Honolulu (10 page)

Then one day into my second week of work, the cane fields truly became the hell that the Japanese women sang of in their lament. The trade winds that normally cooled the fields had vanished in the night. The sea offered up not so much as a breath of relief, and the light rain showers that often refreshed us in the afternoon also failed to appear. With neither air nor water mitigating the heat of the day, the tropic sun became a blazing furnace. The air we breathed parched our throats and the lunas had to bring in barrels of extra drinking water, which itself was hot as soup. I perspired so much inside my protective clothes that they became soaked, but I dared not take anything off for fear of wasp stings and cane cuts. None of us had the strength to sing, or even to talk over lunch. The scorching sun climbed higher into the heavens but seemed as if it were floating only a few hundred feet above us. Waves of heat shimmered the air, making me wonder if perhaps I was dreaming all of this.

The other women called this “Kona weather,” and by 1:00 P.M. at least one of them was overcome by the heat and had to stop working. But when a luna ridiculed the poor woman for her weakness, I resolved to go on as long as I could, though I swung my hoe at the weeds with slowly diminishing force.

Around three o’clock I heard a commotion and looked up to see a knot of women gathered at the end of a nearby cane row. From their midst came the disturbing sound of a woman’s sobs-not the soft weeping I had heard in the Hotel of Sorrows, but something that was both a gasp and a moan.

I hurried over and caught a glimpse, through the thicket of wahines surrounding her, of a woman sitting cross-legged on the ground, wildly tearing off her hat, her kerchief, her heavy denim jacket. Between sobs she cried out, “Damn it! Damn it! Too hot.”-in Korean.

It was jade Moon.

A Chinese woman tried to calm her, but was rebuffed with an angry shove. “Eh, you papule!” the woman snapped at her. The other women now backed away, but I pushed through them, even as jade Moon started to unbutton her denim blouse. I squatted down and put a hand on hers.

“It’s all right,” I told her, “we’ll get you some water-”

She was looking directly at me, yet despite this I believe she didn’t recognize me. Her face, like all of ours, was dusted red from the soil, and her tears had traced dark red rivulets down her cheeks, as if she were weeping blood.

“I can’t,” she cried. “I can’t do it anymore-”

She wrenched her hand free from mine and tore at her shirt buttons, snapping the threads with a pop. She sighed as the air touched the exposed skin of her neck.

“What in hell’s going on here?”

I looked behind me. One of the Tunas was glowering down at us.

“This woman suffers,” I told him in English. “She must get out of the sun.

“She’s just lazy,” he said with a sneer, “like all of-”

Jade Moon’s fingers fumbled at her buttons, exposing the upper crescents of her breasts for all to see. The Tuna’s eyes widened: “What the hell is she…”

I grabbed her hands in mine, looked her in the eye and, seeking to shock, hissed at her: “Stop this! Are you a fool?”

She stopped, brought up short by her own words of a week ago. I believe she dimly began to recognize me.

“Go on, get her out of here,” the tuna said, finally realizing that jade Moon wasn’t faking. “I’ll only dock you each half a day.” I helped my friend up onto wobbly feet and supported her as we trod out of the cane field. It took twenty minutes to get back to our camp, with frequent drinks from my water bottle, but at last we reached my bungalow, where I had her lie down on our bed. I dabbed her face with water, both to cool her and to wipe away the crust of red dirt, and gave her as much to drink as she could swallow.

All this time she had not spoken a word. Now, as she drained a glass of water, she looked at me with embarrassment and said quietly, `Vianham- nida. ” There is no precise English equivalent of this word-it can express both gratitude and apology, as in “Thank you, I am sorry for the trouble I have caused you.”

“You have nothing to apologize for. It’s a hot day, it might have happened to any of us.”

“You probably think me a silly city girl unacquainted with hard work,” she said with a frown, “and you would be right. I know nothing of manual labor. My first day in the fields, I thought I was going to die. At the end of the day, I wanted to die. My body had never hurt so much in my life.” She added with chagrin, “That is what I tried to tell you, badly, when you came to work in the fields.”

I now recognized her characteristic frown for what it was: not a scowl of disdain for me, but a reflection of her own self-loathing.

