Hawaii

by James Michener

  For when the first Chinese plantation worker saved, through bitter labor, the few pennies needed to send his son to Iolani, a kind of revolution was launched which nothing in world history had so far proved capable of reversing. When Blake taught the first Chinese boy the alphabet, the old system of indentured labor was doomed. Because a boy who could read would sooner or later come upon some book that would give him an idea, and a boy with an idea could accomplish almost anything. During these years in Hawaii, the Chinese were not particularly well treated. Hell-raising lunas on the plantations--gang foremen--often thought it hilarious to tie two Chinese together by their pigtails and abuse them both at the same time. Other lunas, on a drunk, found delight in tying the pigtail of a passing Oriental to the tail of a horse, and lashing the horse into a gallop. The Chinese retaliated until it became a standing rule among lunas: "Never go into a field where more than six Chinese are working with cane knives. Never." And one night an infuriated Chinese, for no reason that anyone ever developed, screamed into the bedroom of the French consul and with a long knife massacred him. These were not easy years, and the Chinese were by no means the docile Orientals that the Honolulu Mail had reported on their arrival. They were apt to be mean, fearfully quick to revenge insults, and positively unwilling to extend their contracts at three dollars a month for fourteen hours of hard work a day. Deep tensions were created, and the Chinese experiment might have failed, except that Uliassutai Karakoram Blake was quietly teaching his boys: "The same virtues that are extolled in China will lead to success in Hawaii. Study, listen to your parents, save your money, align yourselves with honest men." He also laid great emphasis upon the wisdom of conforming to the mores of the majority. "Cut your pigtails," he counseled, "and dress like Americans. Join their churches. Forget that you are Chinese."

  A boy asked, "But if we ought to drop Buddhism, why don't you?" And Uliassutai replied, "When I leave Hawaii, I shall return to England, where freedoms of all kind are permitted. But you will not leave these islands. You will have to live among Americans, and they despise most freedoms, so conform." He was a difficult, opinionated man, and he transformed a race.

  In these days, when Nyuk Tsin came to work in the early morning twilight, she led her four sons with her, and for the hours before school opened, they labored in the field with her. As schooltime approached, she dipped a rag in the muddy water of the taro patch and cleaned her sons, sending them off to their lessons. When day ended, they were back among the vegetables, and after nightfall they all reached home, where big Kimo had a hot supper waiting for them. After a year of this severe regime Kimo, exhausted by the amount of work the Chinese were doing, suggested, "Why don't we all leave this house and build a little house down the valley? We'll keep this land for a vegetable field. Then nobody will have to walk so far, and I'll be close to the poolroom."

  Nyuk Tsin considered this for some time and said, "I don't like to give up even an inch of the vegetable field for a house."

  "But look!" Kimo argued. "For a little corner of the vegetable field, you'll get a whole lot of land up here.'"

  "If we do that," Nyuk Tsin countered, "Apikela will have to walk great distances for her maile. And I can walk better than Apikela."

  "What I had in mind," Kimo explained, "was that Apikela should stop bothering with the maile and help you with the vegetable field down there. That way, the boys can study longer for their school."

  The plan was so reasonable that next day Nyuk Tsin invited Kimo to accompany her to the vegetable field, and the huge man explained how little land would be taken off by the house, and he reminded her how much forest land she would be getting in exchange, and on the spur of the moment she said, "Good."

  They took down the upland house and for several nights slept in the open while the lowland house was building, and after a while the first of the famous Kee houses stood on Nuuanu Street. This one was a ramshackle affair, neither waterproof nor tidy, but it comfortably housed five Chinese and two Hawaiians. In a way, it was also responsible for the good fortune of the Kees, for one day when Nyuk Tsin was trudging up the valley toward her new fields, which because they were so high did not produce as well as the lower, she was stopped by a handsome young man of twenty who was riding in a gig and who called, "You the Pake who has the field in there?" She said that she was, and he reined in his horse, climbed down, and extended his hand. "I'm Whip Hoxworth," he said, "and I'd like to see your field, if I may." He tied the horse to a tree and tramped in with her, kicked the soil, rubbed some through his palms, and said, "Pake, I'd like to make a deal with you. I brought back with me from Formosa, nearly lost my head doing it, about a hundred pineapple plants. I've tried growing them in low fields, and they don't work. Seems to me a field at this elevation might be nearer to what they knew in Formosa. Tell you what I'll do. I'll give you all the plants that are now living. And if you can make them grow, you can have them. All I want is some of the fruit and some of the seed."

