Hawaii

by James Michener

  The third particular in which Nyuk Tsin dominated her family was in the purchase of land. Her Hakka hunger for this greatest of the world's commodities would never be satiated, and she was haunted by a recurring nightmare: she saw her constantly increasing brood and there was never enough land for each Kee to stand upon and to raise his arms and move about. So whenever the Kee hui had a few dollars left over after paying education bills, she insisted that they acquire more land. To do so in Honolulu was not easy, for generally speaking, land, Hawaii's most precious resource, was not sold; it was leased. Nor was it parceled into acres or lots; it was leased by the square foot. The Hoxworths owned tremendous areas of land, inherited from the Alii Nui Noelani, and so did the Hewletts, inherited through the old missionary's second wife. The Kanakoa family had huge estates; and the Janderses and the Whipples, although they owned little, controlled enormous areas through leases. Whoever owned land grew wealthy, and it was the ironclad law of the great haole families never to sell. Hawaiians were willing to sell, but their land was usually in the country. Therefore, when the bent little Chinese woman Nyuk Tsin decided to get enough Honolulu land for her multiplying family her interests threw her directly athwart the established wealth of the island.

  I remarked some time back that if the haoles in Hawaii had wanted to protect themselves from the Chinese they should have shot Uliassutai Karakoram Blake. That chance passed, and the Chinese got their education. In 1900, if the haoles had still wanted to maintain their prerogatives, and apparently they did, they should have shot Nyuk Tsin; but none had ever heard of her. They thought that the guiding force behind the Kee family was the lawyer, Africa, and they kept a close watch on him.

  In late 1899 Africa found himself hemmed in, unable to make a move, and he had to report to his auntie: "It's getting almost impossible to buy land. The haoles simply won't sell."

  "How much money does the hui have?" Nyuk Tsin asked.

  "Four thousand dollars in cash, and we could convert more."

  "Have you tried to buy business land toward Queen Street?"

  "No luck."

  "Leases?"

  "No luck."

  The Kee empire, almost before it got started, was stalemated, and it might have remained so had it not received dramatic assistance from a rat.

  On Thanksgiving day in 1899 the blue-funneled H & H steamer Maui put into harbor after an uneventful trip from Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama. As its seamen curled their landing lines artfully through the air and then sent heavy hawsers after them, this brown rat that was to salvage the fortunes of the Kee hui scuttled down from ship to shore, carrying a hideful of fleas. It ran through some alleys and wound up in the grimy kitchen of a family named Chang.

  On December 12, 1899, as the old century lay dying, an old man named Chang also lay dying with a dreadful fever that seemed to spring from large, purplish nodules in his armpits and groin. When young Dr. Hewlett Whipple from the Department of Health picked his way through the alleys to certify that the man had died of natural causes, he studied the corpse with apprehension.

  "Don't bury this man," he ordered, and within ten minutes he had returned, breathless, with two other young doctors, each of whom carried a medical book. In silence the three men studied the corpse and looked at one another in horror.

  "Is it what I think it is?" Dr. Whipple asked.

  "The plague," his associate replied.

  "May God have mercy on us!" Whipple prayed.

  The three doctors walked soberly back to their Department of Health, trying to mask from the general public the terror they felt, for they knew that in Calcutta the plague had once killed thousands in a few weeks; there was no known remedy, and when this dreadful disease struck a community, the epidemic had to burn itself out in frightful death and terror. When they reached their Department office, the three doctors closed the doors and sat silent for a moment, as if trying to muster courage for the things they must now do. Then Dr. Whipple, who had inherited his great-grandfather's force of character, said simply, "We must burn that house immediately. We must set aside a special burying ground. And we must inspect every house in Honolulu. It is absolutely essential that not a single sick person be hidden from us. Are you agreed?"

  "There will be protests against the burning," one of the other doctors argued.

  "We burn, or we face a calamity of such size that I cannot imagine it," Dr. Whipple replied.

  "I'd rather we talked with the older doctors."

  They did, summoning them in fearful haste, and the older men were sure that their junior colleagues must have been panicked by some ordinary disease with extraordinary developments. It's unlikely that we have the plague in Honolulu. We've kept it out of here for seventy years."

  Another argued: "I think we ought to see the body," and four of the established physicians started to leave for the grimy little shack in Chinatown, but Dr. Whipple protested.

  "You'll create consternation among the Chinese," he warned. "I went and hurried away for my associates. Now if you appear, they'll know something is wrong."

  "I'm not going to announce that we have the plague in this city until I see for myself," a big, solidly built doctor said, "and I want two experienced men to come along with me."

  "Before you go," Whipple asked, seeing that they were leaving without medical books, "what symptoms would convince you that it is truly the plague?"

  "I saw the plague in China," the older doctor evaded haughtily.

  "But what symptoms?"

  "Purplish nodules in the groin. Smaller ones in the armpits. Marked fever accompanied by hallucinations. And a characteristic smell from the punctured nodules."

  Dr. Whipple licked his lips, for they were achingly dry, and said, "Dr. Harvey, when you go, take a policeman along to guard the house. We must burn it tonight."

