Hawaii (106 page)

Nyuk Tsin walked through the clean new settlement and up past the volcano crater. Then she stopped and an ache past understanding assailed her, for she looked down upon the most beautiful sight she had ever seen. It was more dramatic than the hills of China, lovelier than the valleys of Honolulu. In the distance rose the soaring cliffs of Molokai, with white spray beating upon their rock bases and gossamer waterfalls leaping from their summits to fall three thousand silvery feet. The ocean was blue and the small islands that clustered offshore formed handsome patterns. The fields of Kalawao, now empty of lepers, were soft and green as they had been a thousand years before that horrible disease was known in the islands. Two vacant churches, one Protestant and one Catholic, stood where

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once there had been terror. The house she had built with her own hands no longer had a roof. "How sweet," she thought, "were the days Mun Ki and Palani and I spent there. Oh, how I wish I could see those two good men once more." In her mind's eye she saw them not with noses and lips falling away and with stumps of hands, but as men. "How I would like to see them once more playing fan-tan on the shore."

That night she spent at Kalawao in the home of a kokua she had known years before, and on the next morning at cockcrow, in the third hour, she left the house and went to her husband's grave, so that she would be there when his spirit rose to walk about the valley. In the moonlight she carefully replaced any rocks that had fallen away. She brushed the earth and pulled weeds. Carefully she erected a slab on which his name, Kee Mun Ki, had been printed in gold letters. Then she undid a bundle and ceremoniously placed a fine set of new dishes about the grave, putting into them the three required delicacies: roast pig, chicken and fish. On saucers she placed oranges, boiled rice, little cakes with caraway, and brown candies with poppy seed. Then she lit a small candle, so that its incense would infuse the atmosphere and make it congenial to the ghost, and when these preparations were completed, she waited for the dawn.

When her husband's ghost appeared he found no tree to roost in, as he would have expected in China, where trees were plentiful and where they were kept near graves for just that purpose, but he did find a perching place on the rocky cliffs that rose behind his grave, and there in the warm sunlight, away from the cold ocean breezes, he sat with his dutiful wife.

She explained in a quiet voice: "Three of the boys are married, Wu Chow's Father, and although I was not able to arrange perfect marriages with huge dowries, I did as well as could be expected. Mrs. Ching, as you would expect, argued very strongly against me, and at the last she even brought up an unpleasant fact. 'Your husband died of leprosy,' she said, but I didn't lose my temper, for there was more important business at hand, and at last she gave in.

"Ah Chow has four children, Au Chow has three and Fei Chow three. I am going to try very hard to get Mrs. Ching's youngest daughter to marry Oh Chow, but I may have a good deal of trouble there, for the girl is a beauty and will be able to command a high price.

"At the house things go well. Kimo and Apikela look after things for us all, and they are precious people. The fields yield as before, and pineapples continue to sell well. Ah Chow has a fine restaurant that is always busy and Au Chow has a good vegetable business.

"But the good news, Wu Chow's Father, is that your son Fei Chow is already on a ship going to Michigan to study to be a lawyer. When I put him aboard the vessel I could see you and Palani in our little house down there, dreaming of going around the world and seeing strange places.

"Think! Think! Our son, our own child, is going to be a scholar!"

In gratitude for this great boon Nyuk Tsin fell silent and tears trembled on her lids, and the sun rose higher in the heavens, and she stayed by the grave. At eleven she asked, "Is it not hot on those rocks? You really ought to have a tree, Wu Chow's Father." And in the later afternoon she left the grave and the meal she had set for the ghost.

On her walk back toward Kalaupapa she passed the old graveyard and saw a new stone, larger than the others, and she wondered who of her friends lay buried there, so she waited until a Hawaiian leper came by with hardly any face, and she asked him, "Who lies in that grave?" And the man said, "Father Damien. He died one of us."

When she reached Kalaupapa she found that while she was talking with her husband the settlement had discovered who she was, and she returned to see many people waiting for her. "Pake Kokua!" they called, and many came to greet her who had known her in the evil days. Some she recognized, for the disease had been kind to them, but others no eyes but God's could see as human beings. "Pake Kokua!" they all cried. "It's good to have you back."

