Honolulu (20 page)

He bowed and formally introduced himself as Jae-sun of the Choi clan of Pusan. His given name translates into English as “prosperity and goodness,” but as that is somewhat awkward, I shall refer to him hereafter by his Korean name. (The vowel ae sounds like the English a in “bat,” and “sun” is pronounced somewhere between “sun” and “soon.”)

I introduced myself as Jin of the Pak clan of Pojogae. “Ah,” he said with a small smile, “and a gem you are, amidst all these diamonds!”

This was a reference to the diamond-shaped segment on the pineapple’s skin, and it seemed amusing at the time. I laughed. And I had to admit, I was enjoying the opportunity to speak again in my native tongue.

Instead of taking me to the company cafeteria, Jae-sun picked up a large basket and a mat, and led me outside to a grassy spot near where the newly harvested pineapples were warehoused. He laid down the mat on the grass. “I beg your indulgence,” he said humbly, “as it is a poor table I set before you.”

The table was anything but poor. Out of this magic basket he produced a miraculous array of foods: spicy-hot eggplant kimchi; sesame balls filled with sweet red-bean paste and raisins; and naengmyeon, cold noodles with vegetables.

“This is delicious,” I said between bites. “Where did you get it?”

“You are too generous. I made it myself, for better or worse.”

I had never met a Korean man who could cook, much less admit to having done so. “For better, I think. You are an excellent cook.”

“Being a bachelor, I am a cook out of necessity. But I do enjoy it. I used to watch my mother preparing dumplings and fire beef, and asked her to teach me how, but she told me the kitchen was not the proper realm for boys.”

“In Korea, perhaps. But here you could be a chef at a restaurant.”

“I have dreamed of such a thing,” he admitted, “but my English is not sufficient to the task of running such a business. And most of what I know to cook is Korean-there are no such restaurants in Honolulu.”

“There are many Japanese restaurants; you might get a job at one of them.”

His cheerful eyes suddenly hardened. “No,” he said sharply. “I will not work for the Wai barbarians who have stolen our country from us.”

Startled but not shocked by his vehemence, I changed the subject and asked how long he had been working at the cannery and what it was he did. He told me he worked in the facility that ground up the pineapple shells into bran for use as cattle feed, loading twenty-pound bags of pineapple bran onto conveyor belts. He had been here for four years, having worked at Waimanalo Plantation for eight years previous to that. He was a widower, he said, though he did not elaborate.

“We are both widowed, but only one of us may marry again,” I said. Widows in Korea were prohibited from remarriage; I brought this up to discourage his interest in one who was, unbeknownst to him, still a married woman.

But he just laughed at that. “In Korea it would not be seemly for a man to cook in his home-and yet are you not even now eating my kimchi and noodles?”

I had to smile and concede the point. I was impressed. Was he truly so lib eral a thinker that he would sanction a woman to marry for a second time? Or was he merely pretending to be enlightened, as my husband had appeared at first?

I enjoyed our lunch, and the next day, when Jae-sun asked me out to dinner that weekend, I found myself accepting. We ate at Hop Hing Lun’s restaurant on ‘A’ala Street, where I told him about my family in Korea and even about my desire for an education, which did not appear to alarm him. I did not volunteer any details of my marriage and he did not ask for them. By this time the difference in our ages no longer seemed so important, but I wondered whether it was cruel and futile to encourage his attentions when I was still legally married to Mr. Noh.

It was on a Wednesday evening in mid-January, as I pondered this question while sewing, when I heard a knock on my door. I assumed it must be either my landlord, Mr. Leung, or one of my neighbors-but when I opened the door I was staggered to see a familiar figure in white on my doorstep, a pile of luggage at her feet, and a gramophone tucked under her arm.

“Hiya, toots!” May greeted me brightly. “Ain’t this a kick in the pants?”

She barreled past me and into the room, depositing the gramophone with a thud on my wobbly table. “Boy, am I sick of lugging this goddamn thing halfway around the Pacific!” She took in my cramped, narrow quarters and blanched. “Jesus! Put a couple of handles on this place and you’ve got yourself a coffin.” I laughed: it was true. Suddenly an orange ball of fur propelled itself off my bed and into May’s arms. “Hey, there he is!” she cried out happily. “There’s my Little Bastard!” She stroked his mane and, transported with bliss, the cat climbed up her chest and wrapped himself around her neck like a stole, purring contentedly.