  An ominous hush fell upon the room, and Dr. Harvey finally asked, "Then it is the plague?"

  "Yes."

  There was an apprehensive silence, a moment of hesitation, followed by Dr. Harvey's stubborn insistence: "I cannot authorize the required steps until I see for myself."

  "But you will take a policeman?"

  "Of course. And you can be talking about what we must do next ... in the unlikely event that it is indeed the plague." He hurried off, taking two frightened companions with him, and it was a long time before he returned; and during this interval the three young doctors on whom the burden of a quarantine would fall were afraid that their older confreres would refuse to sanction emergency measures until the plague had established itself, but in this uncharitable supposition they quite underestimated Dr. Harvey.

  After an hour he rushed into the Department of Health, ashen-faced and with the news that it was the bubonic plague. He had searched all houses in the immediate vicinity and had uncovered another dead body and three cases near death, so on his own recognizance he had alerted the Fire Department to stand by for immediate action of the gravest importance. "Gentlemen," he puffed, "Honolulu is already in the toils of the bubonic plague. May God give us the strength to fight it."

  That night the terror began. The determined doctors summoned government officials and told them coldly: "The only way to combat this scourge is to burn every house where the plague has struck. Burn it, burn it, burn it!"

  A timorous official protested: "How can we burn a house without permission of the owner? In Chinatown it'll take us weeks to find out who owns what. And even if we don't make mistakes we'll be subject to lawsuits."

  "Good God!" Dr. Harvey shouted, banging the table with his fist. "You speak of lawsuits. How many people do you think may be dead by Christmas? I'll tell you. We'll be lucky if our losses are less than two thousand. Whipple here may be dead, because he touched the body. I may be dead, because I did, too. And you may be dead, because you associated with us. Now burn those goddamned buildings immediately."

  The government summoned the Fire Department and asked if they had perfected any way to burn one building and no
t the one standing beside it. "There's always a risk," the fire fighters replied. "But it's been done."

  "Is there wind tonight?"

  "Nothing unusual."

  "Could you burn four houses? Completely?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Don't do anything. Don't say anything." Nothing happened that night.

  For three agonizing days the debate continued, with the doctors appalled by the delay. In the unspeakable warrens of Chinatown they uncovered three dozen new cases and eleven deaths. Old men would suddenly complain of fevers and pains in their groin. Their faces would become blanched with pain, then fiery red with burning temperatures. Their desire for water was extraordinary, and they died trembling, a hideous smell enveloping them whenever one of their nodules broke. It was the raging, tempestuous plague, but still the finicky debate continued.

  At last Drs. Harvey and Whipple announced the facts to the general public: "Honolulu is in the grip of an epidemic of bubonic plague. The death toll cannot at this time be predicted, and the most severe measures must be taken to combat the menace."

  Now general panic swept the city. A cordon was thrown around Chinatown and no one inside the area was allowed to move out. Churches and schools were suspended and no groups assembled. Ships were asked to move to other harbors and life in the city ground to a slow, painful halt. It was a terrible Christmas, that last one of the nineteenth century, and there was no celebration when the new year and the new century dawned.

  During Christmas week the fires started. Dr. Whipple and his team showed the firemen where deaths had occurred, and after precautions were taken, the houses were burned. Chinatown was divided roughly into the business area toward the ocean and the crowded living areas toward the mountains, and although the plague had started in the former area, it now seemed concentrated in the closely packed homes. Therefore the doctors recommended that an entire section be eliminated, and the government agreed, for by burning this swath across the city, a barrier would be cut between the two areas. The condemned area happened to include Dr. John Whipple's original mansion, now crowded by slums, and his great-grandson felt tears coming to his eyes when he saw the old family home go up in flames that he himself had set. It was a ghastly business to burn down a city that one had worked so hard to build, but the fires continued, and patrols kept back the Chinese who sought to escape the doomed areas and circulate generally throughout the city. Refugee camps were established in church grounds, with tents for those whose houses had been burned and sheds for cooking food. Mrs. Henry Hewlett supervised one camp, Mrs. Rudolph Hale another, and Mrs. John Janders a third on the slopes of Punchbowl, the volcanic crater that rose on the edge of the city. Blankets were supplied by teams that searched the city, Mrs. Malama Hoxworth having taken charge of that effort. David Hale, Jr., and his uncle Tom Whipple set up the field kitchens and ran them, riding from one camp to the other on horseback.

  Inspection teams were organized and every room in Honolulu was visually checked twice each day, to be sure that no new cases of the plague went unreported, and consonant with the missionary tradition from which they had sprung, it was the Hales and the Hewletts and the Whipples who volunteered for the particularly dangerous work of crawling through the Chinatown warrens to be sure no dead bodies lay hiding. It was a dreadful sight they saw, a fearful condemnation of their rule in Hawaii.

