Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  “And what would you do in Paris?”

  “Find a job. And paint, which is all I’ve ever wanted. Imagine the museums! The galleries! Imagine seeing Titians and Rembrandts in real life, instead of tiny reproductions in books.”

  Her hunger for life scared him a little. “Your running off would shame your father, maybe destroy him. Do you hate him so much?”

  “Yes, I hate him. And I love him. I hear him crying at night. But I can’t stand what he does to Mama. What he has done to others.” She took his hand, holding it tight. “It isn’t all Papa’s fault. He’s a victim of his history.”

  She explained how, at the turn of the century, Japan and Russia fought for control of Korea. In 1905 Japan, the victor, annexed and enslaved the entire country.

  “They burned Korean history books, forbade the Mother Tongue. Art and architecture were destroyed. They slaughtered villages, infants and elders. And there was mass rape, the most profound shame for Korean women. Thousands drank bowls of lye.”

  She told how Koreans were turned into second-class Japanese, fingerprinted like criminals. Children were made to take Japanese names.

  “Papa’s parents were fishmongers. Their childless landlord discovered Papa was intelligent, and sent him to university and medical school. When someone sponsored him to come to Honolulu and find a better life, he fled Korea, changing ships in Shanghai. But many nights I hear him praying for his parents. At such times there is throughout our house the smell of tidewater and raw fish. In the mornings, I smell his mother and father on his breath. . . .”

  She lay in Keo’s arms weeping like a child. “That is who he is, what he has suffered. Even though he’s violent, and has never said he loves me, I cannot really hate him.”

  Keo wiped her face, thinking how her father’s history paralleled her mother’s. Hawai‘ians invaded, their monarch crushed. Lands stolen, Mother Tongue forbidden.

  “Yes,” she whispered. “I am twice engraved.”

  Then she sat up, something in her eyes. “I will tell you one last thing. The wife Papa brought here from Korea didn’t die of illness. But of broken heart. They had a daughter, Lili, born with a clubfoot. Not wanting to start a new life with a cripple, Papa abandoned her, forced her on relatives in Shanghai. His wife went mad, and died within a year of their arrival here. My brother found letters, this is how we know.”

  She hung her head. “O Sister, Sister . . . one day I will find you.”

  HELE WALE

  To Go Empty-Handed into the World

  KEO’S FATHER, TIMOTEO, CIRCLED HIS TINY YARD, WATERING orchids from rusty Shoyu cans. His only relaxation, Sunny thought. How he kills time between corpses. She watched his eyes when he looked at his wife, sheer adoration. She felt safe here with this family. Such robust, handsome folks, it was like sitting in a grove of great dark trees, swaying and protective.

  Sometimes she sat with Leilani in the garage, singing and eating crackseed while they cleaned ‘ahi, fish scales pelting their arms and legs.

  “You like cook wit’ yo’ mama?” Leilani asked.

  Sunny thought of her mother’s house, kept so immaculate she asked permission to touch things.

  “Mama doesn’t relax like this. She’s forgotten how.” With her tongue she dislodged bits of salty crackseed from between her teeth. “The truth is, Papa treats her like a maid. Sometimes when she starts to talk, he snaps his fingers meaning quiet.”

  Leilani reared back, shocked.

  “I know Papa suffers, too. Doctors at the clinic look down on him, they see him as merely an immigrant. I imagine them snapping their fingers when he starts to talk.”

  Sometimes she coaxed her mother from the house, took her shopping at Kress’s for fabrics, eating ice-cream floats and trailing their hands across the store’s black marble walls. Or they went to Chinatown for favorite char siu duck, joyriding the trolley down King Street, its noiseless rubber wheels making it seem a trip on air. Then her mother would look at her watch and panic, forgetting Sunny, forgetting everything, rushing home to her life of genuflection.

  Sunny spent more and more time with Keo’s folks, lulled by the steady seizure of laughter in this rollicking, feverish, high-strung clan, each member so restless and full of dreams, it seemed the walls of the house bulged. She brought dishes from her mother, stuffed squid sushi, jasmine-steamed ‘pakapaka.

