I was happy to make whatever kind of shirt my customers requested. I cut my own shirt patterns out of old newspapers, creating front pieces, backs, yokes, sleeves, collars, and pockets. I knew I was not alone in receiving such requests: Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker had produced shirts with equally striking designs, made from tapa cloth imported from Samoa, for students at a local dance studio. Clearly something new was in the air, and when my beachboy friends saw what I was working on, they quickly ordered similar shirts for themselves and even began recommending them to the tourists they served at Waikiki.
Meanwhile, I had begun dreading kye meetings, and even considered not attending one to be held in the dining room of Wise Pearl's home in Kaimuki, but in the end I did. Beauty arrived late and seemed more subdued than usual. Jade Moon immediately saw that something was awry. "Where is your ring?" she asked, and only then did I notice that Beauty's hand was bare of jewelry.
She replied quietly, "The marriage has been called off."
"What!" Jade Moon was beside herself, even as I felt a surge of relief. "Why would he do such a thing!"
"He did not call it off," Beauty said. "I did."
"Are you insane?" Jade Moon cried. "Why would you do such a thing?"
"It is a personal matter. I don't wish to speak of it."
"Did you share a bed with him? I told you to wait until-"
Angrily, Beauty stood, strode over to where jade Moon was sitting, and slapped her hard across the face.
Jade Moon jerked back, as much from surprise as from pain.
"I said it is a personal matter!" Beauty shouted, then stormed out.
After a moment I got up and followed her outside, where I found her leaning up against the clapboard walls of the plantation-style cottage, weeping. I went to her and she collapsed into my arms, once again the vulnerable little girl I had comforted after her disinheritance by Mr. Yi. Gently I asked what happened.
"I could not go through with it," she said.
"So I see, but why?"
She sniffed back tears and stood up a little straighter. "You know the custom here in America," she said, "of the wife taking the husband's name? Well, it may sound odd to you, but-when I first became engaged, I would try speaking my new name aloud: `Mrs. Ko."Hello, I am Mrs. Ko.' `Mrs. Ko, you have a lovely home.' `That is a lovely ring, Mrs. Ko.'
"Soon, this was how I began to think of myself-as Mrs. Ko. Mrs. Ko would not have to struggle to pay her bills. Mrs. Ko would live in a nice house and not a tiny one-room walk-up on River Street. Mrs. Ko's daughter would want for nothing. Mrs. Ko would not be taken advantage of as Mrs. Yi had been. And then ... Do you remember the Hai Dong Hotel?"
"Of course. How could either of us forget it?"
"As Mr. Ko and I began planning our honeymoon, I could suddenly think of nothing else," she said. "I had been such a fool back then-a girl of sixteen who'd fallen in love with the photograph of a virile young man. Instead I met one old enough to be my grandfather and searched his face for some ghost of the man I had fallen in love with. I can never forget the feel of his body-like the wrinkled skin of a fig-as he lay atop me. Afterward, as he slept, I lay there and wept. I have never felt as lonely before or since.
"It was a terrible thing, a wedding night spent with a man I did not love. Yet here was Mrs. Ko, planning to do just that. In that moment I saw her as you might see someone whose face has been turned away from you, but now turns smiling to face you. I saw the cold appraisal in her eyes, the cunning in her smile, and decided I did not wish to be Mrs. Ko."
I clasped her hand and told her she had done the right thing.
I wish I could tell you that she never regretted this choice-but I cannot.
n October 29, 1929, the American stock market-inflated to unnatural proportions by years of speculation-burst like a tire pumped full of too much air, ultimately deflating in value by some twenty-six billion dollars. Figures like these were impossible to comprehend for a family that subsisted on perhaps thirty dollars a month, and at first we took as much notice of the event as we might of an airplane experiencing engine trouble high above our heads. This was only a problem for rich people, we thought, and so went about the business of our lives.
But six months after the crash, there were some twenty-seven hundred unemployed workers in the territory. Soon afterward the pineapple market collapsed, taking with it one of Hawai'i's largest industries. Tens of thousands of pineapples rotted in the fields; canneries closed their doors. Four thousand plantation laborers flocked to the city, looking for work that wasn't there. Many of them were Filipinos, who had been among the most recent wave of imported plantation labor; now there was talk not just of limiting Filipino immigration, but actually returning the workers already here to their homeland. We began to wonder when the government might decide that Koreans should be the next to go.
The sugar industry continued strong, but construction work plunged and even tourism began to decline. With dwindling numbers of visitors, hotel workers were laid off. Fewer tourists required fewer flower leis, and demand decreased for Wise Pearl's carnations. Shrinking jobs in hotel and other service industries meant reduced income for the customers of Beauty's barbershop, many of whom took to having their wives cut their hair. Meanwhile, every day on her way to work Beauty passed Mr. Ko's jewelry shop, which seemed to be weathering the depression quite nicely, and had c
ause to doubt the wisdom of her decision not to marry him.
