Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  It was in 1868 that Nyuk Tsin and the Chinese community throughout Hawaii finally realized how strange and barbarous the white man’s society really was, for word came into Honolulu that the ancient father of the Hales had died alone, ignored and untended on the island of Maui. The news was difficult to believe, and Nyuk Tsin gathered with her Hakka friends at the Hakka store, while Mun Ki sat on his haunches in the Punti store trying to get the appalling news into focus. In both stores this was the news:

  “You say the father of all these famous and rich people was allowed to die in poverty?”

  “Yes. I was there, and I saw them find his old worn-out body in the cemetery.”

  “What was he doing there, this old man?”

  “He had gone to care for his wife’s grave, and then he was doing the same for the grave of some Hawaiian lady. It looked as if he had died late in the afternoon, falling over the Hawaiian grave, and he was there all night.”

  “You say he lived in a pitiful little house?”

  “So small and dirty you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “And here his children have such big houses. Have you seen the houses of his children?”

  “No. Are they good and fine?”

  “Li Lum Fong works for his son Micah, and he says Micah’s house is one of the best in Honolulu. The old man’s first daughter is married to Hewlett, and they have much wealth. His second daughter is wed to one of the Whipples, and they have a big house, and his second son also married a Whipple, so he is very rich.”

  “Have his children grandchildren among whom the old man could have lived?”

  “The families have two grandchildren, and five, and five, and six.”

  “And he died alone?”

  “He died alone, caring for the graves, but no one cared for him.”

  When this was said, this harsh summary of the white man’s fundamental unconcern for human values and respect for one’s ancestors, the Chinese in the various stores sat glum, bewildered. Some of them, reminded of their longing to see some ancestral hall in a remote Chinese village, would rock back and forth on their haunches, trying vainly to comprehend a family with four big houses and eighteen grandchildren who had allowed an old man to die alone and untended. How could the families be indifferent to the bad luck attendant upon such an untended death? In such discussions the Chinese often wanted to speak, to say, “How I long to see my father in the High Village!” but no words came, and they returned to their gloomy discussion of Abner Hale’s death.

  “Wasn’t he the old man who knocked down the Chinese temples?”

  “Yes. I saw him once running in with a club. He limped, but when he was knocking down temples he was extremely vigorous, and the plantation managers had to put a guard on him, every day, and if the little old man started for a temple the guard would shout, ‘Here he comes again!’ and white men would run out and capture him and take him home.”

  “You would think, under those circumstances, that it would be the Chinese who wanted to see him dead, and yet it is we who are mourning him, and his own family cares nothing about his death.”

  But in the big houses there was profound, silent grief. A Mormon missionary told Micah Hale: “On the last day your father met the ferry and inquired after the girl Iliki. He then picked some flowers and I met him on the road leading to the church graveyard. He shook his stick at me and cried, ‘You are an abomination. You should be driven from the islands.’ If I had had my thoughts about me, I should have followed him then, for he seemed weak and faltering, but so often we do not do that which we should, and I passed him by, keeping away from his stick. He certainly went on to the church and tried to get the pastor to allow him to preach again on Sunday, but as you know, he wandered so much that preaching was hopeless, and the minister put him off. That was the last anyone saw of him. He was found fallen across the grave of an alii nui of Maui, a woman, I believe, that he himself had brought into the church.

  “That night I had a clear premonition that I had done an un-Christian thing in passing your father by, and once I started to see if he had gotten home correctly, but I failed to do so, but on my morning walk I stopped by his house to wish him well, and he was gone. I hurried out to the cemetery, expecting to find him fallen along the way, but as I explained, he had died at the grave.

  “Mr. Hale, I’ll not mince words. There were, as you are well aware, harsh comments made concerning your father’s death alone in Lahaina, but I know and all like me know how hard you tried to make his last days easier. He was an obstinate man and would permit no kindness. I suffered from his sharp tongue, so I know. I want to reassure you that the true facts are known, and only the fools of the city condemn you.”