  Eventually she brought her mother and watching her with Leilani—their affection instant and mutual—Sunny felt envious. She had inherited that natural love of one Hawai‘ian for another, but it was diluted by her father’s blood. She wondered if that was why she had been drawn to Keo. Inside his dark exterior, she found light, strong and verifiable, a sense of who he was—congruous and proud.

  Only Malia held back from her. The girl irritated her; she seemed to penetrate every room in their house.

  “Do you find us so entertaining?” Malia asked.

  Sunny studied her, her homemade dress, her earnest hat. She felt gathering affection for her. “In fact, I envy you.”

  “If you hurt Keo,” Malia said, “I will come after you.”

  Hurt him? She wondered if she could ever mean that much to him, if any woman could. Yet because she was the type of woman she was, with a confidence that remained steadfast to its choice—without requiring self-justification, the approval of peers—Sunny’s loyalty became unshakable. Her university friends laughed at him: professional waiter, fox-trotter. Onstage he was brilliant; in conversation they found him “dull.” Without his horn he could be blinked away. Turning her back on them forever, she put herself entirely in his hands.

  So little sheltered them, they seemed to live at the tips of their senses. He began to feel such a union with her, it didn’t matter if they touched. He carried her touch with him. His feelings for her grew so intense, Keo felt tremors in his body, felt he could look at objects and raise them to their feet. He felt even if he failed, Sunny would still be there, urging him on, telling him to try again, that there was a future to live for, life ahead.

  One night practising in the garage, moths swooping round a naked lightbulb, something jolted him. Keo suddenly envisioned three people. He, and Sunny, joined by the single form they made together, a form of perfect symmetry that gave them human balance. In that moment he understood.

  “I love her. I love Sunny Sung.”

  It made him cautious, careful of her well-being. It made him more considerate of others. Each time she brought up Paris, he brought up her father—how her leaving would demoralize him.

  “He would be relieved,” she said. “But I need to take care of Mama first, give her back her life.”

  “Sunny. She has a life. It’s what she wants, or she would leave him.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “Maybe I would if I met him. Don’t you think it’s time?”

  “I couldn’t bear the shame.”

  Keo flinched, as if struck.

  “I mean the shame of having you meet this man who threw a child away, who caused his first wife’s death. I grew up lying in the dark waiting for him to come and hand me to a stranger. He wanted another son, not me.”

  “I want to meet this buggah,” he said. “I want to look him in the eye.”

  She refused, exhausting all his arguments. He turned away.

  One night she sat up in the dark. “All right,” she said softly. “All right.”

  Approaching her father’s house in Alewa Heights, he was so apprehensive, his shadow moved ahead of him. Meeting the man, Keo understood for the first time how inscrutability was a tactical skill. Samchok Sung experienced the shock of Keo with no discernible reaction other than mild glazing of the eyes, erasing from his vision that which was to him obscene. For Keo was sure that “obscene” was how the man saw him—unschooled, blasphemously dark, a sickness consuming his daughter.

  Hair a helmet of smoky gray, his bronzed face rather handsome, he was almost Western-looking except for extremely wide cheekbones and long narrow
eyes. Late fifties, lean and wiry, skilled in Tae Kwon Do. As Keo approached and tried to shake his hand, he heard the man’s heart pounding much too hard for something that was human.

  Keo had intentionally dressed loud, aloha shirt, bright linen pants, flaunting “bad taste” to escape the criticism of good taste. Yet he was so well dowered with quiet dignity, he achieved a composure that made Sunny’s father detest him on sight. Still, he talked candidly about his life—waiting tables, playing trumpet—knowing the man hated jazz. During the meal Sunny’s mother, Butterfly, chattered on about Keo’s surfing skills, his family, as if he were an appliance she was trying to sell her husband. She talked until sweat ran down her forehead, until it pressed her eyes shut.

  Not responding, Mr. Sung clicked chopsticks, brought food to his mouth, chewed in a way that was formidable. Keo leaned forward, addressing him, asking about his medical studies, his herbal teas. The man put down his chopsticks, placed his fists on either side of his plate like a man clutching prison bars. He studied his plate for long minutes, then took up his chopsticks again.