  "Can you sell pineapple?" Nyuk Tsin asked suspiciously.

  Whip Hoxworth turned and pointed expansively back down the valley, and although trees cut off his view, that did not disturb him. "Every house you can see down there will want to buy your pineapples, Pake. Is it a deal?"

  It was, and young Whip Hoxworth had made a shrewd guess, for Nyuk Tsin's upper field was exactly the soil needed for the Formosa pineapple, which was markedly sweeter and in all ways superior to the grubby degenerates that had been introduced into the islands half a century before. Now Nyuk Tsin hiked out of her upper Nuuanu fields day after day, her back loaded with pineapples which she hawked through the city. Her vegetables from the lower field also prospered, but best of all, her four sons were learning their necessary lessons.

  In only one venture was Nyuk Tsin failing and that was, as before, her taro bed, for not satisfied with selling the brutish bulbs to the natives, and the leaves to anyone who wanted to steam them for vegetables, while keeping the stalks to herself for picking and serving with fried mullet, thus exacting three profits from the accommodating taro, she allowed Kimo and Apikela to talk her into boiling down the roots and converting them once more into poi. This time the procedure worked exactly right, and the resulting poi was a rich, gooey, purplish color that made the mouth of any Hawaiian water when he saw it, and a considerable market developed for this Pake poi, as it was called. But very few Hawaiians were able to buy any, for big Apikela and bigger Kimo worked so hard at cultivating the taro that when mealtime came they were famished, and Nyuk Tsin, gobbling a few handfuls of cold rice with perhaps a bit of pickled taro stalk, sat by aghast at the amounts of poi her two gigantic housemates consumed. Kimo, now weighing nearly three hundred and fifty pounds, would lumber over to the poi buckets, ladle himself out a quart or more and serve Apikela an equal amount. Pecking at half a dozen fish, some cold pork, a baked breadfruit and what was left of a can of Oregon salmon, they would dip two fingers, held scooped like loose fishhooks, into the poi, twirl them around the sticky mass, and swing them deftly to their mouths. With a sweet sucking sound they inhaled the delicious paste, and looked happily at each other as they did so.

  With dismay, Nyuk Tsin realized that none of her poi was getting onto the market. Yet she did not complain, for these great placid people had adopted her children when she was with the lepers. Even now Nyuk Tsin felt that she could not get along without them, for they tended the boys, did the laundry, brought the gossip home from the poolroom, and took care of the poi. But in prudence Nyuk Tsin felt she had to protect herself, so at last she said to Kimo, "I would like to buy your upper fields."

  "Buy?" Kimo asked in astonishment. "You can have them."

  "Maybe it's better if I buy them, properly."

  "They're yours," Apikela insisted.

  "Could we go to the land office and sign the papers?" Nyuk Tsin asked. "And I'll pay you."

  Big Apikela lifted her Chinese friend in the air and sat her on her lap, saying, "Kimo and I have no use for the land. We have no chi
ldren."

  "You have the four boys," Nyuk Tsin corrected.

  "Good idea!" Kimo cried. "We'll give the land to our boys." So the three of them went down to the land office and registered the sale of the upper fields to the Kee boys, and when the white man asked, through his interpreter, "And what fee changed hands?" the two huge Hawaiians looked confused, and the official explained, "There has to be a recognized fee, or the sale isn't legal."

  Nyuk Tsin began to say that she had a bagful of dimes and reals and Australian gold pieces saved for her sons' education and she was willing, but Kimo interrupted, and with a grand gesture said, "We sell this Pake our land in return for all the poi we can eat." And that was what Nyuk Tsin had been thinking about in the first place, and that was how the deed was registered.