  As I have said, there was profound grief in the four Hale houses, for the children could remember how their father had cared for them, and loved them, and taught them, and changed their sheets when they had fevers and sacrificed his life for them, that they might be worthy children. They could see him, a father of terrible wrath, keeping them tightly confined to the small, walled-in garden; and they remembered his dreadful lamentations when Reverend Eliphalet Thorn took them away from his care. From that day on, each of the four Hale children had tried vainly to return to his father the love he had spent on them, but he would not accept it. He rejected his oldest son Micah for having married a part-Hawaiian. He scorned David for refusing to become a minister. He despised Lucy for having married young Hewlett, who although he was pure white was nevertheless half-brother to half-castes. And he ignored Esther, his baby, for having married a Whipple who had publicly made fun of missionaries. The sorrow of his four children was deep.

  But they were also New Englanders, and when the Honolulu community whisperingly condemned them for having abandoned their poor old dim-witted father, allowing him to die in a filthy shack in distant Lahaina, the Hales felt it imperative that they appear in public. They accepted the scorn and walked proudly as if there were no whispers following them. When aggravating hostesses tempted them with invitations, to see how they were bearing up, they accepted, and they moved normally in Honolulu society, grimly bearing the charges made against them. It was their duty.

  But the Chinese servants, seeing this, were more perplexed than ever, and in the stores they added to the whispers: “Li Lum Fong told me that last night Micah Hale and Mrs. Hewlett and Mrs. Whipple all went to a party. Now please tell me, please explain how a family that allows their poor old father to die in poverty, untended, can be so shameless as to appear in public, drinking alcohol and laughing? Even before the first year of mourning has ended.”

  “You will never understand these heartless people,” the Chinese agreed.

  WHEN MUN KI’S SON Asia started growing into a bow-legged, chubby-faced little toddler, he was promptly joined by the Continent of Europe and later Africa, who rioted around the kitchen floor as their parents prepared meals for the Whipples; and with the coming of these children a curious transformation occurred in the relationship between Mun Ki and his wife. Many centuries earlier Confucius had pointed out that the harmonious existence of husband and wife was most difficult to sustain: “Between the two let there be respect.”

  It was common, therefore, in Chinese families for a husband never to hand his wife anything, for to do so seemed to imply: “I wish to give you this. You must take it.” Instead, he placed the object near his wife and she picked it up at her own time. Some ignored this particular convention, but there was another that all observed. As the scholar at the Punti store had explained to Dr. Whipple, a respectful husband never spoke his wife’s name, neither in public nor at home. As soon as a girl married she became simply Mun Ki’s wife; that was her profession and her personality. But when children arrived, special care was taken to hide her name from them, and there was scarcely a Chinese growing up in Hawaii who knew his mother’s name. It was never spoken.

  In Mun Ki’s case the problem was further complicated by the fact that his Hakka girl was not properly a wife at all, b
ut merely a concubine, and she must never be called Mother; to do so would be offensive. It is true that she had borne the three sons, but their real mother was the official Kung wife who had remained dutifully behind in the Low Village. By Chinese custom this first wife would be the legal mother of any children Mun Ki might have, anywhere in the world.

  So the scrawny Hakka girl became Wu Chow’s Auntie—the Auntie of the Five Continents—and by this name she was known throughout the city. She considered herself fortunate, because in many families concubines like her were known contemptuously as “That One” or more simply “She,” but Mun Ki was not willing to give her those names, for he was impressed by the Punti scholar’s prediction that his Hakka wife was going to bear many sons and that they would share the continents. So whenever the tricky little gambler addressed his wife as Wu Chow’s Auntie, he felt a special love for her.

