by Huang, Yunte
—Henry Bergh, drafting the first charter for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
FANS OF Hawaii Five-O, the longest-running crime show on American television before Law & Order, will not forget the signature punch line of Jack Lord’s tough character. Like a thunderclap, Steve McGarrett’s catch phrase, “Book ’em, Danno!” tolls the death knell for hapless criminals.
Chang Apana’s daily routine as a humane officer in the twilight years of the nineteenth century might not have been as colorful and dramatic as that of McGarrett’s fast-paced special unit, but his work was full of challenges. These were the early days of animal-rights protection. The newly passed law had yet to reach the hearts and minds of Honolulu’s rough-and-tumble public. Stories were legion about early crusaders for animal rights running into stubborn owners who were incredulous that there was a law forbidding them to beat their animals into subordination. The apparently relentless Helen Wilder once stopped Sanford Dole, president of the Republic of Hawaii, on the street to point out a large sore under his horse’s collar, and she ended up incurring no small degree of his wrath. On another occasion, “when [she] arrested a Honolulu Rapid Transit driver who had run over a dog with his mule-drawn tram, he sued her for $50,000.” She was lucky that time to have both the law and a friendly jury on her side. On her acquittal at the trial, she received a bottle of champagne with a card reading, “From your friends, the Jurymen.”1
Apana, a paniolo-turned-officer, a Chinaman with no standing in the higher echelons of Honolulu society, certainly had his work cut out for him. He might have grown a tough hide as a cowboy, but the general conditions for pets and especially working animals in Honolulu were far from ideal. C. K. Ai, whose memoir provided a glimpse into Apana’s childhood life in rural Canton, reflected on the mal-treatment of animals in Honolulu at the time:
The Hawaiians traveled about on horseback. Those who owned horses along the waterfront usually did not pay enough attention to the feeding of their animals, especially with Manini hay costing fifty cents the bundle. During the day they let their horses out to foray for grass; at night, they stabled their horses in a small corral on Maunakea Street. The horses were therefore thin and completely at the mercy of their masters.2
Cruelty was by far the norm rather than the exception. Ailing, even cachectic horses were forced to work, overburdened with oppressive loads. Cattle were routinely abandoned in the streets, while dogs and cats were brutalized and sometimes even consigned to cooking pots. So appalling were the conditions for the new urban immigrants that vicious cockfights could hardly seem cruel.
Patrolling the dusty streets of Honolulu, Apana ran into another problem. As a Chinese, he came from a culture that even today believes in the reincarnation of souls. Under the influence of Buddhism, many Chinese believe that a soul after the death of a person will inhabit another body, but there is—and this is the tricky part—no guarantee that the latter will be a human body. If you have done something evil in this life, then in the next life your soul will inhabit the body of a dog, pig, horse, or any animal that belongs to a lower rung on the ladder of species. So, to a Chinese eye, the unenviable life of a working mule is punishment for the bad deeds committed in the last life by the soul currently occupying the body of the mule. This does not mean that the Chinese do not love their animals or pets—just that they would be even less willing to accord rights to animals than an ordinary person walking on the streets of Honolulu. Apana himself might have outgrown such a Chinese belief. As a former paniolo and stableman, he obviously loved his horses. Even a run-of-the-mill cowboy would have harbored affection for the steed that was his daily companion. But for Apana to enforce the animal-rights law in Honolulu would put him at odds with the beliefs of the Chinese community.