  It was a strange and yet typical Hawaii-like life that Nyuk Tsin now led. Her four sons spoke mainly Hawaiian and English, and she communicated with them only in broken Hawaiian. They were carefully thought to think of the shadowy woman in China as their mother, but they considered Apikela their mamma, just as she thought of them as her sons. Nobody in the household even knew Nyuk Tsin's name, the Hawaiians always calling her merely the Pake, and her children knowing her as Auntie. In food, language and laughter the establishment was Hawaiian. In school-book learning, business and religion it was American. But in filial obedience and reverence for education it was Chinese.

  Nyuk Tsin's years fell into an almost sacred routine. On the first of March she went to the land office and paid her taxes on her two properties, and her most valued physical possession became a box in which she kept her receipts. For her they were a kind of citizenship, a proof that she had a right to stay in the Fragrant Tree Country. ,

  In September and June she washed her one suit of clothes with special care, dressed her hair with a fresh cloth, and accompanied her four sons to discuss their education with Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, who found delight in talking Chinese with her and who said that her sons were doing well. Her insistence upon this was fanatical, and whenever she talked with Blake she hammered one question: "Which of my four sons has the best mind?" And the big, fierce man would reflect and reply, "America." She was pleased to know that her brilliant son was doing well in school, for she loved to visualize the day on which he would set out to the mainland for his advanced schooling, to be supported by all the others.

  In April and October, Nyuk Tsin faithfully trekked down to the Punti store with an appropriate number of dollars and sent them off to Kee Mun Ki's family in the Low Village. Always she took her four sons with her, even though it meant keeping them out of school, for she impressed them with this: "Even more important than education is filial duty, and you are four brothers who must work extra hard to pay the respect due your father and his family." She made each of the boys actually finger the money as it was turned over, and each of them touched the resulting letter. "Now you can go back to school," she said. Sometimes she thought it strange that she should be inculcating these ancient Chinese virtues not in the powerful Hakka language but in a broken Hawaiian pidgin. However, the virtues were self-evident and the boys understood.

  Such was the year of Nyuk Tsin, the Pake Kokua, the Auntie. For herself she had one blouse, one pair of trousers, no shoes and one basket hat. She had a bamboo carrying-pole, two baskets, a poi factory that made no money, and two parcels of land that would one day be worth more than a million dollars. But the revolution in which this slim-hipped Chinese woman was involved stemmed mainly from the fact that she had four bright boys in Iolani, and when they were ready to move into Honolulu's economic life, fortified by Uliassutai Blake's inspired learning and their Auntie's frugal common sense, there would be little that could stop them.

  And then one day in 1879, as Nyuk Tsin was leading her sons to the Episcopal church, she saw a Hawaiian family entering with seven children, and one of the boys looked Chinese. She began studying this child and concluded that he must be about eight years old, which would be the age of her missing son. She was not sure that he was Chinese, for he blended perfectly with his Hawaiian brothers and sisters, but when service ended she sent her sons home with thirteen-year-old Asia and quietly followed the Hawaiian family to their residence. She found it to be a large, rambling house on Beretania Street far out Diamond Head way, and the eight-year-old boy seemed fully at home there. She tried to ask a passer-by what the family's name was but could not make the man understand.

  She now revised her peddling routes and walked miles out of her way to keep check on the big Hawaiian house, and in time she found that the Chinese boy went to school, seemed normally bright, and was known only by a Hawaiian name. Once she lugged her pineapples onto the veranda of the house itself and tried to engage the mother of the household in conversation, but the latter wanted no pineapples. When she had exhausted all her own ingenuity, she decided to discuss the matter frankly with Apikela, but as she was about to do so, her intuition warned her that the big Hawaiian woman would sympathize with her fellow Hawaiian who now had the child, rather than with its rightful mother Nyuk Tsin; furthermore, she concluded that this was the kind of adventure that would appeal to Kimo, who considered himself not exactly fitted for other kinds of work. Accordingly, she took the big, shirtless man aside and said, "Find out who those people are."

  "I don't have to find out," he replied simply. "That's Governor Kelolo Kanakoa's house."

  "Find out where they got the Pake child."