  Not one of her children or many grandchildren would ever know her name, nor would they think of her as Mother, for as Mun Ki sternly reminded the boys: “Your mother lives in China.” And the boys became convinced that in the Low Village their mother waited for them, and it was to her they owed their devotion. In time a photographer traveled out from Canton, and in some villages he was stoned as a sorcerer attempting to steal men’s spirits with his magic, but in the Low Village, Uncle Chun Fat, who had been in California, said to his nephew’s pretty wife, “Get your picture taken and send it to the Fragrant Tree Country.” She did, and the Kee boys grew up with this brown-tinted picture of a regal-looking, well-dressed Punti woman staring down at them from the wall; and this photograph evoked in them a sterner sense of filial responsibility than Nyuk Tsin ever did.

  She was not concerned with these matters, for as a Hakka she was governed by two supreme drives: above all else she wanted an education for her sons, and to attain it she would sacrifice anything; after that she wanted to own some land. To attain either of these goals she required money, and she had been in Honolulu only a few weeks before she started hawking vegetables. Now, without telling the Whipples, she took in the laundry of unmarried Hakka men, but one day Dr. Whipple asked his wife, “Amanda, what’s all that blue clothing doing on the back lawn?”

  “We don’t have any blue clothing,” she replied, and they investigated.

  “No more laundry!” Dr. Whipple ordered, but by that time she had already earned her beginning store of coins.

  She then switched to serving meals on the side to bachelor Chinese, and this proved fairly profitable until Amanda Whipple grew suspicious of the many strange men who were trailing up Nuuanu and slipping through the back garden gate. “John, forgive my evil mind,” she said one night, “but do you think our maid is … well … all these men?”

  “After all, she is only the cook’s second wife, and I suppose that if he thinks he can earn a little more money.”

  “John! How horrible!”

  They agreed that something must be done and Dr. Whipple appointed himself detective. Some days later he staggered into the sitting room, choking with laughter. “Ah, these evil Chinese!” he chuckled. “Amanda, Captain Hoxworth should see what’s going on in our back yard. It’d prove every suspicion he ever had.”

  “John! What is it?”

  “Mrs. Kee, horrible thought, is serving hot meals. To unmarried men.”

  Mrs. Whipple broke into an embarrassed laugh and ending by asking, “Why do our servants try so many ways to make extra money? We pay them good wages.”

  “They are determined to educate their children,” Dr. Whipple explained.

  “Good for them, but not by running a restaurant on our property.” Again Nyuk Tsin was ordered to desist, but again she wound up with more coins than when she started.

  Her big venture came when she discovered that two acres of swampland on the Whipple property could be converted into money. This time she went to Dr. Whipple and in the barbarous pidgin that all Honolulu spoke, conveyed to him the following: “Could I use this swampland?”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “To grow taro.”

  “Do you Pakes eat taro?”

  “No. We will make poi.”

  “You don’t eat poi, do you?”

  “No. We will sell it to the natives.”

  Dr. Whipple made some inquiries and found that Nyuk Tsin had a good idea. The Hawaiians were now working for wages in livery stables and mechanics’ shops and no longer wanted to waste their time making poi, so that the profession had fallen into the hands of Pakes. The bizarre idea appealed to Whipple and he told Amanda, “I’ve owned that swampland for years but it took a Pake to show me what to do with it. The more I see these people, the better I like them.”

  As the days passed he became increasingly impressed by what Nyuk Tsin could accomplish with land. Whenever she found a few minutes’ respite from her long hours as maid, she would hurry down to her taro patch, tie her conical hat under her chin, roll up her blue trousers and plunge barefooted into the soft mud. She built dikes better than most men and constructed ingenious waterways that drained the land so it could be tilled and later flooded for taro. Dr. Whipple, watching her beaver-like industry, thought: “She has a positive affinity for the land.” He was not surprised, therefore, when she came up to him one hot day, wiping her muddy hands on a bunch of grass, to ask, “Will you sell me the swamp?”

  “Where would you get the money?” he teased.

  She astounded him by disclosing how much she had already saved. “The rest I will get from selling poi, and year after year I will pay you the money.”