“Then why do it?” I asked. “Does your husband make you?”

She shook her head. “My father is yangban, ” she said, “and spends his days in scholarly pursuits. His family inheritance was exhausted years ago. He applied for the civil service, but was turned down; and to take another kind of job would be beneath his dignity. So while he sits in his den and studies the Chinese classics, my mother works herself to the bone-raising vegetables to sell at market, taking in laundry, anything she can think of to support a family of five. I thought that if I married a rich man in Hawai’i …” Here her voice faltered. “… I could send back enough money that my mother would not have to work herself to death. She’s so small, so frail … and she works so very hard. I thought I could help, but-” She laughed ruefully. “The joke is on me. I came all the way to Hawai’i just to marry a pauper who spent every cent he had to bring me here! Hilarious, isn’t it?”

“So you work in the fields,” I said, “to send money to your family?”

“Yes, but I’m not strong enough, God help me. I am weak and spoiled, a terrible daughter! I wish I were dead!” She broke down again into sobs; I took her in my arms and held her as she let loose her shame and exhaustion. When she had cried herself out, I spoke up:

“Listen to me,” I told her. “You are no weaker than I am. You hate yourself no less than I have hated myself. You are not alone.

“You have endured much. You have suffered much. You will suffer more, and you will endure that as well. Is this not what it means to be Korean?”

I saw a shadow of her dignity return to her. She nodded slowly.

“Yes,” she said. “This is so.”

Then a small smile even tugged at her mouth. She reached up and playfully straightened my neckerchief.

“And are we not,” she added dryly, “so very fashionable?”

We both laughed, and I went to the kitchen to prepare her something to eat.

Saturday, twice a month, was payday, and no one was awaiting their wages more excitedly than I was. I stood in line at the manager’s office, and when it was my turn I proudly showed the paymaster my bango. “Number 3327,” he read from his ledger. “Worked eleven and one-half days at forty-six cents a day, for a total of five dollars and twenty-seven-”

“Wait-that cannot be right. I was told field workers were paid seventy cents a day.”

“Men make seventy. Women make forty-six.”

“But we do the same work!”

“Do you want your money or not?” he barked. Grudgingly I nodded. He counted up the appropriate number of coins, placed them in my hand. “Next!”

My annoyance at making only two-thirds of a man’s wages was outweighed by the pride I felt as I hefted the money in my hand, money that I had earned from my own effort. I put the coins in my skirt pocket and happily listened to them jingle all the way to the plantation store, where I purchased enough food to last us at least two weeks. And I even had a dollar left over, one I could perhaps send to my mother or save for schooling. I felt great joy and satisfaction-almost as much as I had felt upon learning to read-as I carried the groceries home and proceeded to restock our bare pantry.

I was surprised and pleased when only a few minutes later my husband came home. I had prepared myself for the possibility that he might again stay out late gambling and drinking, but here he was, sober and on time.

I went into the living room and greeted him, utterly unprepared for the fist that struck me in the nose like a hammer. My face seemed to explode, I saw flashing lights as my head jerked backwards, and I fell to the floor.

I lay there, blood gushing from my nose, gazing up with a total lack of comprehension at my husband, who towered above me, quivering with rage.

“You shame me!” he shouted, and I heard again my father’s voice. “My wife, working in the fields like a man-as if I am not man enough to provide for you! They were all laughing at me behind my back, did you hear them?”

Oh Heaven, I thought. I put a hand to my nose, trying to staunch the flow of blood, but even the slightest pressure on it hurt beyond imagining.

“I … I am sorry, honored husband,” I said, trying to find the words that might dampen his rage. “I was only trying to help.”

He took a step toward me, and for a moment I thought it was to give me a hand up. Instead he kicked me in the side, the tip of his boot stabbing like a dagger in my ribs, and I screamed in pain.

“Where is the money?” he asked. I couldn’t even catch my breath. He reached down, grabbed me by my shirt, and shook me hard. “Where is it?”

Through a red fog of pain I reached into my pocket and brought out the few coins left over from my wages.

“Where’s the rest of it?” he demanded.

“I-bought food.” I braced myself for another blow of the hammer, but he just took a step backward and dropped the coins into his pocket.

