Honolulu

by Alan Brennert

  When my husband came home from work and I told him what happened, he grimaced and said, "That damned Jap! He likes to give Koreans a bad time, that's all. Just make do until payday," he directed, and sat down for supper.

  I scrimped as best I could, stretching out our dwindling supply of rice, and with my few remaining coins I bought the cheapest items I could find at the plantation store: sardines were only five cents a tin, bread a penny a loaf, and aku, a tasty local fish, was available at three to five cents per pound. Marisol also kindly gave me some eggs from their chicken coop and cabbage from her garden.

  But the larder was looking bare indeed when one Saturday morning before work Mr. Noh announced, "Payday today. I'll be home a little latersix, maybe seven o'clock." I assumed it took that long to disburse wages to the thousands of the plantation's laborers. Relieved, I scraped together a meager dinner of bean paste, kimchi, and rice that could simmer in its pot until Mr. Noh came home.

  The four-thirty whistle blew and soon the other men in our camp came home with smiles on their faces and gold coins jingling in their pockets. My husband was not among them, but I didn't worry since he had told me he would be late.

  I waited for him on the porch, watching the dusty parade of workers straggling home, and took note of one of the women among them. Her face shaded by the wide brim of a straw hat, her eyes downcast, she plodded along with the same bone-weary posture as the men. She had almost shuffled past me when I recognized the long face and sharp features, nearly masked by a veil of red dust. It was jade Moon.

  So startled was I that I called out her name, a terrible breach of etiquette. She looked up, dismayed and embarrassed that I had seen her.

  She stopped, the other laborers continuing on around her like the waters of a river flowing around a mired tree branch. With a mirthless smile on her face, she held up a benro bag in a hand covered with a kind of work mitten. "An amusing sight, eh?" she called to me. "How elegant is the city girl from Seoul! How fashionably she dresses." She lifted a leg to show the calf-high boots hiding under her skirt. "The latest in ladies' footwear! Are you not envious?"

  I hurried down the porch steps and to her side. "I looked for you at your house, but it never occurred to me you were working in the fields!"

  "It would not have occurred to me, either," she said with a sigh, "three days ago."

  "Come inside, let me get you something to drink, we can talk-"

  "Some other time. I must make Mr. Ha's dinner."

  "Would you like some help? Mr. Noh won't be home for-"

  She suddenly exploded at me, "I need nothing from you! What could you possibly give me? How could you possibly help me? Leave me alone!"

  I was startled but not really offended by the outburst. She turned away and continued on down the road, and in her slow, weary shuffle I saw a proud woman brought low. Perhaps she was right: What words of comfort could I offer her?

  Six o'clock passed with still no sign of my husband, then seven. At the blast of the eight o'clock whistle I threw manners and custom aside and ate my dinner alone. Finally, just ten minutes before the eight-thirty lights-out, I heard a noise from outside, followed by a loud curse in Korean.

  I opened the front door to find Mr. Noh sprawled facedown on the porch steps. I rushed to his aid as he struggled to stand. "Husband, are you all right?"

  He raised his face to mine. I recoiled at the sour reek of alcohol on his breath.

  "Goddamned steps," he muttered, and got unsteadily to his feet.

  I guided him through the doorway and into the house. Once inside he stubbornly pushed away from me and staggered to one of the dining chairs, into which he awkwardly deposited himself.

  I had no idea what to do next; I had no experience with inebriated men. Then Mr. Noh declared, "I'm hungry," and grateful for something to do, I hurried to get him his supper of kimchi and rice.

  But when I put it in front of him he looked disgusted: "No meat again?"

  "There will be plenty of meat," I assured him, "now that you've been paid."

  His mouth twitched. He shoveled a spoonful of rice into it, chewed, then mumbled around the food, "No money this week."

  "What?" I prayed I hadn't heard that right. "You didn't get paid?"

  He picked up some kimchi with his chopsticks, swallowing it almost without chewing. "I was winning, " he said heatedly.

  "Winning what?"

  "You should have seen my hand!"

  I looked at his hand. "What's wrong with it?"