She sat down on a rock, a little Chinese woman with a sunburned face, and they gathered around. A priest came up and asked in Hawaiian, "Are you the one they call the Pake Kokua?" She said that she was, and he said, "You are remembered in this place." She asked if it was true that Father Damien had died of leprosy, and the priest said, "Only last spring." "Did he suffer?" Nyuk Tsin asked, and the priest replied, "Here everyone suffers." She said, "Kalaupapa is better than Kalawao used to be," and the young man said, "When the people in Honolulu wakened to their responsibility, it had to become better." She asked, "Have you found any drug that cures?" And he replied, "The infinite mercy of God has not yet shown us the way, but He will not permit a thing like leprosy to continue without a cure. Meanwhile, we pray."

In late 1889 Nyuk Tsin spent most of her spare time arguing with the Ching family about terms on which their youngest daughter, Ching Siu Han, might be given to her youngest son Australia. She told Mrs. Ching frankly, "The boy is very good at school, and I don't worry about him in that regard, but having grown up with Hawaiians he is more like them than a Chinese. He's got to marry a Chinese girl. Otherwise he will be lost to us."

Mrs. Ching pointed out: "You allowed Au Chow and Mei Chow to marry Hawaiian girls."

Nyuk Tsin argued: "Those girls brought much land with them, and the marriages were good for the boys. But Oh Chow's problem is different. He doesn't require land. He requires a strong-minded Chinese wife." But her antagonist felt that Siu Han, being rather prettier than average, ought to be saved for a better prospect than Australia.

At this time Siu Han, who was now a sparkling Chinese girl of fifteen, had begun to show her headstrong nature and had broken

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away from the severe old Chinese custom which required girls to hide at home. While her sister, Africa's wife, tended her three babies, Siu Han liked to walk up and down Hotel Street, and because she was unusually attractive this caused much comment in the Chinese community. On one such trip she met Nyuk Tsin, who said to her, "Have you ever seen my son Australia?" "No," the girl said.

"He's in his brother's restaurant. Let's have a bowl of noodles together."

So Nyuk Tsin and the pretty young girl went into Asia's place and sat down, and in a moment Australia appeared and was astonished to see them, for Wu Chow's Auntie had never before entered the place. He sat down with them, and Nyuk Tsin asked bluntly, "Don't you think your brother's wife's sister is attractive?" Obviously, Australia did, and after a few minutes Nyuk Tsin found occasion to leave the table and talk with her son Asia, who said, "It's disgraceful to bring a girl like that in here."

In the weeks that followed, Nyuk Tsin often asked Australia, "Why don't you help your brother at the restaurant?" And whenever her only unmarried son did so, Nyuk Tsin managed to find Siu Han somewhere in Chinatown, and she would bring the two together, so that before the year was out it was not Wu Chow's Auntie who was arguing with the wealthy Chings that they permit their only remaining daughter to marry Australia; it was the daughter herself who did all the talking. "My rascal girl," Mrs. Ching called her. Nyuk Tsin prudently dropped out of the picture, and in early 1890 a marriage was announced.

At the wedding Nyuk Tsin, then forty-three years old but looking closer to sixty, sat silent and thanked the Hakka gods that they had been so good to her; then her attention was attracted to a Hakka woman who had brought as a gift a small sandalwood box, carried from Canton, and as Nyuk Tsin smelled that aromatic present she thought: "This is indeed the Fragrant Tree Country."

By THE TIME the last decade of the nineteenth century opened, Wild Whip Hoxworth was concentrating his considerable energy on two propects: women and making Hawaii part of the United States. For a while his performance in the former field was the more spectacular, for after his divorce from the Spanish woman Aloma Duarte he spent his free time with a strange assortment of creatures who could be counted upon to drift ashore from passing ships. They were women without faces, but with memorable bodies, and it was uncanny how as soon as they touched shore they made a direct line to Wild Whip, as if he had the capacity to send out messages that he could be found lolling on the porch of the Hawaiian Hotel. Quickly, these drifting women moved their luggage� they never had much�into the rooms Whip occupied and after a while each moved along to Manila or Hong Kong. Many would