  "Good," Kimo grunted, and he set off to the poolroom and in a short time reported: "The governor was on the docks one day when a ship came in with a little baby boy, and no one knew what to do with it, so naturally the governor said, 'I'll take him,' and he did." Kimo shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Isn't that simple?" And then he saw what Nyuk Tsin was driving at. "The boy belongs to Kelolo!" he warned. "He fed him. He brought him up."

  "But he's a Pake," Nyuk Tsin argued. "He's mine."

  "Of course!" Kimo agreed. "He's your boy, but he belongs to the governor."

  Patiently, but with swelling emotion, Nyuk Tsin reasoned: "I did not give the child to the governor. I sent him to you, to keep for me till I got home."

  "But what did it matter who got the child?" Kimo reasoned back. "The boy has a home and parents who love him. He has others to play with and enough food. What does it matter?"

  "I want him to grow up to be a Chinese," Nyuk Tsin argued, growing nervous.

  "I don't understand," Kimo said blankly. "When I was young my father always had two or three sailors who had fled their ships, hiding out in our fields up there. Swedish, Americans, Spaniards, it didn't matter. Sometimes they had babies with my sisters, and where are the babies now? I don't know, neither do my sisters. And are they Spanish or Hawaiian? Who cares?"

  Nyuk Tsin found herself making no headway with Kimo, so against her better judgment she enlarged the debate to include Apikela, and as she suspected, the big Hawaiian woman instinctively sided with the boy's Hawaiian mother. "You must think of how much the governor's wife has grown to love this boy," Apikela reasoned.

  "But she has six children of her own!" Nyuk Tsin replied in growing despair.

  "They aren't all her own!" Apikela replied triumphantly. "Some were left in the street and one I know comes from Maui."

  "I am going to get my son," Nyuk Tsin said stubbornly.

  "Pake!" Apikela warned. "He is no longer your son."

  Nyuk Tsin spoke unwisely: "Are the other four boys no longer my sons, either?"

  Softly Apikela replied, "No, Pake, they are not yours alone. They are now my sons too." She did not have the words to explain that in the Hawaiian system the filial-parent relationship was completely fluid, and son-ship derived not from blood lines but from love. No child was ever left abandoned, and some of the most touching narratives of Hawaiian history stemmed from the love of some peasant woman who heard the cries of an unwanted girl baby whom the alii had left beside the sea to perish, and the peasant woman had rescued the child and had raised it as
her own until war came, or some other great event, and then the child was revealed in full beauty. It had happened again and again. Apikela was unable to explain all these things to her Pake friend, but she did add this: "In all the Hawaiian families you see, there will always be one child that was found somewhere. A friend gave the child to the family, and that was that."

  Stubbornly Nyuk Tsin repeated her question: "Then my boys are not my sons?"

  "Not yours alone," huge Apikela repeated. The little Chinese woman, steeled in the Hakka tradition of family, stared at her big Hawaiian friend, reared in the softer tradition of love, and each woman typified the wisdom of her race, and neither would surrender, but as always, it was the copious Hawaiian who made the overture of peace: "Surely, Pake, with four boys we have enough for two mothers." And the big woman was so persuasive that even though Nyuk Tsin despised the concept being offered, and saw in it an explanation of why the Hawaiians were dying out and the Chinese were thriving, she could not ignore the testimony of love that she saw in the happy faces of her sons. Even if they did have to live suspended between Hawaiian love and Chinese duty, they were thriving; so at last Nyuk Tsin allowed herself to be drawn into Apikela's great arms and cherished, as if she were a daughter and not an equal. Then the big woman said, "Now that our tempers are at peace, let us go see the governor's wife."

  Sedately, she and Kimo and the Pake walked down Nuuanu to Beretania and then out toward Diamond Head, and when they got to the governor's big house, Apikela said softly, "I will speak," and as if she were an ambassador from the court of the Nuuanu taro patch to the high court of Beretania Street, she explained to the governor's wife: "The Pake thinks your seventh child is hers."

  "Probably is," Governor Kelolo's wife agreed easily. "I think my husband found him on a boat."

  "The Pake would like to take the boy home with her," Apikela said softly.

  The governor's wife looked down at her hands and began to cry. Finally she said gently, "We think of the boy as our own."