Honolulu (16 page)

“What is this?” I asked her.

“It’s the money the other gals have been paying me for your sewing.”

I looked up at her, and it was my turn to be shocked.

Defensively, she said, “Hey, I’ve got expenses like everybody else, okay? But go on, take it. From now on, I’ll have the gals pay you directly, and only the work you do for me will be charged against my overhead.”

Embarrassed, she got up and put a record on the gramophone, which began playing a familiar tune as I stared at the wrinkled bills in my hand and smiled.

Honi kaua wikiwiki You have learned it perfectly On the beach at Waikiki.

In hindsight it is easy to see the riot as the beginning of the end for Iwilei, but it hardly seemed so at the time. It was true, in the wake of the violence the local newspapers published heated editorials calling for the closure of the red-light district. There were even a few “citizen’s committees”-mostly white society women from the “better” neighborhoods-formed to lobby for its closing. But with the sailing of the
USS
Sheridan a few days later-and no apparent action taken against the soldiers who had participated in the riot-the whole incident seemed quickly forgotten by the public at large. Carpenters were already busily repairing the damage to the stockade’s houses, and by the following Monday Iwilei was once again open for business.

Also back in business were the saloons, arcades, pool halls, and other seamy establishments that benefited from the sex trade at Iwilei. Among these was a boardinghouse on Iwilei Road in which interested parties could find games of poker, craps, and the illegal lottery known as the fa. Each time I passed this house I was asked by someone loitering outside whether I wished to place a wager on the the fa-but even if Mr. Noh had not gambled away his salary I would hardly have been tempted to part with the few dollars I earned each week from my job, which now included the making of entire dresses or sarongs from patterns and fabrics provided by Iwilei women.

I also took time to make some new clothes for myself: Western-style dresses like the ones I saw being worn by haole and Hawaiian women on the streets, replacing the traditional bright red, blue, or orange blouses and skirts that immediately (I feared) identified me as Korean. In my first few months in Honolulu, I had been afraid to venture far outside of Iwilei lest someone might recognize me and Mr. Noh-now relegated to the province of nightmares in which I felt again the lash of his hand, and the pain of losing our child-might come and reclaim me as his wife. I even avoided shopping at a conveniently located general store in Iwilei run by a Korean named Kim Yuen Tai.

Eventually those fears abated somewhat, aided by the camouflage of my white shirtwaist dress: I might have been Chinese for all anyone here could tell. So now in my free time I began to explore my new home, while still avoiding areas like adjacent Palama, where resided a greater concentration of Asian immigrants.

My first impression of Honolulu from aboard the Nippon Maru had been of a tropic backwater barely qualifying as a city. This was not, it turned out, a fair assessment. Downtown Honolulu-with its staid bank buildings, impressive government offices, and beautiful churches-could certainly lay claim to being as modern an urban center as anything I had seen in Korea or Japan. But then I walked only a mile farther down King Street-to where it intersected with Kapi’olani Boulevard-and found myself gazing out upon acre after acre of duck ponds, rice paddies, banana groves, taro patches, and pig farms. It was almost as if I were back in Pojogae. I had never before seen a city give way to country quite so suddenly and unself-consciously, and I found it quite charming.

I would wander from Iwilei to Kapi’olani Park, from Waikiki to Punchbowl and back again. (A streetcar cost five cents to ride, a waste of a nickel when I could just as easily get there by foot.) On these travels I made a point of stopping at every school I saw-public or private, from McKinley High School to Kawaiaha’o Girls School-to inquire about the possibility of my enrollment. But I was now nineteen years of age: far too old for primary school, lacking the requisite education for middle school, and college was out of the question. Mrs. Kim had told the truth, as far as it went, when she said that girls in Hawai’i had the opportunity to attend school. What she did not tell me-perhaps did not know-was that that opportunity was already long past for girls like myself.