“You are not to work the fields anymore,” he ordered.

“I … won’t,” I said between gasps. “I promise.”

“I’ll be home late. I will spare you the trouble of preparing dinner.”

He turned and stalked out of the house, the slam of the door behind him making me flinch.

I lay there unable to move for at least ten minutes, finally gathering the strength to stand. My ribs burned when I took a breath. I quickly found a rag and pressed it against the bridge of my nose. I felt lancing pain, but I kept up the pressure and eventually the bleeding stopped. I looked into a mirror and saw a face ruddy with dust and blood-but beneath the rust was a shocked and terrified pallor.

From somewhere I found the fortitude to walk to the plantation dispensary, where I told the doctor that I had fallen coming home from the fields. I couldn’t tell him the truth; I was too ashamed. Whether he believed me or not he adjudged my nose fractured and gave me an icepack to reduce the swelling, which was by now prodigious. Then he examined my ribs, which were luckily only bruised, not broken. The swelling on my face gradually decreased and the pain subsided, but it left me with a black-and-blue swath across my nose. I went home with instructions not to touch it or sleep on it, as well as a bottle of aspirin for the pain and the doctor’s insistence that should the bleeding start again, or should pus appear, I was to return to the infirmary.

As I walked home I wondered-in an oddly detached manner I would recognize only in hindsight as shock-what to do next. My husband had forbidden me from working in the fields, but I knew he would come home tonight having once more gambled away his wages. Fortunately I had purchased enough food to last several weeks-but what then?

Worrying about food when I should have been worrying for my life, I arrived home and fell exhausted into bed. My nose still throbbed and I took two aspirin as instructed. Tomorrow was Sunday and I did not, blessedly, have to rise at four in the morning to prepare breakfast. I slept in till nearly six. When I woke my husband was in bed beside me and he made no mention of my bruised and swollen face. He even seemed rather chipper. I did my best to stay out of his way for the rest of the day, preparing his favorite meals and saying not a whisper to antagonize him. When he left in the afternoon to play something called “softball” with his friends, I went to the management office and turned in my bango.

By Monday the shock had worn off and I was again gripped by fear. The first time Mr. Noh struck me he had been drinking, but this time he had been cold sober. That meant that an attack could happen at any time, for any reason. The thought paralyzed me: What did I do, what did I say around him? How did I live with this explosive presence? I was anxious to talk with jade Moon but she was in the fields, as I should have been. In desperation I sought the counsel of other Korean housewives in the camp, but found that they held a very Confucian view of marriage. “It is a husband’s right to treat his wife as he sees fit,” one told me, while another quoted the old Korean adage, “Women and dried pollack should be beaten every three days,” and admitted that her own husband occasionally had to “discipline” her.

Only one of the women I spoke with thought that what my husband had done was wrong: “This is America, not Korea. Women are not chattel. Take the train and speak to the pastor at the Korean Methodist Church; perhaps he can help you.” When I protested that I had no money for train fare, she thrust some coins into my hand and said, “Go. ”

My family was Confucian, not Christian, and Namsanhyun Methodist Church was fifteen miles away in Kahuku-the last stop on the Oahu Railway main line. But with no better alternative, after my husband left for work the next morning, I stole away to the railway station and purchased a ticket for the 11:45 train. It took half an hour to reach Kahuku Station and from there I was able to walk to the church, where I asked to speak to the pastor.

But though the reverend was sympathetic to my plight, and made clear he did not countenance violence, he advised me, “We are far from the lands we knew, and Koreans are a small minority here in Hawai’i. If we are to preserve Korean culture and tradition, we must preserve family unity. Look into your heart, child, and forgive your husband his transgressions.”

“As he forgives me?” I asked. “With his closed fist?”

“What other choice do you have?” he asked, adding gently, “This is the life you chose, child. You must learn to make the best of it.”

I took the 2:20 P.M. train back to Waialua. As the station neared I was sorely tempted to remain sitting-to let the train take me as far from Waialua and Mokuleia Camp as I could travel. For a few moments I thought I might actually do it. But after the locomotive shrieked to a stop in Waialua Station, I lost my nerve, got up, and got off the train.