In The Chinese Parrot, Charlie Chan is confronted by his cousin, Chan Kee Lim, and accused of being in cahoots with the “foreign devils,” the Americans. “You come in the garb of a foreign devil, and knock on my door with the knuckles, as rude foreign devils do,” Lim says, trying hard to conceal his disapproval. “It is too much to say that I do not approve, but I do not quite understand. The foreign devil police—what has a Chinese in common with them?” There is no evidence to suggest that before he wrote the first three Chan novels, including The Chinese Parrot, Earl Biggers had known much about Apana’s life. The two would not meet until 1928, but Biggers seemed to have an uncanny ability to imagine the complexity of being a Chinese law enforcer in a multiracial society like Honolulu around the turn of the century. In the novel, or, rather, in Biggers’s imagination, Chan is made to concur politely with Lim, “There are times, honorable cousin, when I do not understand myself.”3
In reality, Apana was much less circumspect about toeing the line of “foreign devils.” He was as adaptable as his fictional double. By this time, he had acquired the nickname of “Kana Pung,” short for “Kanaka Pung,” because he looked more Hawaiian than Chinese. Not only was he dark-skinned and always wearing a coat and tie, he had also lost the key marker that defined a Chinaman in the nineteenth century: the queue. Under the Manchu rule, every Chinese man had to grow a queue and let it swing like a pigtail or wrap it around his head like a turban. The punishment for a violator was beheading. No queue, no head. Even though the Chinese immigrants were already beyond the reach of the laws of their native land, most of them had kept the queues like a birthmark for the Celestials.
“I was the only one without my queue in the 80’s and 90’s,” Apana reminisced during an interview in 1932.4 We do not know when he decided to stop wearing one, but we do get the picture that the humane officer who rode on top of a strong horse and kept a sharp eye out for any sign of abused animals on the streets of Honolulu did not look quintessentially Chinese, nor was he an ordinary Chinese. And he meant business.
His meteoric success as an animal-cruelty-prevention officer reveals at once his abilities. In his best month, Apana reported 140 cases: 11 arrests, 8 convictions, 129 “remedied without prosecution,” 5 “horses humanely killed,” 21 “cases of horses found unfit for work and ordered out of harness,” 12 “cases of beating or whipping,” 7 “overloading,” 18 “driven when lame and galled,” 7 “animals abandoned to die.” The fines amounted to $84.5
Years later, Apana’s nephew, Walter Chang, fondly recalled the days when Apana patrolled the streets trying to protect animals as well as children, whose rights and well-being by then also fell under the jurisdiction of the Humane Society: “When you see the horse ‘cock-cock-cock’ coming, oh those kids they run. ‘Apana coming.’ You think we can play on the sidewalk like this? You cannot. He get after you, he use whip. The kids, when they hear Apana coming, but he no whip them, he chase them go school.”6
Walter’s recollection, transcribed in the late 1980s, depicts a strict but warmhearted man, an officer who would do more than his share to keep neighborhoods safe and sound, a person well respected by his community:
The whole public, every time they see Apana, “hey, comes Apana.” You see. Baseball game, football game he always down the park. “All right, you know, stand back.” You see, everybody like him. He’s a very strict man, but not a cruel man. When he use a whip on somebody over there, he tell you “go back, go back—stay back behind the line,” you see.7
So successful was Apana’s work with animals that he drew the notice of the Marshal of the Republic of Hawaii. In August 1898, only days after the islands became a U.S. territory, Apana was officially deputized and joined the Honolulu Police Department.
THE ANNEXATION OF Hawaii by the United States had been long in coming. In the words of President William McKinley, who had been elected to office in 1896, annexation was no new scheme but “a consummation” of a relationship steadfastly maintained for three-quarters of a century. The Hawaiian Star concurred with the annexationist president: “Hawaii may be regarded as a bride whose marriage day is not yet definitely fixed, but who is prepared to go through the ceremony whenever the signal is g
iven.”8 In 1898, the signal was, as they say, loud and clear.
Ever since the 1891 death of King Kalakaua—an adamant nationalist who despised the United States—American elements on the islands had been working steadily to usurp Queen Liliuokalani’s power. Aided by troops from the USS Boston and backed by U.S. Minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, a coup d’état was staged to force the queen to abdicate in January 1893. Blue-jacketed marines surrounded the Royal Palace while the local armed militia took over the police station and the government building. The queen yielded her authority under protest, expecting that she would be reinstated once the U.S. government learned the facts and undid the action of its representatives. But her hopes were in vain.9 On July 4, 1894, a date charged with American symbolism, the Republic of Hawaii was inaugurated, ending the indigenous monarchy that had ruled the islands for centuries and bringing Hawaii one step closer to becoming part of the United States.