But then, not all education is received in schools. One morning, on one of my walking tours of downtown Honolulu, I noticed a rather long line of people standing outside the wrought-iron gates of a palatial private home on Beretania Street. It was a white coral-block house with rows of tapered white pillars forming colonnades on split-level balconies wrapping around both upper and lower stories. It stood at a modest remove from the street, graced by greenswards and flower gardens. A lush arbor of palm and monkeypod trees shaded it from the tropic sun. I assumed on first glance that it was the home of some wealthy haole, to judge by the architectural style (French Colonial, I was told later).

But what were all these people doing queued up outside? The line extended from the street through the wrought-iron gates, down a long driveway, and into the home itself. These were not the sort of guests one would expect to find on the doorstep of some rich haole: men, women, and children of largely Hawaiian descent and obviously modest means were proudly dressed in their best Sunday apparel even though it was a weekday. Many held fragrant leis strung of plumeria, carnation, or jasmine blossoms; some carried bouquets of ginger, lilies, and anthuriums; others had come bearing fruits, poi wrapped in ti leaves, sweets, even the occasional live chicken. There was a festive air to the crowd, as if today were some kind of holiday, though I was relatively sure it was not.

I followed the queue halfway down the block until I came to its end, where a Hawaiian man in a dark suit was holding a toddler as his wife quieted a fidgety six-year-old. I asked him politely what he and the others were waiting for. He seemed surprised that anyone would have to ask.

“We’re here for the levee,” he said.

“‘Levee’? What is that?”

“The reception. To see the Queen.”

I was nonplussed by this: “I did not know America had a queen.”

The woman responded coolly, “We are not Americans by choice,” which only confused me all the more.

Her husband, however, laughed good-naturedly. “Hawai’i’s queen. From before the revolution.” He looked me over, amused. “You a malihini, eh?”

Yes, I admitted, I was a newcomer, and apologized for my ignorance. The man explained to me how Hawai’i had for centuries been a kingdom, ruled by the ali’i, the royalty. For most of its history each island was ruled by separate chieftains, until united by Kamehameha I more than a century ago. Then in 1892 a thousand years of autonomous rule came to an end when a cabal of greedy businessmen-aided by the collusion of the American ambassador-seized control of the government, and under the implicit threat of American military might, forced Queen Lili’uokalani to abdicate. Twenty-five years later, this “haole elite” of businessmen still ruled Hawai’i, now a territory of the United States. They were known as the “Big Five” companies-sometimes called “the invisible Government,” owing to their power behind the scenes of the Republican Party that dominated Hawaiian government and politics.

All this was a revelation to me, stirring feelings I had not considered in many months. I thought of our murdered Queen Min, and of King Sejong, deposed by the Japanese a decade later. Suddenly I saw this place where I was living, this Hawai’i, in an unexpected new light: as a country that had suffered as Korea had suffered, lost face as a people, lost sovereignty to foreign occupiers.

Of course these Hawaiians would not think of themselves as Americansdid I consider myself Japanese?

“The queen lives in this house now?” I said. “And you may come see her?”

“Yeah, sure. Used to be she gave levees all the time; not so much since she been sick. People come, pay respect, bring her ho’okupu-tributes. Show her she’s still our mo’i wahine, our queen. Always will be.” The depth of feeling in his voice as he said this was quite the opposite of what a Korean might show on speaking of our royal family-but it was a feeling we shared in common.

“May anyone pay their respect?” I asked. “Even a malihini?”

“Yeah, sure thing.”

I got in line behind them and they generously shared some of their flowers, so that I might have a tribute to give the queen. I hoped I looked presentable enough to meet royalty. We stood in the hot sun for half an hour as the queue slowly made its way up the street, through the gate, and onto the grounds.

We entered the house through a light and spacious entryway, then into a dining room lushly appointed with flowers and gifts. Seated in a high-backed wooden chair was a woman in her late seventies wearing a black silk dress with a yoke collar. Her face was strong and open in a way I had come to expect from Hawaiians. Her hair was mostly white, with a few strands of black threading through it like old memories. Flanked by attendants wearing bright yellow feather leis, she sat with a proud, queenly bearing, as if she were still on a throne.

Some of her visitors approached on their knees, chanting their genealogies as they entered her presence. They kissed her hand, presented their tribute, then, as I was told court etiquette demanded, backed out of the room again. A few women curtsied before her. I grew nervous as I drew closerwhat should I do when I reached her? What would be appropriate for a malihini like me?