  "I had an inside straight," he said, spouting more nonsense.

  "Husband," I asked anxiously, "what happened to your pay?"

  "Four queens happened to it!"

  Despite the unfamiliar nomenclature, I began to see the general outline of our misfortune. "Were you-gambling?"

  He suddenly spit out a gob of half-chewed rice onto his plate. "This is slop!" he shouted. "I thought you could cook!"

  "And what will we eat," I asked helplessly, voice raised in panic, "if you've gambled away your earnings?"

  This was a mistake, one I would never make again. As my father had done, my husband jumped to his feet and struck me. But where Father had given me the back of his hand, my husband delivered a fist across the mouth. I staggered backwards. I felt as though a spike had been driven into my lip, splitting it open, and I tasted my own blood.

  "You have no right to question what I do with my money!" he yelled at me. "A wife is to offer her husband respect, not reproof! You are a poor excuse for a wife, and if you don't improve, I will have you sent back to Korea!"

  He stood there, nearly vibrating with rage, glaring at me with such fierce rebuke that I feared he might strike me again and again until I "improved." My heart pounded in my chest almost as a clapper sounded inside a bell, its terrified peal drowning out even the words I now forced myself to speak: "I ... I am sorry, honorable husband. Please forgive my callowness and stupidity. I promise, I will try and be a better wife."

  This seemed to mollify him somewhat, and when his hand next lashed out it was merely to snap up his dinner plate and hurl it against the wall. I flinched as the plate shattered, smearing the wall with rice and kimchi.

  He staggered into the bedroom and collapsed just short of the bed. I did not dare try to move him for fear he might awaken.

  I could not bear to be in the house another second, and despite the eight o'clock curfew I ran outside and up the red clay road bordering the cane fields. When I had run half a mile or so, far enough away that I thought no human could hear, I unburdened myself of my tears. I sat there amid the cane stalks and cried in the dark for the better part of an hour, my emotions swinging from pain to anger, anger to fear, and thence to panic. In that panic I convinced myself that this was all my fault; had I not come here under false pretenses, the lie that was my photograph? Did my husband not have the right to be disappointed in me? And I had been callow and stupid to criticize him. I thought of the night a week before when he praised the meal I had cooked and had allowed me to sit and eat with him. He was not a bad man; I was a bad wife. I would have to become a better one, that was all. It was the only way I could walk back into that little bungalow: to embrace the illusion that I could somehow change the situation, that I had some say over it. To admit that I had no say-that was too terrifying to contemplate. And so I sat there on the ground, weaving an illusion from strands of desperation, until at last I got up and started the long walk back to my husband's house.

  he next morning Mr. Noh awoke with a violent hangover and no apparent recollection of what transpired the night before. He eschewed breakfast but seemed grateful for the hot coffee I served him, even thanking me for it, and was out the door without a mention made of anything that had passed between us. I was grateful for this second chance, and resolved to make the most of it.

  Once more I surveyed our pathetic larder and realized that if it was ever to be filled again, I was going to have to do something to earn some money of my own. My encounter with jade Moon fr
esh in my mind, I saw only one option.

  I went to the plantation offices and requested to be assigned field work. The clerk took my name, my bungalow address, and had me fill out some forms. In short order I was assigned a bango of my own and given a medallion like my husband's, but bearing its own number. I who began life as a girl called Regret, who was addressed here in America as "Mrs. Noh," would now also be known-by the Tunas in the fields, and by the paymaster on payday as Number 3327.

  Five

  he next morning Mr. Noh woke to discover that the wife who was preparing his breakfast was doing so not in traditional Korean attire, but in plantation work clothes-a denim blouse, long gathered skirt, and a pair of most unwomanly boots, all of which I had charged against my future wages at the plantation store. My husband looked at me in utter bewilderment: "What are you doing dressed like that?" I replied casually, "Just a little hanahana"-a plantation term for work-"to make some extra money." He seemed flustered, uncertain what to make of this, so he sat down to eat his rice gruel and kimchi, both of which were reassuringly normal. After he had finished he reached for his bento bag, saw another one sitting beside it that I had packed for myself, gave it an unsettled look, and hurriedly left for the fields.