I asked, “Did you not go to Samoa?”

“Oh yeah, I went, all right.”

“And what happened? Why are you back so soon?”

“Oh, baby, that’s a long story. Listen, I’m starving. You got a kitchen in this dump?”

“Why, yes,” I said airily, “it’s off the verandah. ”

In the communal kitchen I stir-fried some vegetables, water chestnuts, and tinned salmon while May used the facilities. She came back and announced, “No offense, kiddo, but this rattrap makes Iwilei look like ‘Iolani Palace.”

“It is the best I can afford at the moment.”

“You find a job?”

“Yes, at the cannery. I cut out pineapple eyes.”

“Smart. That way they can’t see it when you slice ‘em to pieces.” She opened the cupboard and rummaged through it. “Any hooch in here?”

Finding the cupboard hoochless, May went out onto the balcony and called down to a small boy playing in the courtyard. “Hey, kid! I’ll pay you a quarter to go down to the corner and pick me up a fifth of gin!”

She flipped him a quarter and the cost of the gin, and the boy took off like a bullet, returning in record time. We brought the food back to my room and May finally told me about her trip. “So here’s the straight dope,” she said around a mouthful of food. “I’d had a bellyful of `civilization’ and all I wanted was that little grass shack in Samoa. Which isn’t to say I didn’t want to have a good time getting there, so I threw a little party in my cabin. Lasted about ten days.” She hooted with glee. “That’s the beauty of being aboard ship-there’s no shortage of available men! I was pretty tight the whole time, and I couldn’t give you their names if you put a gun to my head, but let’s just say I worked my way up through the ranks. If we’d been at sea another day, hell, maybe the skipper himself might’ve signed on for a hitch.”

As usual with May, I understood every third word but somehow gleaned her meaning.

“Couple cabins down from mine, there are these two gentlemen.” Her words dripped with uncharacteristic disdain. “The younger one’s American, kinda good-looking … I invited him to my cabin, but he gave me the cold shoulder. The older guy’s an uppity Brit who looks me over like something he found on the bottom of his shoe. And while they’re looking down their noses at me-` Tsk tsk, bad job, isn’t she, Gerald? That she is, Willie’-these two queers are pretending to all the `respectable’ folk on board like they’re not goin’ back to their cabin and buggering each other’s brains out!”

I had absolutely no idea what this meant, and said so. When May explained, I was shocked: I had never heard of such a thing.

“Honey, it takes all kinds,” May said with a shrug. “I got no problem with how anybody gets their jollies, long as they don’t judge me. So wouldn’t you know, not only do I get a snootful from Willie and Gerald, I get another one from some holier-than-thou missionary couple, hauling a shitload of salvation down to the aborigines. They’d give me the evil eye, and just to piss ‘em off I’d wiggle my ass in their faces whenever I saw ‘em.

“So we sail into Pago Pago Harbor, but there’s some bushwah about an outbreak of smallpox on the schooner that’s supposed to take us to Apiaand we all have to put up in some fleabag of a rooming house outside Pago Pago till the quarantine’s lifted! And it’s raining. Jesus, I never saw so much goddamn rain in my life. For five whole days, it’s pissing down so hard we can’t even drive the three lousy miles into Pago Pago for a little entertainment!

“But thank God for the red, white, and blue: Pago Pago is in American Samoa, and there’s a U.S. naval base nearby. I got the quartermaster of the Sonoma to wangle me a tour of the base. My escort was tall, dark, and handsome, and oh boy, pretty soon shore leave’s not lookin’ so bad after all.”

Little Bastard was curled up in May’s lap and as she massaged his neck he emitted a wheezy purr of contentment. “But just my luck-I’m in this fleabag rooming house and on one side of me I’ve got the missionary and his wife, and on the other, Mr. and Mrs. Willie! The preacher raises hell with management about me having a man in my room, the Brit gives me a hard time about my playing music … I mean, here we are, stuck in this miserable little dive at the ass-end of nowhere, and these killjoys are bellyaching about a girl getting a little recreation! What the hell did I do to deserve this?