When the time came, I decided to emulate the deep, formal curtsy I had seen others perform. I kissed her hand, gave her my floral tribute, then stepped back and said to her, “May it please Your Majesty to know I am called Jin, and I come from Korea, the land of morning calm. We too had a queen we loved above all else, and a king who was deposed by agents of a foreign government. They reign in our hearts until the day our land, and yours, are again sovereign nations.”

Lili’uokalani was frail and gray, but her warm brown eyes looked at me first with surprise, then with quick interest, and finally a gleam of approval. She smiled, and raised a thin hand in a little motion that seemed to take in everyone in the room.

“These people,” she said proudly, “are my nation.”

I curtsied again, then backed out of the room as I had seen others do.

In minutes I was back on Beretania Street, blinking in the bright morning sun; everything was the same as before I entered, but from that day forward I could never think of this adopted home of mine in the same way. Now, whenever I looked in the faces of the Hawaiian people I would meet, I would see a kinship, a shared burden. Because now I knew that Hawaiians, too, understood han.

On my way home, I happened to pass that certain boardinghouse on Iwilei Road in which games of chance were known to be played. As I went out of my way to avoid being asked whether I wished to place a bet on the the fa, I carelessly bumped into a man-not very tall, wearing a blue woolen cap and a black sailor’s peacoat-who was on his way into the house.

“Oh! I’m sorry-” I began, then noticed that the man’s cap was pulled down low over his forehead-but not low enough to obscure a very distinctive scar above his right eye. And peeking out from under his peacoat was what appeared to be a bullwhip coiled around his waist.

He looked up, and I found myself staring into the face of Detective Chang Apana. He recognized me too, and hushed me with a finger to his lips and a wink of his eye. Then he hurried past me and into the boardinghouse.

Well, I thought, this promised to be of no small interest. I crossed the street and lingered for a while in Kai Kee’s grocery store. Minutes later a rowdy commotion erupted from the boardinghouse-shouts, curses, a loud popping sound that was not quite a gunshot-followed by a stream of gamblers spilling out the front door like a flock of chickens fleeing a henhouse, one step ahead of a wolf.

Ah, but no wolf ever presented a sight as memorable as that of Chang Apana chasing down a houseful of wrongdoers, cracking his blacksnake whip above his head as if he were herding cattle (which he once had, as apaniolo on the big island of Hawai’i). With calloused hands gripping the handle, he snapped the whip at a fleeing felon clad in an undershirt. The air cracked again as the whip literally exceeded the speed of sound, the stinging tip lashing the man’s back, toppling him. Apana followed up with a sharp kick to the ribs, which occupied the man’s attention for some time. In moments, the braided leather thong had coiled itself like a python around another felon’s arm; the detective yanked on the whip, sending the man spinning like a top into the side of the house. When a third criminal tried to get past him, Apana chose a more direct approach, tackling him to the ground amid a cloud of red dust and pummeling him into submission with his bare hands.

He was going after yet a fourth man when I heard the wail of a police siren and saw two patrol cars racing down Iwilei Road. They braked to halt just a few feet from where the detective was holding his prey in what I believe is popularly known as a “half-nelson.” Several patrolmen burst out of the cars, guns drawn, as well as Chief McDuffie, who took in the scene with exasperation and bellowed, “God damn it, Apana, how many times do I have to tell you: Wait for the goddamned back-up to get here!”

Apana grinned as he rounded up the unlucky gamblers and herded them like dazed cattle into the police cars. I no longer harbored any doubts about his arrest record and remembered what he’d told me that night: Cool head main t zng.

After the entire gambling ring had been taken away, Detective Apana came up to me and asked, “So howzat little bastard of yours, eh?”

I laughed and told him the cat was fine. I congratulated him on his arrest.

“One thing I hate, it’s gambling,” he said vehemently. “My wife, she like to play the mah jonng, you know? Alla time, mah jonng, mah jonng. Drive me crazy. What am I gonna do, arrest her?” He shook his head, disgusted.