  This pleased Whipple, for it was the kind of frugal bargaining his own New England ancestors had probably engaged in when they wanted to send their sons to college; but he had to disappoint her. “This land’s too close to our house to sell. But there’s some up the valley I might let you have.”

  “Can we go see it?” Nyuk Tsin asked. “Now?” Her lust for land was such that she would have walked miles to see a field. For nearly fifty generations her Hakka people had yearned for rich valley lands, and here she stood among the choicest, determined to own some. That day it wasn’t convenient for Dr. Whipple to take her up the valley to see the useless swampland he had in mind and later he forgot, but Nyuk Tsin never did.

  Her progress to ownership was deterred by two setbacks. First her husband vetoed the idea of buying land, explaining: “We won’t be here long. It would be foolish to buy land that we would have to abandon when we sailed back to China.”

  “I want a field,” Nyuk Tsin argued in her stubborn Hakka way.

  “No,” Mun Ki reasoned, “our plan must be to save every dime we can get and take our wealth back to the Low Village. When we reach there, I’ll send you on up to the High Village, because you wouldn’t feel at ease among the Punti and my wife wouldn’t want you around.”

  “What will happen to the boys?” Nyuk Tsin asked.

  “Well, since they’re really Punti, with Punti names, they’ll stay with their mother.” Seeing her shock he added hastily, “Of course, I’ll give you a little of the money we’ve saved and you can buy yourself a piece of land in the Hakka village, and probably we’ll see each other from time to time along the road.”

  “I would rather have the land here,” Nyuk Tsin pleaded.

  “Wu Chow’s Auntie!” Mun Ki snapped. “We’re not staying here.”

  Her second setback involved poi, for clever as the Chinese were, they could not master the trick of making this island staple. Nyuk Tsin raised the taro beautifully, and Dr. Whipple said he had rarely seen better. She harvested it correctly, removing first the dark green leaves to sell as a spinach-like vegetable. Then she peeled the stalks for cooking like asparagus, the flowers having already been sold to be eaten like cauliflower. This left the big, dark corms for the making of poi. In the raw state they contained bitter crystals of oxide that made them inedible, but when boiled and peeled they were delicious, except that they looked like Roquefort cheese. It was these boiled corms that Nyuk Tsin hauled to
her poi board, a six-foot-long trough in which she hammered the taro with a lava-rock pounder, smashing and gradually liquefying the mass until finally a glob of sticky, glutinous paste resulted. This was poi, the world’s most remarkable starch: it was alkaline rather than acid; it was more easily digestible than potatoes, more nourishing than rice; an infant of two weeks could eat poi with safety, while an old man whose stomach was riddled with ulcers could enjoy it with relish. Dr. Whipple, who amused his associates by having poi at his meals instead of bread or potatoes, termed it: “The only perfect food.”

  Hawaiians loved poi and were relieved when the Pakes took over the grueling work of manufacturing it, but they could not learn to like poi the way Nyuk Tsin and her husband made it. On days when poi was ready to be sold, it was an island custom to hang along the street a small white flag, and when Nyuk Tsin first displayed hers she had many pleased customers, but later they complained that her product lacked quality. Her poi was not the bland, neutral food they craved, and with apologies they inquired if she had been careful to keep her utensils clean, for whereas in ordinary living the Hawaiians were fanatics about cleanliness, in the making of poi they were maniacs. If a fly lighted on a poi bowl, they would throw the contents out, and the damning word was passed along that Pake poi wasn’t clean. Worse, it had lumps.

  A further complication developed. The dollar that formed the basic currency of the islands was broken down into three conflicting coin systems: ten American dimes equaled a dollar; so did eight Spanish reals; so did four English shillings. The latter could be chopped in half with a cold chisel to make eight sixpences to the dollar. Since dimes and reals were of about the same size, the Hawaiians tried to convince the Chinese that a dime worth ten cents was just as good as a real worth twelve and a half, whereas for her part Nyuk Tsin tried to collect reals and pay back dimes, so there was constant warfare.