Smaller incomes also forced families to cook meals at home rather than dine out. By the end of the year, business at our cafe had plummeted by forty percent. We lowered prices, reducing our profit margin, but things only worsened. My tailor shop fared a little better-the tourists who could still afford to come to Hawai'i were also able to afford colorful shirts as souvenirsand I began funneling all my income from tailoring into keeping the restaurant afloat.
Of all my Sisters of Kyongsang, only Jade Moon and her husband could have been said to be doing well. People could cut their own hair and cook their own food, but they still needed a place to live; they could not make their own land or build houses out of air. Despite her frequent complaints about the costs of upkeep, Jade Moon had perhaps made the wisest investment of us all.
Financial problems in Esther's household were the cause of even worse troubles for her son. Joe had always had a temper-he once hit a man who refused to stop kicking a dog, though I could hardly fault him for this. Now, seeking to recover money owed him by an acquaintance named Hayako Fukinako, Joe got into a fistfight with the "four-flusher" and was arrested and charged with robbery and assault. Joe argued that he was just trying to collect on a debt; the jury agreed up to a point, acquitting him on the robbery charge but convicting him of assault. Joe received a thirty-day suspended sentence, and I hoped that this close brush with prison might shock him into thinking twice before using his fists.
But there was no reprieve from our own woes. By spring of 1931, I was forced to borrow money from the kye just to keep the cafe going for a few more months. When at the end of that time there was no improvement, one evening I gingerly broached the subject of closure to Jae-sun. He took in the suggestion with only a passive nod. We said nothing more about it and went to sleep. I woke around three in the morning to find myself alone in bed. I slipped on a robe and went downstairs, but Jae-sun was not in the kitchen. I entered the main dining room, then stopped at what I saw outside the front window.
In the glow of street lamps, I saw my husband in his pajamas, standing on the sidewalk, gazing up at the stenciled sign on the window that read LILIHA CAFE, J. S. CHOI, PROPRIETOR. His eyes, usually so bright and cheerful, reflected only disappointment and loss of face. My heart ached to see this, and I considered turning around and returning to bed before he noticed me. But no-I was his wife, and it was my duty to share his pain as I shared his success. I walked out the front door and joined him on the sidewalk, slipping my hand into his like a thread into a needle; and together we looked up at this sign, once the embodiment of a dream, now merely a remembrance of it.
ecause our living quarters came with the lease on the restaurant, we now needed to find another place to live. Yet we barely had enough money left for the first month's rent on an apartment. One morning, as I packed up our belongings, I answered a knock on the back door to find jade Moon standing in the alleyway. She looked awkward and uncomfortablewe had not spoken more than a dozen words to one another since Beauty had called off her wedding-but now she held out some sort of document to me and said, "This is yours if you want it."
"What is it?"
"A lease," she said. "There is a two-room flat available in our boardinghouse. On the second floor. It is a poor thing I offer you, I know, but if you need a place to live, it is yours."
I looked at the two-page lease, which called for a monthly rent of ten dollars. "That is ... very kind of you," I said, quite taken aback, "but I am not certain we can afford even this."
"Then I will cut it in half. Here." She snatched the lease away, took out a pen and slashed a line through Ten, replacing it with a scribbled Five. "There. If necessary, I will cut it even further. It doesn't matter. You did not worry about money," she said, "the day the Luna docked us half a day's pay. When you brought me in from the sun." For the first time since that long-ago day, I saw tears in her eyes. "But I understand if you cannot accept."
Touched, I told her I would discuss it with Jae-sun. In truth, we had no other choices. We moved into jade Moon's rooming house within the week, and slowly she and I found that our friendship, though damaged, was like a fabric torn on the seam: not beyond repair.
Jae-sun went looking for work, and as there was little call for chefs he applied at canneries, loading docks, and rice mills. But he was competing with thousands of jobless men in the city of Honolulu. He would come home discouraged and dispirited, as did thousands of able-bodied men throughout the United States. His lack of proficiency in English did not help. He finally found occasional work-one day a week-at the docks as a stevedore. But the few dollars this brought home was scarcely enough to feed a family of five.
Thankfully, a good seamstress remained in some demand, and my shop now became our family's primary source of income. Mrs. Quigley continued to employ me one day a week, even when other kama'aina families were cutting back. I became the breadwinner, albeit often day-old bread, and we also ate much liver, tripe, and knucklebone soup. I patched and repatched Grace's dresses and Harry's trousers-everyone did during the Depression-and I ached when Charlie would ask me for a nickel's worth of crackseed and I had to tell him we couldn't afford it.
It was a struggle to earn enough to pay the rent on the shop and put food on the table, and I soon found myself working very long hours-twelve hours a day were not unusual. I came home exhausted, and it fell to Jae-sun to tend to the household while I worked. He was always happy to cook, of course, but I think he was less enamored of sweeping and cleaning the apartment. Each day he woke the children for school-"Easier to wake the dead, and the dead complain less"-and cooked rice gruel and kimchi for our daily breakfast.
