Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  Grandly, he left the ancestral tablets and returned to his chair, from which he reasoned directly: “But we know that it is always better when a Chinese man has some woman with him, so it would be wise if, when you get to the Fragrant Tree Country, you took a wife there too. And the reason I say this is that while I was in America I noticed again and again that the Chinese men who made the most money were those with women. You might think it ought to be the other way around, but as long as I had no woman I did rather poorly … gambling … bad houses … and I may as well confess it, I got drunk every night for almost a year. Well, anyway, I found this Mexican woman and pretty soon I had her washing for the miners and cooking their food. And consider this, you Kees who are departing for a strange country. Even though I had to pay much money for her food, for she ate like a pig, and even though she was always wanting a new dress, it was only because of her that I saved any money. Therefore, it seems to me that if a bright young man like my nephew Mun Ki were to marry the Kung girl here, and then also find a strong wife for himself in the Fragrant Tree Country … but be sure to get one who can work … well,” and Uncle Chun Fat coughed modestly, hiding his lips with his silken-sleeved hand, “it would not surprise me at all if he were to return to this village a much richer man than I am.”

  With a new flush of modesty he dropped his eyes and allowed this dazzling prospect to capture his family. Not for a summer’s moment did he believe that Mun Ki or anyone else would come close to his record of more than forty thousand dollars, but from the corner of his eye he saw with assurance that some of the young men were instinctively looking out across the fields and planning where, among the hills, they would build their cemeteries when they returned with staggering riches. But from the rear of the family came a nagging question: “When Mun Ki returns a wealthy man, does he bring his strange wife back to this village?”

  “Certainly not,” Uncle Chun Fat said evenly.

  “What does he do with her?”

  “He leaves her where he found her.”

  A buzz of admiration swept over the crowd, for the solution was both right and simple. The Low Village would be contaminated if it had to accept wives with strange customs, and while the elders were congratulating Chun Fat on his perspicacity, he quieted them and told the sprawling family: “The other wives will be able to care for themselves. When I left California I had three wives. A Mexican in San Francisco and two Indians in different parts of the mountains. They had helped me, so I helped them. I gave each one a thousand dollars.” The crowd gasped at Chun Fat’s compassion, and he concluded: “Because the important thing in a man’s life is to return home to his village, to find his patient wife waiting, and in his old age to acquire two or three beautiful young girls of good family.” Behind him his three wives smiled gently as he said, “Believe me, under those circumstances a man’s joy is great.”

  When the young gambler Mun Ki accepted the betrothal his uncle had arranged for him, Chun Fat sent the Kungs in the next village not the customary thousand cakes—“Your daughter is worth one thousand pieces of gold, but please accept these poor cakes”—but two thousand and forty-three, the idea being that the number really could have been as large as he wished. Each cake was the size of a plate: soft sponge cakes, cakes stuffed with chopped nuts and sugar, hard flat cakes, cakes lined with rich mince, and others decorated with expensive sweetmeats. He also sent sixty-nine pigs, four chickens with red feathers, and four large baked fish. Then, to prove his munificence, he added forty-seven pieces of gold, each wrapped in red paper. The procession that carried these things to the Kungs was a quarter of a mile in length.

  From two of the ceremonial pigs the bride’s family cut off the heads and tails, wrapped them in silk and returned them to the Kees, indicating that the largesse had been both humbly and impressively received by the bride’s family. But on her own account she sent three gifts to the groom: an embroidered red cloth which he would use as a belt, a wallet for the worldly wealth which she would help him earn, and two pairs of pants.

  It was obviously going to be a tremendous wedding, and it dwarfed the thirty-one others that were proceeding at the same time. Two weeks before the Kees were scheduled to depart for the ship waiting at Hong Kong, the ceremony took place amid all the grandeur the two Lowland villages could provide, and when the days of celebration ended, young Kee Mun Ki brought his bride home and tried mightily to impregnate her before the time for sailing, but he failed.

  On the morning when Uncle Chun Fat assembled his hundred and fifty Punti for the three-day hike to Canton, where they would board a river steamer for Hong Kong and the American ship, he saw before him a rather bleary-eyed, sexually exhausted group of men. “A good march along the river will toughen them up,” he reassured himself, because he realized that if he could deliver his volunteers in good condition, he had a right to expect that subsequently Dr. Whipple would commission him to conscript many more, all at two dollars a head. He therefore moved among his troops encouraging them to spruce up, but when he came to his nephew Kee Mun Ki, he scarcely recognized him. The young gambler had been drunk for two weeks, hardly out of bed for ten days, and looked as if he might collapse during the first hundred yards of the march to Canton. Realizing that he had to depend upon this youth for transmitting orders to the Hakka, Uncle Chun Fat started slapping him back and forth across the cheeks, and slowly the young man’s eyes began to focus. “I’ll be all right,” the gambler mumbled. “In Macao once I was drunk for three weeks. But not with a fine wife like the Kung girl.” And Chun Fat saw with pleasure that when his nephew’s services were really required, the brash young gambler would be ready. “You’ll do well in the Fragrant Tree Country,” Chun Fat reassured the young man. “I expect to,” the young husband replied. It was just a little insulting, the way in which he spoke to his uncle on a man-to-man basis, as if they were equals.