In the ensuing years, there were heated debates in the American media and the chambers of Congress over the pros and cons of annexation. The stakes were high because the Hawaii question symbolically reflected the United States’s position in the world, its role as a rising empire. At a conference held during the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, only a year before the founding of the republic, a young Harvard history professor named Frederick Jackson Turner proposed a now-famous Frontier Thesis. Drawing on John O’Sullivan’s 1839 idea of “Manifest Destiny,” Turner contended, in bold strokes, that the spirit and success of the United States was directly tied to the country’s westward expansion. Standing at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness, the frontier was a crucible for the forging of a “unique and rugged American identity,” by breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, and creating new institutions.10
Now that this expansion had reached its continental limit and a new frontier loomed in the Pacific Ocean, would America be ready to take the risk and the responsibility as well as the rewards? Annexing a “noncontiguous territory” like Hawaii would either fulfill or pervert America’s Manifest Destiny. Both sides seemed to agree on the economic and strategic advantages of annexation: American shipping and commerce would benefit, and Japan, which was winning its war against Russia at the time and had begun to flex its muscles in the Pacific, could be curbed. But the moral, political, and especially racial pictures were far more complex. The Constitution of the United States had no provisions that legitimated the annexation of territory. Hawaii’s people were not only different from those of the United States, they also were considered by the anti-annexationists “unfit to be incorporated” into the great democracy. “Bad blood and bad customs,” as one politician put it, “will drive out good.” When Congress was debating the resolution on annexation in June 1898, Missouri Congressman James Beauchamp Clark expressed concerns over the indefatigable “jingo bacillus.” He warned that the insatiable imperial appetite for a territory swarming with “a rabble of brown men and yellow men” would be ruinous to the Union. What if Hawaii one day became a state? “How can we endure our shame,” he asked, “when a Chinese Senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan joss in his hand, shall rise from his curule chair and in pidgin English proceed to chop logic with George Frisbie Hoar or Henry Cabot Lodge?”11*
The annexationists eventually won the debate when the United States went to war against Spain in 1898. As the American warships, under the command of Commodore George Dewey, sank a Spanish fleet in the harbor of Manila, America’s Manifest Destiny in the Pacific became as clear as the broth of wonton soup. While the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada had presaged the rise of the British Empire in the Atlantic, the Battle of Manila three centuries later portended the emergence of a new empire in the Pacific. This empire would fulfill the old typology that the center of the world has moved throughout history from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic and then to the Pacific. And if the United States was going to occupy the Philippines, it would make no sense at all to oppose the annexation of Hawaii, which could serve as a base for military maneuvers in the Pacific. After Congress passed the joint resolution by a vote of 209 to 91, President McKinley swiftly signed the bill.
On August 12, 1898, a ceremony for transferring sovereignty was held at Iolani Palace. Marines from two U.S. warships stood by the Hawaii National Guard. On a platform decorated in red, white, and blue bunting, U.S. Minister to Hawaii Harold M. Sewall read the annexation resolution, and white-bearded Sanford Dole, president of the Republic of Hawaii, responded with a short speech, declaring: “I now, in the interest of the Hawaiian body politic and with full confidence in the honor, justice and friendship of the American people, yield up to you as the representative of the Government of the United States, the sovereignty and public property of the Hawaiian Islands.” After Sewall accepted the sovereignty, the band played a dirgelike rendition of “Hawaii Ponoi” for the last time as the anthem of an independent nation, and the Hawaiian flag was lowered, “like the fluttering of a wounded bird,” as one bystander observed.12 From then on, the Stars and Stripes would fly in the sky over the flower-bedecked golden statue of Kamehameha the Great. The long spear clutched in his hand, once wielding such mighty power over his kingdom, could no longer protect his land and people from the white haoles.