  The streets of Chinatown were unpaved, filthy alleys that wound haphazardly past open cesspools. The houses were collapsing shacks that had been propped up by poles in hopes of squeezing out one more year's rent. Inside, the homes were an abomination of window-less rooms, waterless kitchens, toiletless blocks. Stairwells had no illumination and what cellars there were stood crowded with inflammable junk. No air circulated that was not filthy. After only two generations of use, Chinatown was overcrowded to the point of suffocation, all made worse by the fact that those whose homes had already been burned had managed, by one trick or another, to slip through quarantine cordons so as to remain with their friends rather than suffer banishment to the refugee camps, and with them they brought the plague. If one had searched the world, seeking an area where a rat bearing the fleas which bred bubonic plague could most easily infect the greatest number of unprotected people, Honolulu's Chinatown would have stood high on the list. The police had known of the pitiful overcrowding; the Department of Health had known of the unsanitary conditions; and the landlords had known best of all the menace they were perpetuating; but nobody had spoken in protest because the area was owned principally by those who were now inspecting it: the Hales, the Hewletts and the Whipples; and they had found that Chinese did pay their rents promptly. Now from this open sore the plague threatened to engulf the island, and as the inspectors bravely toured the infected areas day after day, exposing themselves to death and sleeping at nights in restricted tents lest they contaminate their own families, they often thought: "Why didn't we do something about this sooner?"

  By January 15, 1900, eight substantial areas had been completely razed and innumerable rats that might have carried their infected fleas to uncontaminated sections of the city were destroyed; and it seemed as if a general eruption of the plague had been mercifully prevented. Three thousand Chinese were already in refugee camps from which they could not spread contagion, but unknown thousands were hiding out in the narrow warrens to which they had fled and they now began to accomplish what the rats could not. As the reports came into headquarters that night, each with tales of fresh death and new infection, it became hideously apparent to Dr. Whipple that the epidemic was not halted and that the fate of Honolulu hung in a precarious balance.

  On the sixteenth he convened his doctors again, a group of exhausted men who understood how fearful the next week could be, for by their own inspection they had proved that the plague stood poised in upper Chinatown, ready to explode across the entire city, and they knew that on this day they must either take final steps to drive it back or surrender the general community to its ravages; and the only cure they knew was fire. Dr. Whipple was first to speak: "Our teams found twenty-nine new cases yesterday."

  "Oh, hell!" Dr. Harvey cried in acute frustration. He folded his arms on the table and bowed his head upon them, retiring from this part of the discussion.

  "All the cases this week, and most of the deaths, have been concentrated toward the mountains," Whipple explained, pointing to a map, "and we can thank God that they seem to be leading out of the city rather than in toward the heart."

  "That's the only good news we've had," snapped an older doctor who had found seven cases in the mountain area.

  Dr. Whipple hesitated, then said, "Our obligation is clear."

  "You mean to burn that entire outlying area?"

  "I do."

  "Jesus, they'll explode. They just won't permit it, Whipple."

  Dr. Whipple pressed his hands to his forehead and pleaded: "Have you an alternative?"

  "Look, I'm not arguing one way or another," the older man explained. "I'm just saying . . . Hell, Whipple, there must be five hundred homes in that area!"

  "And every one infected with the bubonic plague."

  "I want no part of this decision!" the older doctor protested.

  "Nor me!" another cried. "Christ, Whipple, that's half the city!"

  From his position with his head on his arms, Dr. Harvey asked harshly, "If your arm is infected with blood poisoning that is certain to destroy your entire body, what do you do?"

  There was no answer, so after a moment he slammed his fist onto the table and shouted, "Well, what in hell do you do? You cut it off! Burn those areas. Now!"

  "Only the government can make this decision," Whipple said in slow, terrified tones. "But it's got to make it."

  "We are withdrawing from this meeting," two of the doctors warned. "Let it be recorded."

  Dr. Harvey shouted, "And let it be recorded that I did not withdraw. Burn the goddamned city or perish."

  On the eighteenth of January, 1900, the emergency committee d
ecided to burn a very substantial area of Honolulu in a last prayerful attempt to save the general population, and when the doomed areas were marked in red two facts became apparent: they were not in the center of town but in the residential district; and almost everyone who lived in the area was Chinese. Two members of the cabinet, as they faced the map, were in tears, and a man named Hewlett, who had a good deal of Hawaiian blood, asked, "Why does misery always fall on those least able to bear it?"

  "You burn where the plague has fallen," a cabinet member named Hale replied. "And it's fallen on the Chinese."

  "Stop this talk!" the chairman cried. "There's already an ugly rumor that we're burning Chinatown as punishment because the Pakes left the sugar fields. I don't want to hear any of that libel in this room. We're burning Chinatown because that's where the plague is."

  Hewlett, part-Hawaiian, felt that he was being unduly hectored, so he asked, "Would you burn here," and he banged the haole areas of the map, "if that's where the plague was? Would you burn your own houses?"

  "The plague didn't come to our houses," the chairman replied. "It came to the Chinese."

  On the nineteenth of January the Fire Department gave all its men the day off and advised them to sleep as much as possible in preparation for a hard day's work on the twentieth. The Honolulu Mail in its edition that day reported: "We beg all citizens of our city to be especially alert tomorrow and to watch for flying sparks, because although the able laddies of our Fire Department have proved over and over again that they know how to set fire to one house and save the next, the very magnitude of the job they now face increases the ever-present danger of a general conflagration. Brooms and buckets of water should be at hand throughout the city."