  Now came a moment of intense excitement, for down from the hills marched the contingent of Hakka, thin men, dressed in rude, tough clothing, their pigtails long and their faces tanned. Two months before, the arrival of such a group would have signified war; now it occasioned only mutual disgust. Defiantly, the Hakka marched up to where the Punti stood, and against his own prejudices Uncle Chun Fat thought: “They’ll do well in the new country.” Because he was making two dollars a head on the Hakka, and hoped to make more in the future, he wanted to go up to them and bow in greeting, but he realized that this might be interpreted as Punti subservience and would never be forgiven by his family, so he glared at them as custom required. For a long moment the two groups stood staring insolently at each other. During nearly a thousand years they had lived side by side without ever speaking; they had met only in death and violence; there had been only one marriage. Now, with their inherited hatreds, they were going to travel in a small ship to a small island.

  Mun Ki broke the spell. Pulling himself together, he stepped forward and said to a man named Char, leader of the Hakka, “We will start to Canton now. Some of your men look tired already.”

  Char studied the young Punti to see if this was intended as an insult, and replied evenly, “No wonder they look tired. They’ve been drunk for two weeks … like you.”

  “I got married,” Mun Ki explained.

  “So did they,” the Hakka Char said, and the antagonists smiled.

  The contingents started forward, but as they did, the Punti looked for the last time at their Low Village and its bright red ancestral hall. This was their home, the soil of their heart, the abiding place of their ancestors. Their wives were here. Many had sons whose names were already on the tablets in the pavilion. The graves where the ghosts of their forefathers walked at night were in this land, and to leave the Golden Valley even for a few years was punishment almost beyond the bearing. “I will come back soon!” Mun Ki called, not to his wife, nor to his domineering uncle, nor to any living person. “I will come back!” he called to his ancestors.

  It took three days to reach Canton, the Punti mov
ing together in one group, the Hakka in another, and during this vigorous exercise Kee Mun Ki whipped himself back into his customary lean condition. His eyes cleared and his wits sharpened, and as he entered the great city, seeking out Dr. Whipple to deliver the workers, he wondered if he could slip away for a few hours for some intense gambling with the British sailors at the quay, but unfortunately Dr. Whipple had a river boat waiting and herded his charges directly aboard. When they were assembled he spoke to them in quiet English, and his interpreter explained: “The American has discovered that if he tries to take you men out of China by way of Hong Kong, where his ship is visible in the bay, the government will execute every one of you. For daring to leave China. So we are sailing to Macao, where it will be possible to depart without being killed.”

  Quickly Mun Ki moved up to the interpreter and said, “In Macao I must see my old employer and bid him farewell. Please tell the American.”

  There was some discussion and the interpreter said, “All right. But the others must stay overnight inside a compound until the ship arrives from Hong Kong.”

  Mun Ki congratulated himself and began daydreaming of the great fortune he would make on his last hours at the gambling tables, when the interpreter returned and dashed his fantasies by announcing: “The American remembers that you are the only one who can speak with the Hakka, so you will not be allowed to leave the compound.”

  Mun Ki tried to appeal this unfair decision, but the interpreter, after discussing the protest with Whipple, said bluntly, “You will stay inside the compound.”

  When the coastline of Macao appeared, with its low white Portuguese buildings shining in the sunlight, and its military guard loafing about in European uniforms, the Punti and Hakka workers lined the river boat to study the strange port: a foreign city nestling on the coast of China, a city with one European for every two hundred Chinese, a curious, lawless enclave that was neither China nor Portugal but the worst of each. But to Mun Ki, well versed in the evil ways of Macao, it was a pragmatist’s paradise. He saw the tiled roofs of the Brothel of Spring Nights and thought tenderly of some of the girls he had helped to bring there, strong, happy girls who enjoyed their work. Farther on he saw the gambling halls, where he had known both success and failure, and as the river boat drew closer to the shore, so his excitement mounted, until at last he moved swiftly among the Punti, whispering, “Lend me your money! I am going to the gambling halls and I will return with two for one.” Some were suspicious of their brash cousin; others respected him for his daring, and in time he had a considerable number of coins. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he whispered. “Say nothing to the fool from Canton.”

  So when the river boat touched the quay, and there was much jostling among the Chinese and calls back and forth between the Portuguese officials, Mun Ki slipped deftly away, disappeared into the piles of merchandise stacked along the quay, and hurried up a back alley to the Brothel of Spring Nights. “You must have celebrated the festival of Ching Ming as never before,” the brothel keeper observed icily.

  “I got married,” Mun Ki explained.

  “Ah, that’s very good!” the keeper expounded. “Every man should have a loyal and patient wife. I count the beginning of my happiness from the day I married and began having a large family.”

  “I am also leaving China for the Fragrant Tree Country,” Mun Ki said honestly. “I’ve come to get my things.”

