Europe broke in to ask, “How much can we claim for?”
“How many buildings did we have?” America asked.
The hui waited while Africa counted up in his mind. “We would have a very substantial claim,” he said finally. “The restaurant, the stores, the houses, my office. The Kee claim could be one of the biggest.”
“Oh, no!” Nyuk Tsin interrupted. “Because if that were the case, you could never stand forth as the leader of the claims committee. We will put in some of our claims as Wu Chow’s Auntie. And wherever possible we will claim in the names of your Hawaiian wives. The Kee claim itself must not be large. Africa, it’s your job to see that it isn’t. Use the Chings, anybody, if you have to.”
At this point Australia made one of the most pregnant observations of the night: “I don’t think I ever want to see Chinatown again. After what they did to it today.”
Coldly, yet with compassion for those with less courage than herself, Nyuk Tsin remarked, “There will be many in the next weeks who feel as you do, Australia. Today will be a memory too terrible to accept. They will decide to surrender their land in Chinatown. And if they do, we will buy it.”
There was a long silence as the brothers looked down at the scarred city, visible now and then through the low clouds of smoke that hung in the valleys. On the ocean beyond, the long surf came rolling in, impartially as it had for millions of years, and the Kee boys somehow understood what their mother was urging them to do. From despair hope rises; from defeat victory. There are only three bad years, followed by six wonderfully rich ones. The city is burned, but it must be rebuilt. The family is nearly destroyed, but if there is one man left alive, or one woman, it must go on. Night falls with the smell of destruction, but day rises with the smell of wet mortar … and building resumes.
Nyuk Tsin added: “We must never try to convince any man that he wants to leave Chinatown. We must be careful to drive no unfair bargains. And although we can’t pay much now, we can promise to pay a great deal in the future. Our credit is good. They know a Kee will pay.”
Nyuk Tsin added: “If two pieces of land are for sale, try to buy the one nearest the ones we already own, because stores in the future will be bigger, and we can put our parcels of land together and make each one more valuable than it was before.”
Nyuk Tsin added: “Africa, in the last stages of the committee you must insist that you cannot serve on the board that will actually distribute the money. Because if you are on that board, you could not rightfully give substantial amounts to the Kees, but if you are not on it, everyone who is will say, ‘If it hadn’t been for Africa, we wouldn’t be here today.’ And they will be generous on our behalf.”
Nyuk Tsin added: “As I came through the burned areas I saw that the only thing that was left standing anywhere was the iron safes. The haoles will think them no longer of use. Australia, it will be a good job for you to buy them all. Then figure out some way to make them work again.” When her youngest son protested: “Wu Chow’s Auntie, I’ve never worked on safes,” she replied sharply, “Learn.”
Toward daybreak Nyuk Tsin added: “If we succeed, people will hate us for owning so much land and they will say we stole it from people after the fire. Ignore them. A city belongs to those who are willing to fight for it.”
Finally, Nyuk Tsin added: “I have a little money saved and many vegetables. All of our women and girls must work as servants with haole families, for that will feed the women and also give us money. Europe and America must start to visit every haole store tomorrow, begging for supplies on easy credit so that they can open new stores. Do it tomorrow, while the haoles are sorry for what happened today, for they will give you terms tomorrow that you will not be able to get next week.” She smiled at her four sons and said, “We must work.”
But at dawn Uliassutai Karakoram Blake puffed up the hillside with a list of names of men who were safe at another camp on the other side of Nuuanu River, and when he read in loud Chinese syllables: “Asia Kee, who runs the restaurant,” then Nyuk Tsin dropped her head in her hands.
V
From the Inland Sea
IN THE YEAR 1902, when the reconstruction of Honolulu’s Chinatown was completed, one of the isolated farm villages of Hiroshima-ken, at the southern end of Japan’s main island, stubbornly maintained an ancient courtship custom which everyone knew to be ridiculous but which, perhaps for that very reason, produced good results.
When some lusty youth spotted a marriageable girl he did not speak directly to her, nor did he invite any of his friends to do so. Instead, he artfully contrived to present himself before this girl a dozen times a week. She might be coming home from the Shinto shrine under the cryptomeria trees, and suddenly he would appear, silent, moody, tense, like a man who has just seen a ghost. Or, when she returned from the store with a fish, she would unexpectedly see this agitated yet controlled young man staring at her.
His part of this strange game required that he never speak, that he share his secret with nobody. Her rules were that not once, by even so much as a flicker of an eye, must she indicate that she knew what he was doing. He loomed silently before her, and she passed uncomprehendingly on. Yet obviously, if she was a prudent girl, she had to find some way to encourage his courtship so that ultimately he might send his parents to the matchmakers, who would launch formal conversations with her parents; for a girl in this village could never tell which of the gloomy, intense young men might develop into a serious suitor; so in some mysterious manner wholly understood by nobody she indicated, without seeing him or without ever having spoken to him, that she was ready.