“The missionary tried to get me tossed out, but it was the damn Brit who really got under my skin. He’d call downstairs to his lover boy, `Teatime, Gerald!’-and I couldn’t help myself, I’d bang on the wall and yell, `No, it’s nookie time, you bloody limey!’” She laughed uproariously. “I’d still be there partying if me and a friend hadn’t decided to take a midnight swim in the bay, in the altogether. How the hell was I supposed to know that was the governor’s motorboat pier?”

“I do not understand.”

“They kicked me out of the goddamn country! And here I am again!”

May stayed that night with me, the two of us sharing my small bed, precipitating the only instance I can recall of May Thompson appearing demure: “Now, you just stay on your side, honey, okay? I ain’t that kind of specialty act.” The next day she rented a room for herself in Chinatown, where the city’s remaining prostitutes had quietly settled after the closure of Iwilei. The absence of an unofficially sanctioned red-light district seemed to placate the righteous elements of Honolulu society, and women like May promptly went back to plying their trade, albeit a bit more discreetly.

We stayed in touch, occasionally even going to a movie togetheralways a matinee in advance of her “business hours”-but Jae-sun now occupied most of my social life. We had lunch several times a week at the cannery, and by mid-March I could not deny my growing attraction to him. Then one day he asked me, somewhat to my surprise, if I would accompany him to church that Sunday.

He explained matter-of-factly that he had converted to Christianity after his wife’s death, finding it a comfort. When I asked him how his wife had died, he told me it had been an accident on the plantation. “She was coming home from a long day in the fields, carrying our newborn son. In the dark she stumbled and fell into an irrigation ditch. She hit her head on a pipe and fell facedown into the ditch. She and our son both drowned.”

To a Westerner his expression would have seemed stoic, but I could clearly see his pain-in his eyes, in the tightness around his mouth, even in the way his hands lay in his lap as he spoke. “My wife had wanted us to leave the plantation and move to Honolulu, but I was afraid I would not be able to make a living here, and so we stayed. I should have listened to her,” he finished quietly.

I was unprepared for such a sad and terrible response.

“I am so sorry,” I said, feeling guilty for my own ruse of widowhood, which now seemed venal and self-serving. “How many years has it been?”

“There is no point in counting the age of a dead child,” he said, invoking an old Korean maxim. “But I go to church, and I pray for them.”

I told him I would be honored to join him.

That Sunday we attended services at a Korean Methodist church on Punchbowl Street, where we listened to a sermon by the pastor, Reverend Song. The hymns the congregation sang sounded lovely to my ears, and I could see how Jae-sun derived comfort from this community of believers. However, the presence here of so many of my countrymen and women heightened my fears of being exposed as the wife of Mr. Noh, and I found myself anxious for the service to end.

Finally we began filing out of the large wooden church shaded by tall palm trees, but just when I thought I had escaped detection, I heard a high breathy voice exclaim, in Korean: “Regret?”

My heart pounded at hearing my childhood name again, and fearfully I turned in the direction of the voice.

It belonged to my old friend Beauty, whom I had last heard sobbing through the thin clapboard walls of the Hotel of Sorrows.

But now she seemed anything but sorrowful. She ran toward me, a bright smile on her face, and as she came up to me she happily clasped my hands in hers.

“Oh, do forgive me the rudeness of using your name! I was just so stunned to find you here. You look wonderful, dear friend. Is this your husband?”

Jae-sun blushed.

Beauty, of course, had met Mr. Noh at the docks, and now I saw her dawning realization that this was not him.

“My husband is dead,” I said quickly. “This is my friend, Mr. Choi.”

Beauty’s elderly husband, Mr. Yi, slowly hobbled up to join us and introductions were made; I explained to Jae-sun that Mrs. Yi and I had arrived together in Hawai’i as picture brides aboard the Nippon Maru. If Mr. Yi was shocked at the idea of Jae-sun courting a widow, he did not show it. We all chatted amiably for a few minutes, then Beauty insisted I must come visit her that week; I promised that I would. But even as we left the church grounds, I worried over how much longer I could keep Jae-sun from learning the truth.

Beauty’s husband owned a general store on Liliha Street that was enjoying considerable success, to judge by the number of customers when I came to visit. At seventy-two years of age, Mr. Yi no longer worked long hours at the store but left the running of it to his two sons from his first marriage (his previous wife was deceased some five years). Beauty worked as a sales clerk, and they also employed as a stock boy a young Hawai’i-born Korean in his early twenties, Frank Ahn, the son of a couple Mr. Yi knew from his plantation days.