On one such morning in September of 1931, the family had just settled in at the breakfast table when Harold-eleven years old next monthsuddenly pushed his kimchi away, announcing with a scowl, "I don't want cabbage for breakfast anymore!"
"It is not cabbage, it is kimchi," his father said, puzzled.
"Whatever you call it, I don't want to eat it!"
"Why not?" I was baffled. "You've always liked it."
"The other kids say it makes me stink. They call me `garlic-head'!"
"What nonsense is this?" Jae-sun said. "Who tells you this?"
"Everybody," Harold told him.
"He's right," Grace agreed. "Nobody eats garlic for breakfast in America."
"Well, they do in a Korean house," Jae-sun declared, "and this is a Korean house, so you will eat your kimchi."
"You eat it," Harry said brashly, and ran from the breakfast table. He snapped up his schoolbooks and slammed out the door.
Jae-sun and I looked at each other, nonplussed, as Grace and Charlie meekly began picking at their kimchi.
"I like it," Charlie said with dubious sincerity.
"I will have a talk with the boy tonight," Jae-sun said as he opened his copy of the day's newspaper.
But another shock apparently awaited him in its pages, because after one look at the front page he quickly and quite uncharacteristically folded the paper closed and laid it on his lap.
He looked at Grace a moment, then asked, "Do the other children call you names, as well?"
She shrugged. "Only if they can smell my breath."
Jae-sun took that in soberly, as did I.
When breakfast was over and Grace and Charlie were on their way to school, Jae-sun again opened the newspaper. A headline shouted from the page:
GANG ASSAULTS YOUNG WIFE
Kidnapped in Automobile, Maltreated by Fiends!
After being kidnapped by a gang of young hoodlums as she was walking along one of the principal streets of the Waikiki district late Saturday evening, a young married woman of the highest character was dragged to a secluded spot on the Ala Moana and criminally assaulted six or seven times by her abductors, who fled in an open touring car and left her half-conscious on the road. She was picked up by occupants of a passing car as she staggered along the Ala Moana toward Waikiki in the
early hours of Sunday morning and was taken home. She was later transferred to the Queen's Hospital.
Seven suspects, one arrested early Sunday morning by Detectives John Cluney and Thurman Black, and the other six Sunday afternoon by Detective Lucian Machado, are being grilled by Chief of Detectives John McIntosh. One of those held is said to be the owner of the car which the gang used to abduct the woman, and two of the others are said to have jail records, one having been previously arrested for rape and one for robbery.
I understood now why my husband had not wanted the children to see this. It was a terrible tale, and upon reading it I felt what any decent person would: sympathy for the poor woman, who was unnamed, and disgust and anger at her brutal attackers, "fiends" and "hoodlums" as the paper called them.
The story was on everyone's lips in Honolulu that day-it was all anyone who came into the tailor shop could talk about. In addition to what was revealed in the papers, word quickly spread via the "coconut wireless," or rumor mill, that the victim was a haole woman-the wife of a Navy officer stationed at Pearl Harbor-and that her attackers had been Hawaiian. This in itself was remarkable; though there had been many instances of haole men assaulting Hawaiian women, no one could recall an incident in which a Hawaiian man had sexually assaulted a white woman.
Soon the even more shocking news came that two of the men arrested on suspicion of being among these "fiends" and "hoodlums" were both local sports heroes, star players in "barefoot" football as well as boxers. One was Benny Ahakuelo, who had recently competed in the National Amateur Boxing Championship at Madison Square Garden; and the other, a member of the National Guard boxing team, was one "Joe Kalani"-aka Joseph Kahahawai Jr.
felt physically ill the whole day, hoping it was all a horrible mistake. After work I stopped at the Anito house; Esther and Pascual had spent the greater part of the day at the police station. As Pascual put on a pot of coffee, Esther told me what Joe related to her: He and his friends Ben, Henry Chang, David "Mack" Takai, and Horace "Shorty" Ida-the latter just back from a stay in Los Angeles-had been out Saturday night joy-riding in a car Horace had borrowed from his sister Haruyo. Earlier in the evening Joe and Henry had run into Shorty while "crashing" a wedding luau at the home of their friend Sylvester Correa. After they left, they drifted over to the dance pavilion at Waikiki Park, a gathering spot for local young people. Joe had had too many beers at the Correas' and was groggy as they drove back a while later to the Correa home. But the party was pau, over, and they were on their way home when at the intersection of King and Liliha Streets their car was nearly sideswiped by a Hudson sedan driven by a white man. As the cars came squealing to a halt, the man's Hawaiian wife called out, "Why don't you look where you're driving!" Joe shot back, "Get that goddamn haole out of the car and I'll give him what he's looking for!"