If for some it was a day of exuberant toasts and libations, for many others it was at best a mixed blessing, a moment marked by sadness and shame, a day filled with fervent prayers. For Chinese immigrants, in particular, annexation meant that America’s racist laws and policies would now be fully implemented in the territory, including the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act as well as the federal law denying their citizenship eligibility. Born in Hawaii, Apana was at least by law a U.S. citizen. His deputization as a police officer was a further boost to his status in Hawaii’s hierarchical world.
The police department that Apana joined in 1898 had a unique history inseparable from the islands’ tribal past. The institution of Hawaiian law enforcement dates back to the pre-Cook era, under what was called the kapu system. In service to the king and senior chiefs, a team of warriors called the ilamuku worked as enforcers of law and order. When justice needed to be served, the ilamuku would visit the taboo-breaker at night to kill or otherwise punish the person. The mu in ilamuku means “body snatcher.”
The arrival of Christian missionaries in 1820 disrupted the century-old oral-based kapu system. With the adoption of writing, the first formal criminal code was published by Kamehameha III on December 8, 1827. Clearly showing missionary influence, the code prohibited murder, theft, gambling, sales of liquor, fornication, prostitution, and drunkenness. On October 8, 1840, the same king published the first Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaii, in which chapter V provided for the creation of a police force. Under this chapter, the governor of each island was authorized to appoint police officers and constables for the protection of the people and villages. The constitution also provided for a means of identification for the law enforcers: “a stick made round at one end with the name of the king on it.” But these constables were still a loose cluster of lawmen. They received no wages; instead, “they were given a percentage of the fine assessed any offender whom they arrested and who was convicted in court.” During the boom whaling years, the native constables made so much money by catching fun-seeking sailors committing small indiscretions on shore that the Honolulu police fort was dubbed “The Mint.”13
A better system of supervision and organization was established, with the creation of the post of Marshal of the Republic of Hawaii in 1847. Under a new law passed in the previous year, the marshal was to choose sheriffs of each island, and the sheriffs were to select their own deputies.14 This system ran smoothly for more than fifty years and still existed when Apana became a deputy.
The man who handpicked Apana for the police force was himself a local legend. Arthur Morgan Brown had been born and raised in Honolulu. His father, Jacob Brown, a sea captain from
New Bedford, Massachusetts, had once been shipwrecked on the rough coast of Siberia with his wife and infant daughter. They spent four months in inhospitable Siberian snows until rescued by a whaling ship and brought to Hawaii. Arthur Brown had received his early education at Punahou, then and now Hawaii’s best preparatory school, before graduating from Boston University Law School. In 1893, at the age of twenty-six, Brown had become Marshal of Hawaii. He remained marshal until the position was changed to High Sheriff of the Territory in 1900; he held the latter office until 1906, when he went into private legal practice.15 An influential man in Honolulu, Brown befriended many illustrious visitors from the mainland, including Jack London and his second wife, Charmian Kittredge London, who often stayed at Brown’s house on their many lengthy visits to the islands.
As Helen Wilder’s right-hand man at the Humane Society, Apana soon caught the attention of her friend Marshal Brown. Anticipating a raft of changes after annexation and incorporation of Honolulu, law-enforcement officials knew that they would require more manpower. Headed by Brown, the police organization on the island of Oahu in 1898 comprised one sheriff, 23 deputy sheriffs, 172 police officers, and 24 mounted patrols.16 As the only Chinese, Apana stood out like a tropical bird among the predominantly native Hawaiian officers and the predominantly haole chiefs. But his service was a bonanza to the department, because Honolulu’s Chinatown had already become a breeding warren for crime, and the police needed someone who could make inroads into that labyrinthine underworld.
Apana turned out to be a godsend.
6
Chinatown