Apart from certain species of the bird kingdom, where courtship was conducted with much the same ritual, this sexual parading was one of the strangest on earth, but in this village of Hiroshima-ken it worked, because it involved one additional step of which I have not yet spoken, and it was this next step that young Sakagawa Kamejiro found himself engaged in.
In 1902 he was twenty years old, a rugged, barrel-chested, bowlegged little bulldog of a man with dark, unblemished skin and jet-black hair. He had powerful arms which hung out from his body, as if their musculature was too great to be compressed, and he gave the appearance of a five-foot, one-inch accumulation of raw power, bursting with vital drives yet confused because he knew no specific target upon which to discharge them. In other words, Kamejiro was in love.
He had fallen in love on the very day that the Sakagawa family council had decided that he should be the one to go on the ship to Hawaii, where jobs in the sugar fields were plentiful. It was not the prospect of leaving home that had aroused his inchoate passions, for he knew that his parents, responsible for eight children and one old woman, could not find enough rice to feed the family. He had observed how infrequently fish got to the Sakagawa table—and meat not at all—so he was prepared to leave.
It happened late one afternoon when he stood in the tiny Sakagawa paddy field and looked out at the shimmering islands of the Inland Sea, and he understood in that brilliant moment, with the westering sun playing upon the most beautiful of all waters, that he might be leaving Hiroshima-ken forever. “I said I would go for only five years,” he muttered stubbornly to himself, “but things can happen. I might never see these islands again. Maybe I won’t plough this field … ever again.” And a consuming sorrow possessed him, for of all the lands he could imagine, there could be no other on the face of the earth more exciting than these fields along the coastline of Hiroshima-ken.
Kamejiro was by no charitable interpretation of the word a poet. He was not even literate, nor had he ever looked at picture books. He had never talked much at home, and among the boys of the village he was known to be a stolid fighter rather than a talker. He had always ignored girls and, although he followed his father’s advice on most things, had stubbornly refused to think of marriage. But now, as he stood in the faltering twilight and saw the land of his ancestors for the first time—in history and in passion and in love, as men occasionall
y perceive the land upon which they have been bred—he wanted brutishly to reach out his hand and halt the descending sun. He wanted to continue his spiritual embrace of the niggardly little field of which he was so much a part. “I may never come back!” he thought. “Look at the sun burning its way into the sea. You would think …” He did not put his thoughts into words, but stood in the paddy field, mud about ankles, entertaining tremendous surges of longing. How magnificent his land was!
It was in this mood that he started homeward, for in the Japanese custom all rice fields were gathered together while the houses to which they pertained clustered in small villages. Thus arable land was not wasted on housing, but the system did require farmers to walk substantial distances from their fields to their homes, and on this night little bulldog Sakagawa Kamejiro, his arms hanging out with their powerful muscles, walked home. Had he met some man who had earlier insulted him, as often happened in village life, he would surely have thrashed him then and there, for he thought that he wanted to fight; but as he walked he happened to see, at the edge of the village, the girl Yoko, and although he had seen her often before, it was not until then—when she walked with a slight wind at her dress and with a white working-woman’s towel about her head—that he realized how much like the spirit of the land she was, and he experienced an almost uncontrollable desire to pull her off the footpath and into the rice field and have it over with on the spot.
Instead, he stood dumb as she approached. His eyes followed her and his big arms quivered, and as she passed she knew that this Kamejiro who was earmarked for Hawaii would watch her constantly throughout the following days, and she began to look for him at strange locations, and he would be there, stolid, staring, his arms hanging awkwardly down. Without ever acknowledging by a single motion of her own that she had even seen him, she conveyed the timeless message of the village: “It would not be unreasonable if you were to do so.”
Therefore, on a soft spring night when the rice fields were beginning to turn delicate green, the sweet promise of food to come, Sakagawa Kamejiro secretly dressed in the traditional garb of the Hiroshima-ken night lover. He wore his best pair of trousers, his clean straw zori and a shirt that did not smell. The most conspicuous part of his costume, however, was a white cloth mask which wound about his head and covered his nose and mouth. Thus properly attired, he slipped out of the Sakagawa home, down a back path to Yoko’s and waited several hours as her family closed up the day’s business, blew out the lights and threw no more shadows on the shoji. When he was satisfied that Yoko had retired, with a reasonable chance that her parents might be sleeping, he crept toward the room which from long study he had spotted as hers, and in some mysterious way known only in the villages, she had anticipated that this was the night he would visit her, so the shoji had been left unlocked, and in a moment he slipped bemasked into the room.
Yoko saw him in the faint moonlight, but said nothing. Without removing his mask, for that was essential to the custom, he crept to her bed and placed his left hand upon her cheek. Then he took her right hand in his and held her fingers in a certain way, which from the beginning of Japan had meant, “I want to sleep with you,” and of her own accord she changed the position of his fingers, which timelessly had signified, “You may.”