  I strapped on a straw sunbonnet and a neckerchief, and followed him into the world of work. It took me twenty minutes on foot to reach my assigned cane field, and I was already perspiring mightily by the time I got there. But I'd been told that these heavy clothes, as hot and uncomfortable as they might be, were absolutely essential to protect me from the sharp spines of the cane leaves.

  I had been assigned to a work gang made up of about twenty wahines, or women-Japanese, Filipinos, Chinese, Portuguese, Okinawans, but only two Koreans, myself and jade Moon. When my erstwhile shipmate saw me walk into the cane field, she made a beeline toward me. She is probably as happy to see a countrywoman here as I am, I thought.

  "Are you a fool?" she greeted me. "What are you doing here?"

  So much for the camaraderie of countrywomen.

  "I want to make money," I replied. "Why else would I be here?"

  "Unless your husband is forcing you to work in the fields," she said, scowling, "I suggest you earn your pin money by selling vegetables from your garden. This is no place for women."

  "These are all women," I pointed out. "You're a woman."

  "Yes, and this is no place for me either!"

  "Does your husband make you work in the fields?"

  "No! I'm just offering you advice, thankless as it may be."

  "I need to make money," I told her, "and I intend to work for it."

  She was, I could tell, on the verge of another withering remark when the head Luna, a white man-or haole, as Caucasians were called here in Hawai'i- swaggered up to us and declared gruffly, "No jabbering! Get to work, both of you!" He thrust a hoe into my hand; Jade Moon shook her head at my abject stupidity and headed back into the fields.

  I was put to work doing hoe hana-weeding row after row of cane that stood a foot taller than me and seemed to stretch almost infinitely into the distance. Wielding my hoe I broke up the hard soil, then yanked out the obstinate weeds by hand. A line of cane comprised about thirty feet; we were expected to weed on the order of a hundred lines a day. When you tried to stand up straight to ease the pain of bending over, the Tunas would shout, "3327! Stop lazing around and get back to work!" Quite often we worked from six to eleven in the morning without once standing up, and by then my back and shoulders ached like a rotten tooth. It was also blazingly hot in the open fields, mitigated only somewhat by the cool trade winds. Our wide brimmed hats-made of what the Hawaiians called lauhala, pandanus leavesmore than adequately shaded our faces, but did nothing to discourage the wasps and mosquitoes that unfailingly found our few inches of exposed flesh, or the caterpillars that wriggled up our legs and into our boots.

  Nor did my gloves offer complete protection when, later, we were assigned to strip away dried leaves from the cane stalks-this was called hole hole. By evening my hands were scraped and bleeding from dozens of cane cuts, so blistered and raw that I had to soak them in a solution of Epsom salts.

  The lunas warned us not to talk among ourselves, but the women got around this by singing as they worked. One tune sung by the Japanese women came to be understood by all the races at work in the fields:

  Wonderful Hawaii, or so I hear

  One look and it seems like hell

  The manager's the devil and

  His lunas are demons.

  I was reluctantly impressed by these women, who often worked with infant children strapped to their backs, or would make a kind of playpen out of the towering cane stalks and suckle their babes between lines of weeding.

  At 11:00 A.M. the whistle blew and we were given thirty minutes for kaukau-mealtime-gathering in groups to eat and talk. I ate my rice in the Korean manner, with a spoon, and my kimchi with chopsticks, and I was startled to see that the Japanese women used only chopsticks for all foods but soup, which struck me as somewhat vulgar. But I was frankly appalled as I watched the Portuguese women scoop fish or beef out of tins with their fingers, as Hawaiians did with fish or this taro paste called poi-in Korea it was strictly forbidden to eat food with one's hands, and I did my best to conceal my horror.

  I must have been staring too long at one of the Portuguese women, who misinterpreted it and asked me cheerfully, "You like try?" She broke off a piece of some sort of pastry and held it out to me. I couldn't gracefully decline, so I smiled a little nervously and used my chopsticks to pluck the offering from her hand (which seemed to amuse her). But my dismay at her table manners quickly paled next to the sweetness of the pastry. "This is delicious," I told her.