  “You’re leaving me!” the proprietor stormed. “After I’ve spent all this time and money training …” Suddenly he stopped ranting and asked, “Did you say the Fragrant Tree Country?”

  “Yes. Sugar fields.”

  “Now that’s really strange!” the brothel keeper cried, tapping his knee with his forefinger. “I have some rather important work that requires doing in that country. Yes.” He went to a file of papers and sorted out one from a Punti who had gone to the Fragrant Tree land some years before, and this man, remembering how well the Brothel of Spring Nights had been run in Macao, had written to the proprietor asking for certain assistance. Holding the letter between his teeth, Mun Ki’s superior studied the young gambler and then asked, “Would you be willing to execute a rather difficult commission for me?”

  “Do I get paid?” Uncle Chun Fat’s nephew asked bluntly.

  “You do.”

  “I’ll do it.”

  “I thought you would.”

  “What’s the job?”

  “I’ve got a girl tied up in the little room. Been planning to ship her to Manila. We can’t use her here, as you’ll see. Will you deliver her to my friend in the Fragrant Tree Country?”

  “I will. Which room?”

  “The one where the Russian girl used to be.”

  Mun Ki forgot his gambling for a moment, walked down a narrow hall, and kicked open the familiar door. Inside, the blinds were drawn, and in the darkness, on the floor, lay a trussed-up girl, knees lashed to chin, almost unconscious from hunger and lack of water. With his foot Mun Ki rolled her over and saw that she was dressed in a cheap blue cotton smock and trousers; her big feet proved that she was a Hakka. In disgust Mun Ki slammed the door and returned to his employer.

  “Who wants a Hakka?” he demanded.

  “Nobody,” the brothel keeper agreed. “I paid some of General Wang’s soldiers to kidnap half a dozen girls, and they brought back this one. I was going to send her to Manila. Over there they don’t know the difference.”

  “How much for me if I take her to the Fragrant Tree Country?” Mun Ki asked.

  “Twenty Mexican dollars,” the proprietor replied.

  “Paid now? I’d like to double it in the gambling rooms.”

  “Half paid now,” the canny brothel keeper agreed.

  He gave Mun Ki the ten Mexican dollars, and the young man was about to dash over to the gambling, but the proprietor suggested, “Maybe you better feed her. She’s been tied up for two days. The soldiers seem to have treated her rather badly before they turned her in, and I was afraid she might run away after I had paid for her.”

  “Did you give much?” Mun Ki inquired.

  “For a Hakka? That I couldn’t use?”

  The young gambler returned to the room, yelled for a maid to bring him some hot tea and rice, and then parted the curtains. He saw at his feet a young Hakka woman of about eighteen. Even when her face healed she would probably not be a pretty woman, and the manner in which she was gagged and trussed did not permit any estimate of her general appearance. Therefore, more in a spirit of investigation than humanity Mun Ki kneeled down and started to untie the merciless ropes. As he loosened one after the other, he could hear the girl groaning with relief, but he noticed that even so her limbs did not automatically stretch out toward their normal position, for they had been constricted so long that some of their muscles had gone into spasm. Again motivated by investigation, he started gently to unfold her hands and pull her arms down along her body. He pushed her shoulders back and could hear joints creaking in protest. She groaned deeply and fainted, but then the maid brought the tray, and he applied tea to her lips and gradually she regained consciousness and began to drink. She was so desperate for liquids that even Mun Ki was impressed, and he sent for more tea. As its warmth circulated through her body, the girl began to return to an awareness of where she was, and she looked in terror at the man who held her, but the manner in which he started to feed her the rice, waiting until she had chewed each grain lovingly, lest someone steal it from her … this made her think that perhaps he might not be like the others who had captured her that night before the Ching Ming festival. The things they had done in the three weeks they had dragged her and their other captives through the countryside she had already forgotten, for they were too terrible to remember. Instinctively she felt that this man would not treat her so.

  Char Nyuk Tsin was the first Hakka the young gambler had ever touched, and it was with instinctive loathing that he now did so, and yet it was a strange fact that her response to his kindness moved him and
made him want to be kinder yet. He held her shoulders in his left arm and fed her warm rice with his right, and when the maid brought in some cabbage broth, he gave her the spoon and encouraged her to eat, but her wrists were so swollen from the ropes that she could not do so. He therefore started to massage them, and gradually blood circulated to her fingers and she could hold the spoon, but she could not operate her shoulders. So he massaged her back and neck, and instinctively his hand slipped forward over her shoulders and he felt her hard little breasts. Almost against his will there came a moment of awakening, and he felt memories of his soft young wife from the Kung village come flooding over him, and he lifted away Nyuk Tsin’s smock and caressed her body, and then he slipped off her trousers, and when her knees and ankles remained in their rigid, muscle-locked condition, he gently massaged them until they relaxed, and he saw with increasing pleasure how slim and beautiful this girl’s body was. Reminded of his bride, he quickly slid out of his clothes and threw them against the door, saying to the Hakka girl as he did so, “I will not hurt you.”