With never a word spoken, with never a mask removed, Kamejiro silently slipped into bed with the intoxicating girl. She would not allow him to remove her clothing, for she knew that later she might have to do many things in a hurry, but that did not inconvenience Kamejiro, and in a few stolid, fumbling moments he made her ready to accept him. Not even at the height of their passion did Yoko utter a word, and when they collapsed mutually in blazing gratification and he fell asleep like an animal, she did not touch the mask, for it was there to protect her. At any moment in the love-making she could have pushed him away, and he would have had to go. The next day they could have met on the village street—as they would tomorrow—and neither would have been embarrassed, for so long as the mask was in place, Yoko did not know who was in her room. So long as the mask protected him, Kamejiro could not suffer personal humiliation or loss of face, for no matter what Yoko said or did, it could not embarrass him, for officially he was not there. It was a silly system, this Hiroshima courtship routine, but it worked.
When Kamejiro wakened, there was a moment when he could not recall where he was, and then he felt Yoko’s body near his and this time they began to caress each other as proper lovers do, and the long night passed, but on the third sweet love-making, when the joy of possession completely captured them, they grew bolder and unwittingly made a good deal of noise, so that Yoko’s father was awakened, and he shouted, “Who’s in the house?”
And instantly Yoko was required to scream, “Oh, how horrible! A man is trying to get into my room!” And she continued to wail pitifully as lights flashed on throughout the village.
“Some beast is trying to rape Yoko-san!” an old woman screamed.
“We must kill him!” Yoko’s father shouted, pulling on his pants.
“The family is forever disgraced!” Yoko’s mother moaned, but since each of these phrases had been shouted into the night in precisely these intonations for many centuries, everyone knew exactly how to interpret them. But it was essential for the preservation of family dignity that the entire village combine to seek out the rapist, and now, led by Yoko’s outraged father, the night procession formed.
“I saw a man running down this way!” the old woman bellowed.
“The ugly fiend!” another shouted. “Trying to rape a young girl!”
The villagers coursed this way and that, seeking the rapist, but prudently they avoided doing two things: they never took a census of the young men of the village, for by deduction that would have shown who was missing and would have indicated the rapist; nor did they look into the little barn where rice hay was kept, for they knew that the night fiend was certain to be hiding there, and it would be rather embarrassing if he were discovered, for then everyone would have to go through the motions of pretending to beat him.
In the hay barn, with chickens cackling, Kamejiro put on his pants, knocked the mud off his zori, and tucked away his white mask. When this was done, he had time to think: “She is sweeter than a breeze off the sea.” But when he saw her later that day, coming from the fish stall, he looked past her and she ignored him, and this was a good thing, for as yet it was not agreed that Yoko would marry him, and if she elected not to do so, it was better if neither of them officially knew who had attempted to rape her. In fact, during that entire day and for some days thereafter Yoko was the acknowledged heroine of the village, for as one old woman pointed out: “I cannot remember a girl who screamed more loudly than Yoko-san while she was defending herself against that awful man … whoever he was.” Yoko’s father also came in for considerable praise in that he had dashed through every alley in the village, shouting at the top of his voice, “I’ll kill him!” And farmers said approvingly to their wives, “It was lucky for whoever tried to get into that house that Yoko’s father didn’t catch him.”
So the last days before the ship’s departure were spent in this make-believe manner. Kamejiro, the object of much admiration because of his willingness to go to Hawaii, worked hard in the family rice field, not because his labor was required, but because he loved the feel of growing rice. Neighbors, whose ancestors had farmed nearby fields for thousands of years, came by to say farewell, and to each he said, “I’ll be back.” And the more he said these words the more he believed that only death would prevent him from returning to the tiny, mountain-shaded, sea-swept fields of Hiroshima-ken.
Three or four nights a week he donned his magic mask and climbed more or less surreptitiously into bed with Yoko, and they found each other so completely enjoyable, and so mysterious in the unknowing night, that without ever facing up to the problem, they drifted into a mute understanding that one day they would marry. Kamejiro, finding endless delight in the girl’s soft body, prayed tha
t she might become pregnant, so that he would be forced to marry her before he left for Hawaii, but this was not to be, and as the final week began, he spoke haltingly with his mother.
“When I have been in Hawaii for a little while, and after I have sent you a lot of money, I think I may get married.” He blushed a deep red under his dark skin and prepared to confide: “At such time, will you speak to Yoko-chan for me?” But his mother had long waited for this opportunity to advise her favorite son, and now she poured forth her fund of Hiroshima wisdom.
“Kamejiro, I have heard that it is a terrible thing for a man to travel overseas the way you are doing. Not that you will be robbed, because you are a strong man and able to handle such things as well as any.” She was in her fifties, a small, stoop-shouldered woman with deep wrinkles from endless hours in the sun. She loved rice and could eat four bowls at any meal, but she could never afford to do that, so she remained as skinny as she had been in her youth, when Kamejiro’s father had crept into her sleeping room.
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