  "Ono, "she said.

  "It's called ono?"

  She laughed. "No no, this malassada-what the haoles call a `doughnut.' 'Ono'means delicious."

  "It is very ono, then," I said. "Thank you."

  As short as it was, mealtime was the high point of a day in the fields. In those that followed I would discover such delights as Portuguese bread, Okinawan potato manju, Hawaiian haupia pudding, and a sweet Japanese confection called mochi. In return I would share the mandu dumplings, honey rice, and kimchi I prepared for my own lunch. We also exchanged recipes, and now for supper I would occasionally make Chinese eggplant in hot garlic sauce or Spanish paella as a complement to traditional Korean fare. My husband had tasted many of these dishes before and made no objection when I served them.

  At first, it was a bit difficult communicating with these women. I thought I had learned adequate English from the American missionaries, but people on the plantation seemed to speak something entirely different. When a worker wasn't done with a task, she would tell the tuna, "No pau yet, wait bumbye!" (It took me forever to realize that "bumbye" was a contraction of "by and by" and meant "soon enough!") If something was the best or the worst it was ichiban, "number one." To kompang was to work together or to share, and when I looked blankly at any or all of this, someone would invariably ask, "You no sabe?" or "You no savvy?"

  What I finally came to "savvy" was that when the plantations brought laborers to Hawai'i from various countries, there needed to be a common language in which the bosses could communicate with the workers and the workers could communicate among themselves. What evolved was Hawaiian "pidgin," a kind of shorthand dialect whose foundations were English and Hawaiian but whose grammar and sentence structure owed much to Portuguese, Spanish, and Cantonese. Hawaiian words like keiki (child) when added to "sugar cane" became "keiki cane," meaning young seedling cane stalks; sabe came from the Spanish saber, to understand, but also sounded like the English word savvy; ichiban and bango were Japanese; kompang was Filipino. Kaukau sounded Hawaiian, but was actually derived from Chinese pidgin: chow-chow. The more pidgin I heard, with its distinctive lilt and blunt poetry, the more I understood, and the more I came to appreciate it.

  But for all the good fellowship in the fields, the work itself was long, t
edious, and brutal. We were bent over, under an unforgiving sun, for ten and a half hours each day. When we were doing hoe hana our backs ached as if broken; when doing hole hole, despite the heavy clothing we wore, the razorsharp spines of the cane leaves made pincushions of us. And the lunas treated us as beasts of burden, certainly as nothing human.

  Then one day into my second week of work, the cane fields truly became the hell that the Japanese women sang of in their lament. The trade winds that normally cooled the fields had vanished in the night. The sea offered up not so much as a breath of relief, and the light rain showers that often refreshed us in the afternoon also failed to appear. With neither air nor water mitigating the heat of the day, the tropic sun became a blazing furnace. The air we breathed parched our throats and the lunas had to bring in barrels of extra drinking water, which itself was hot as soup. I perspired so much inside my protective clothes that they became soaked, but I dared not take anything off for fear of wasp stings and cane cuts. None of us had the strength to sing, or even to talk over lunch. The scorching sun climbed higher into the heavens but seemed as if it were floating only a few hundred feet above us. Waves of heat shimmered the air, making me wonder if perhaps I was dreaming all of this.

  The other women called this "Kona weather," and by 1:00 P.M. at least one of them was overcome by the heat and had to stop working. But when a luna ridiculed the poor woman for her weakness, I resolved to go on as long as I could, though I swung my hoe at the weeds with slowly diminishing force.

  Around three o'clock I heard a commotion and looked up to see a knot of women gathered at the end of a nearby cane row. From their midst came the disturbing sound of a woman's sobs-not the soft weeping I had heard in the Hotel of Sorrows, but something that was both a gasp and a moan.

  I hurried over and caught a glimpse, through the thicket of wahines surrounding her, of a woman sitting cross-legged on the ground, wildly tearing off her hat, her kerchief, her heavy denim jacket. Between sobs she cried out, "Damn it! Damn it! Too hot."-in Korean.