Honolulu (21 page)

Mr. Yi encouraged his wife to take a few hours to visit with me, so we walked to their large and well-appointed wood-frame house on Morris Lane. Beauty made a pot of hot rice water and we sat in the backyard amid a blaze of orange helliconia blossoms and the soft perfume of Chinese jasmine, or pikake as it was called here. When I told Beauty that her husband seemed as considerate as he was prosperous, she nodded. “He is a good man and he treats me kindly. And he is a good father to his sons, though I’m afraid neither cares much for me. It doesn’t help matters that I’m pregnant.”

“What?” I said. “Congratulations! What could be wrong with that?”

“Mr. Yi’s sons would prefer not to share their inheritance with a sibling from their father’s second marriage. I would just as soon oblige them in this, but from the start my husband seemed intent on raising another family.” Her previously sunny face now looked like a rainy day. “I work long hours at the store; I don’t mind that. But-the nights are difficult. Mr. Yi is a kind and generous man; I don’t wish to seem ungrateful. I think of him as a daughter does a father … but not as a woman feels for a man.”

I told her I understood, but that her circumstances could be worse. I related Mr. Noh’s behavior toward me, her eyes widening as I described my year of married life. “Aigo, “she said softly. “No wonder you looked stricken when you saw me at church. But then, what is Mr. Choi to you?”

“He is everything that my husband is not. At the moment he is only a friend, but I suspect he will shortly wish to be more, and ask me to marry him. I will have to tell him the truth then, and that might well change his mind.”

“But it is beside the point. You are already married.”

“Then I will ask for a …”-I had to use the English word, as ki-cho, “abandoned wife,” hardly applied-“a divorce.”

I did not entertain the idea as casually as I let on, but Beauty was horrorstruck: “Oh, no, no, dear friend, you mustn’t! Bad enough being a Korean widow who dares to remarry, but divorce?”

“This is not Korea. Divorce is not uncommon here.”

“But there is such stigma against it in the Korean community-in the church, especially! I knew one woman who dared seek a divorce, and the whole neighborhood shunned her, as if she were a leper from that hospital in Kalihi!”

“What am I to do, then? Hide like a mouse in a hole the rest of my life? Do I not deserve some happiness, with a man who is tender toward me?”

She looked at me miserably.

“I have asked myself that same question many times,” she said quietly, “and I cannot pretend to have an answer.”

I left feeling sorry for Beauty, but her unhappiness only strengthened my growing resolve to put my marriage to Mr. Noh behind me, regardless of the consequences.

As production slowed on the trimming line, I was assigned other tasks at the cannery, including packing various products for shipment to customers on the mainland. Depending on the size of the package, I might have to pad the boxes for transport, and there was a large stack of old newspapers available for this purpose. It was no less tedious than working the line, but considerably easier. When I grew bored I might sneak a look at one of the news stories, but most of the time I was barely conscious of what was on these sheets I was crumpling into ballast.

Then one morning my attention was caught as I stuffed a newspaper page into a box. Curiously, I withdrew it and, as I had done years ago to that old page from LadyUiyudang’s book, I smoothed it out. What I saw was no less memorable, but hardly beautiful. There on the front page of the Pacific Com- mercialAdvertiser, dated May 25, 1915, was the headline:

BRIDE
MURDERED
ON
BUSY
STREET

Pretty Young Korean Stabbed and Slashed

By Husband While On Way Home

Walking hand in hand with a girl friend on her return home from a pleasant evening spent in a moving picture theater, pretty nineteen-year-old Kim Pak Chi Set, a Korean bride, was fiendishly attacked by her husband, a Korean man, and stabbed to death on a public highway, right in the heart of one of the busiest districts of the city, at half past nine o’clock last night …

I read with understandable interest and increasing alarm the story of “Kim”-referred to as if this were her given name and not her family name-who was brought to Honolulu as a picture bride by a man “of considerably less education than she.” The story went on, “After a time the husband commenced to ill-treat his wife, and the attention of the authorities being called to the existing state of affairs between them, the girl was placed in the Susanna Wesley Home on King Street.” She soon found work as a domestic for a local family, and was walking home from a movie with some of them when her estranged husband “pounced upon his wife … `like a big beast would jump on a little one.’ He placed his hands over her mouth until she screamed out in terror … there was the sound of a shot and the girl was seen to stumble … on the ground with her husband kneeling over her and thrusting at her head with something that gleamed in the moonlight.”