have enjoyed staying, but Whip was too smart to allow that. From time to time he spent his weekends in Rat Alley, across the river in Iwilei, and one of the most common sights at the Hawaiian Hotel, built by the king for the entertainment of important guests, was the deferential appearance of some Chinese brothel keeper with news for Whip that a new girl had come in or that an old one wished particularly to see him. It was understandable that women liked Whip, for at thirty-three he was tall and lean, with knife scars across his left cheek and black hair that rumpled in the wind. He had flashing white teeth and slow, penetrating eyes. He was careful of his appearance, and when he rode horseback along the dusty roads of his sugar plantations, he could speak to his hands in masterful pidgin, with appropriate touches of Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian or Portuguese to fit the individual workman with whom he talked, but for all sentences, regardless of language, he adopted the lilting accent brought to the islands by Mexican cowboys, so that each statement ended with an upward song: "Eh, you Joe! What you theenk? You holo holo watah?" The words think and water were heavily accented and given an ingratiating melody. While his men were in the fields, tending the cane, Wild Whip often stopped by their homes to talk with their women, and it naturally happened that occasionally these women would appreciate his courtly manners and he found great pleasure in suddenly leaping into bed with them and having a wild few minutes, after which he called, as he rode off, "Eh, you Rosie, ne? Take care you boy he come home, he one fine man I theenk." Twice he had been slashed at with machetes, and when he reflected upon that occupational hazard he supposed that some day he would die in a scene of wild brutality and the sanctimonious newspapers of the islands would scream the scandal, and at the prospect he laughed, thinking: "What a great way to die!"

Then, in late 1892, Wild Whip became galvanized into even wilder action in a completely different arena, for the United States was beginning to show signs of once more discriminating against the importation of Hawaiian sugar. The great planters of cane in Louisiana were determined to end the reciprocity arrangements whereby Hawaii sent sugar to the mainland tax-free while the United States was allowed to send certain goods into Hawaii and also to use Pearl Harbor as a naval base. Cried the Louisiana sugar men: "We don't need their sugar and we don't need Pearl Harbor."

For thirty years the New Orleans sugar tycoons had been waging war against Hawaii, and they had managed to hold the profits of Hawaiian planters like Wild Whip Hoxworth to reasonable limits, but they had failed to kill off the industry. Now a new factor had entered the battle against Hawaii: the huge western states of Colorado and Nebraska were beginning to grow beets and to grind them into sugar, and they, too, wanted to destroy Hawaiian competition. Within a few years it was likely that a coalition of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, Colorado and Nebraska, plus such new states as

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Wyoming and Utah, would form to drive Hawaiian sugar forever out of the market, and when this happened sugar planters like Wild Whip would see their massive fortunes begin to vanish.

"In sugar, there's only one rule," Whip told the sugar planters he had assembled. "Either we sell to the United States, or we don't sell. Our sole aim must be to protect that market."

"We're losing it," John Janders pointed out. "Right now I represent eleven of your major sugar plantations, and with the way those bastards from Louisiana and Colorado are trying to strangle us, I can see nine of your eleven outfits going into bankruptcy. One more serious cut in our American market, and I don't know what we'll do."

"Excuse me, John," Whip interrupted. "You're right in what you say, but I'm afraid you're mincing words. I happen to have the figures, and by God, nobody can listen to these without panic. Since the McKinley Tariff every damned sugar man in Louisiana and Colorado has been getting a subsidy of two cents a pound, whereas sugar imported from Hawaii has been penalized. What's it all mean? During the first twelve months of this McKinley abortion our profits have dropped five million dollars. I don't mean the profits of Hawaii. I mean the profits of the nine men sitting in this room. Now as to the actual invested value of our plantations, they've lost twelve million dollars. And it's going to get worse and worse."

He paused to allow discussion of the peril in which the Hawaiian sugar men found themselves, for up to the moment of this meeting, the great planters had known they were in danger but no one had had the courage to accumulate the depressing figures; now under Whip's lashing they had to face facts. Companies were going to go bankrupt and men were going to lose plantations their fathers had built.