  In the silence Sunny jumped to her feet, knocking back her chair. “Yes, Papa, he is kanaka! So am I. I love him. Though you taught me love means punishment. You’ve made me hate myself for all I lack. But Keo taught me I have value, I’m not fated, I can choose. I choose my own existence. One day I will leave this house and go where there is kindness. And I will live and live, until the last day of my life!”

  Butterfly covered her face and rocked.

  “Mama, I will never abandon you. I’ll take you with me.”

  That night Keo dove into the sea, stroking with such fury, he felt sheared clean. Hours later when he struggled from the surf, she was there. He imagined the scene with her father.

  “I’ve put it behind me.” She grasped his hands like a child. “I’m going to be with you wherever you go. Maybe we’ll suffer. I don’t mind.”

  THE YEAR PASSED AND THEY ENTERED A KIND OF LIMBO, A PERIOD of waiting, looking for signs. Keo talked to shipping agents, asking the cost of passage to San Francisco, a train across the U.S. mainland, another ship to France. The cost was astounding—it would take years of saving. And now other things claimed his attention. Honolulu teemed with military men, swelling Hotel Street brothels. Clubs were jammed. Each night he raced from the Royal Hawai‘ian to Rizal’s Dance Hall with his horn.

  In December 1937 Dew Baptiste wrote Keo asking him to come to New Orleans. Scrap-metal factories were booming down south. Folks had more money to spend, and Dew was forming a jazz band. He wanted his Hula Man on trumpet. Keo read the letter over and over. Cradle of blues and jazz. Home of Fats Waller. Armstrong. The possibility of playing in that town, walking streets those men had walked, became an obsession. Yet, he felt terror.

  “You must go. You must.” Sunny shook the letter at him, the thought of his not going appalling to her. “As someone of small talents to someone truly gifted, I beg you.”

  He was shocked by her honesty. “I won’t go without you.”

  “I’ll follow you. As soon as I save some money, and take Mama home to her family. It will give you time to settle.”

  “What about Paris?”

  “Keo. New Orleans is halfway there.”

  “Swear it. Swear you’ll join me.”

  She handed him her life. “Can’t you see, I have to be with you. If you don’t take this chance, we’ll perish here.”

  DeSoto arranged his working passage on a freighter through the Panama Canal. His friends from the Royal took up a collection. Keo lost his nerve, returned the money, canceled all his plans.

  Malia sat beside him at the Steinway. “Sure, you can stay home. Grow old playing l‘au and weddings . . .”

  He spread his hand across the keys. “Don’t you see, I’m scared. Suppose I don’t have it? I still can’t read music like the pros.”

  “Our ancestors crossed one third of this earth with nothing to guide them but stars and tides. Don’t shame their memory.”

  “Would you go?” he asked. “All the way to New Orleans?”

  “I would give an arm, I swear, to get off this rock. But I don’t have your talent. I’m not sure what I have.” Her voice turned harsh. “Brother, if you don’t do this—how will you live with it?”

  One night his parents came to him, his mother weeping, his father so stricken, small movements in his throat made him a child again.

  “Best friend fo’ journeying is truth,” Leilani said. “Time you know t’ings, Keo. Sixteen my babies went die before DeSoto, Malia, you. So much pilikia in dose days. Our queen t’rowed in prison. Haole steal our lands. No mo’ food. Lungs coming puka-puka from tuberculosis . . .

  “But Muddah God went breathe mana in forebirth and afterbirth inside my womb. DeSoto born wit’ lungs like bull! Den Malia. Still we begging. Eating weed, mud, pebbles fo’ make our stomachs full. We coming true ‘ai phaku, stone eaters! Dat da reason you born so dark, Keo. You full of earth. Lava. Born near-blind, eyes swimming mud and mucus from plenny dirt I eat. Later years, when sight come, you no believe, no trust yo’ vision.”

  He lay quiet, remembering the coming of sight, how he didn’t trust what his eyes beheld, how he kept his head turned sideways, ear thrust forward, relying on sound.

  “People t’ink you simpleminded,” Leilani said. “But I know you special. Somet’ing in you meant fo’ greatness. I see folks wipe dere eyes when you blow horn. You touching somet’ing in dere pride. Now, you going far away, break my heart a little. But you going find dat greatness.”

  They held him in their arms, rocking him.