That something was a knife, and the girl died of her wounds on her way to Queen’s Hospital.

All this was chilling enough, but bringing it even closer to my own lifeinto the realm of the terribly possible-was the name of the family for whom Kim worked, and in whose company she died:

Kim Pak Set had for the past month or so been in the employ of the family of Apana, the well-known police officer, and last night she and several members of the family attended the moving picture theater near Liliha and King streets.

The show over the party started to walk leisurely home. Mrs. Luhiwa Apana and her daughter Helen were walking some distance ahead of Mary, a fifteen-year-old daughter, and Sam, a little son of Apana …

I stared at the wrinkled newspaper in what were now trembling hands. I read and reread the words, feeling for myself the panic and terror this girl must have experienced: the jolt of surprise as her husband sprang at her out of the shadows; the suffocating fear of his hand across her mouth; the sound of the gunshot that missed its mark; and the cutting pain of the knife that did not.

It made sense now: Detective Apana’s paternal interest, his friendly protectiveness toward me. I reminded him of someone whom he had not been able to protect. He was not on the scene, according to the story, when the girl was murdered; had he accompanied his family to the movies that night, he might have disarmed the wild-eyed husband in time and poor Kim Chi Ser would still be alive.

But he had not been there, and she was dead.

And if a girl like her could be killed in the way she was-on a brightly lit, well-traveled street, in the company of the family of a prominent police officer-it could happen to me, too. Just as easily, and just as quickly.

I folded the newspaper page into quarters, placed it in the pocket of my work gown, and promptly put all thoughts of divorce out of my mind.

Against my own desires, I began to distance myself from Jae-sun. I had no phone at home and the only way he could reach me was at the cannery, so I asked to be given a different work shift, hoping to simply avoid him. When that did not work, I found reasons not to lunch with him. When he asked me out to dinner the following weekend, I told him I had plans to see a motion picture with a girlfriend. He could clearly sense my new aloofness, and I readily saw the pain and confusion in his eyes. I told myself this was best for both of us, but it made me miserable to contemplate; and by Saturday, consumed with guilt and loneliness, I turned my lie into truth by calling on May to see if she would like to go to a movie. We went downtown to see the new Charlie Chaplin film, Easy Street, in which the Little Tramp improbably becomes a police officer, but I could not enjoy it. Afterward, as we walked to a coffee shop, all I could think of was poor Kim Chi Set, and I fought back the irrational panic that my own estranged husband might appear from around the next corner to attack me.

“So what’s eating you?” May asked as we settled into a booth.

“Oh, perhaps just a cup of tea.”

May rolled her eyes.

“No, not what are you eating, what’s eating you? As in, you look like somebody ran over your dog and then backed up to finish off your mother.”

I told her about my conversation with Beauty, as well as the newspaper story I had stumbled across. I admitted my fear of what might happen to me should I seek a divorce from my husband; or at the least of how Jae-sun might reject me for it. I laid out the impossibility, as I saw it, of a future with him, which was why I had decided to stop seeing him.

May listened patiently as she smoked a Lucky Strike, then when I was finished she asked me one question: “Are you in love with this guy?”

“Whether I love him, or he loves me, does not matter. There are too many reasons we should not marry.”

May stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray and said, “You’re an idiot.”

For once I understood her perfectly, and I was both taken aback and hurt.

“Why do you say such a thing?” I asked.

She sighed heavily, as if about to reveal something she would rather not.

“Remember how I told you,” she said, “about that tour I got of the naval base down in Samoa?”

“Your `shore leave’?”

“Yeah. My escort was named Iosefo-Joseph. He was Samoan. Big handsome guy, with a smile like a goddamn sunrise. Not a mean bone in his body.” She smiled in a way I had never seen her smile before. “We took to each other right off. He called me his `number one vahine.’ And all the time I was down there, he was my number one man. I could’ve had any and all of those sailors at the base, but all I wanted was Joe.

“And baby, what a lover! He was sweet and he was fire. We couldn’t get enough of each other. He’d sneak out of his barracks and we’d spend days at a time in that fleabag room, ordering up steaks from the kitchen. I’d play my records, or strum the ukulele …”

She lit up another cigarette, breathed in the smoke and let it out again, like a cloud of thought in a newspaper cartoon.

“Well, hell, I went there to get away from civilization, right? To live in a little grass shack in Samoa? So one night I say to him, `Joe, let’s go get married.’”

I must have looked dumbfounded at this. May smiled: “So help me God, it’s true. I was crazy about him, and he was crazy about me-so I thought, why the hell not? I had money, we could do whatever we wanted. So I drag Joe’s ass over to the courthouse and we apply for a marriage license.

“But turns out the judge is a good old boy from Florida who looks at us like I just asked for a license to marry a kangaroo. Gives us some bullshit about how we’d have to apply to the territorial governor. See, it’s okay for all these horny white guys to screw, even marry, the vahines; but when a white woman wants to marry a guy whose skin is darker than hers … well, you get the picture.

“Then the goddamned missionary gets wind of this, raises hell with Joe’s CO-and the next thing I know the chief of police is banging down my door in the middle of the night! I told ‘em to go to hell, I know my rightsbut Joe’s in the Navy, and he figures they’ll toss him in the stockade if he resists, so …”

The anger and frustration in her face was plain to see. “They haul Joe in front of the hangin’ judge from Tallahassee, who says, `Don’t you know it’s wrong, Joseph, to be with this white woman every night in her room?’ Joe hung his head, but I piped up, `It’s none of your damned business if Joe and me keep company! We’ll go back to Honolulu to get married and to hell with alla you!’

“The judge says, `You’re going back to Honolulu, all right, but not with him. He’s in the United States Navy.’ ”

She sighed and took a swallow of coffee. “So the bastard deported me. Bam, just like that, I’m back on board the Sonoma, heading for Honolulu.”

For the first time since I had known her, May Thompson looked fragile, and broken.

“Did you … see Joe again before you left?” I asked.

“Naw, they wouldn’t let me near him. I smuggled him a note, promising I’d pay his steamer fare to Honolulu, we could get married here, no one would bat an eye. I’ve written him two letters already since I got back. But …” She hesitated. May never hesitated.

“He has not written back?” I said quietly.

She shook her head. In the silence I clearly heard her disappointment and hurt. She drained her coffee and smiled cheerlessly. “Civilization-what a laugh.”

She stood up and dug into her change purse.

“If you want to marry somebody, Jin, for Chrissake-do it.” She flipped a quarter onto the table as a tip. “That’s why you’re an idiot. Look, I gotta go.”

On her way out a heavyset man at the counter whistled at her, and I saw her throw him a smile. But it was an empty smile, a mere sales tool. I rose to leave. The man preceded me, hurrying out the door to catch up with May as she sashayed up King Street. Within half a block they were walking arm in arm toward the nearest hotel, and I wanted to cry.

I began looking for an attorney the next day.

The dissolution of a marriage in Korea was no trifling matter, and in most cases was initiated by the husband’s parents. A wife could be expelled from marriage for one of “seven evils”: adultery, thievery, jealousy, insolence toward her in-laws, failure to produce a son, a mortal disease, or excessive talkativeness. Ki-cho was an even greater stigma for a woman to bear than sonlessness. By failing as a wife-due to her inherently “dark and ignorant nature”-a divorced woman became a pariah. No respectable clan would allow their son to marry such a woman; her own parents often banned her dishonorable presence from their household. Women who committed adultery were made slaves of the state, and for those who willfully abandoned their husbands, the legal penalty was death by hanging. Many a disgraced woman died by her own hand before it came to that.

With such fearsome associations, a divorce was not something I considered lightly, but America, I told myself, was not Korea. May was the one who advised me to obtain the services of an attorney, and recommended one she knew who had represented women of Iwilei. His name was Tillman and his offices on King Street were modest at best. A short, dark, rumpled haole in his late thirties, he took careful notes as he quizzed me about the date of my wedding, how long my husband and I had lived together, and my reasons for seeking a divorce. When I informed him of my husband’s drunken attacks on me and my subsequent miscarriage, he looked up from his notes: “Were you treated by a doctor at that time?” I told him yes. “What was his name?” I provided him with the name of the plantation doctor. When Mr. Tillman had finished his questions and I had finished answering, he told me, “I believe you have more than adequate grounds to seek a divorce. Now, is there anything you would like to ask me?”