  “One year,” Timoteo said. “If you coming great, or not. One year, den you come home, son.” “One year, Papa, maybe two. I swear.”

  Much later he woke, hearing muffled sounds. He found Jonah sitting in the garage.

  His brother looked up slowly. “Shit. I going miss you, Keo.”

  Keo leaned over, punching his arm affectionately. “ ’Ey! Jonah-boy—remember plenny folks here love you, real proud of you. Athlete, good student. You going university, be one doctor, judge. You Mama’s hope! You need advice, DeSoto’s always here for you.”

  The boy shook his head. “DeSoto always shipping out. You da one I look fo’. When I competing—baseball, football—I always t’inking, Be one winnah! Go fo’ broke! Keo watching!”

  He looked away, embarrassed. “Aw, Jonah . . .”

  His brother stood, bronzed and muscular, four inches taller than Keo. Physically daring, yet generous, large-hearted, he seemed born to be a champion.

  He grabbed Keo, hugging him fiercely. “You going see da world. Important fo’ you. But no fo’get. Come home!”

  HIS LAST NIGHT WITH SUNNY. A CLARITY, AS IF HER TINY ROOM were floodlit. Her eyes like anthracite. Arms outstretched, pushing back the hours. At first, they were leisurely with their bodies, as if there would be time for rituals, a playing of nose flutes, clacking of stones, a pounding and staining of kapa. Then breath grew agitated. Skin slapped in soft emergencies. She bit his chest. His tongue probed a dark ear-y channel, making her swoon. Entering her, his entrance sheer.

  Later they danced, steps mincing and effete. Run through with sadness, they danced themselves still. He carried her back to bed, holding her painfully tight, wanting to melt her skin down to oils. He would drink those oils, they would ride his blood. He licked her teeth, her eyes, chewed at her hair. He sucked her fingers as if trying to steal her fingerprints. He wanted to swallow her nerve ends, blood vessels in her neck, so he could feel them swell and pulse when he blew his distant horn. He wanted to take out his heart and leave it with her, buried in her, his hammering, hers.

  He gentled down beside her. “I’m going to take care of you. We’re going to see and hear and taste everything life has to offer.”

  She was very still.

  “You want that, don’t you?”

  “Yes. But I can’t turn my back on . . .” Her mother. The sister she was haunted by.

  �
�Sunny, you’ve saved my life. You’ve rescued me into the world. You can’t save everyone. Why do you need to?”

  She sighed. “Maybe it’s guilt. In many ways my life is good, even privileged. Then I think of my sister, a cripple. How does she live? Begging? Selling produce in the streets? Someday I’ll find her, you’ll help me, won’t you? I’ll bring her home. Surely Papa would love her. Surely, he would feel ashamed. . . .”

  Keo shook her gently. “Listen to me. You can’t fix everybody’s life. Undoing what your father did. You can’t fix him.”

  “No,” she said thoughtfully. “I can’t. Even as a child, I played a game. Setting my room in order, setting all my toys in order. Setting everything exactly right, so everyone was happy.”

  “Maybe you just need to prove you’re not your father.” He turned her on her side and held her. “From now on, promise me you’ll be a little selfish.”

  “I promise.”

  At dawn he dressed, his face crumpled and sordid. She ran bleating down the hall, dragging him back. When he dressed again, she stood brave and formal. Only her lips moved.

  DESOTO HAD FOUND HIM A BERTH AS GENERAL LABORER ON A freighter out of Singapore bound for New Orleans. Up the gangplank, legs rubbery with fear. Parents waving, then burying their faces in their hands. Malia stood apart, extremely proud. Slowly, as though engines were harnessed to elderly whales, the huge blunt-prowed freighter crept out of Honolulu Harbor.

  The Ko‘olau Mountains were still behind them on the horizon, his islands sinking fast, when the first officer laid down ship’s rules. No gambling, no liquor. The ship’s bridge and hold were off limits. His stomach rising and falling with the shift of the sea, he stumbled up and down greasy metal stairways, swabbing decks, oiling machinery, and when he could stand upright, scraping and painting filthy walls. Flung by the pitch and roll of the ship, through endless weeks he worked his way from bow to stern and back again, his body adopting the trembling of the freighter, his heart the drum-drumming of diesel engines.