Honolulu (26 page)

“He will be fine,” I told Esther. “He’s a good boy.”

Joey’s detachment during the game now made sense, and when shortly afterward I saw him sitting alone, picking at his poi and haupia pudding, I went and joined him.

“Mack and Shorty say I played like a dumb old kua’aina,” he said glumly.

“The last time I saw you play, you hit a home run and won the game. They weren’t complaining then.”

“Last time I didn’t play like a dumb old kua’aina,” he muttered.

“No one can win every game they play, Joey.”

“Why not?” he said angrily.

“It’s not the game that’s bothering you, is it?”

He got up suddenly, kicked a fallen coconut with his bare foot, and sent it hurtling across the park in an impressive if pointless display.

When he sat back down, I saw there were tears in his eyes. “Aunt Jin … why are Mama and Papa so mad at each other? Is it something I did?”

“Oh, Joey, no, no-it’s not your fault.” I lay my arm across his shoulders and told him, “It’s just that … mothers and fathers get married because they fall in love, and sometimes … they fall out of love, and have to stop being married.”

“Why?”

“Because they do, that’s all. But I promise you this, Joey: the one thing they never stop loving is their keiki.”

He looked at me hopefully. “No lie?”

I squeezed him to me and smiled. “No lie,” I said.

The Great War soon ended, but in my homeland another sort of battle was now engaged. Not long after the New Year, Honolulu’s Korean community received the stirring news that a group of thirty-three brave Korean patriots-inspired by President Wilson’s postwar utterances about the rights of smaller countries to be free-had conspired to compose a document they called “The Proclamation of Korean independence,” which asserted Korea’s sovereign right to be free of Japanese domination. On the morning of March 1, 1919, the conspirators gathered at the Pagoda Restaurant in Seoul, signed the highly illegal and seditious document, then politely telephoned the nearest police station to turn themselves in.

At two o’clock that afternoon, three million courageous citizens all across Korea participated in a series of carefully synchronized demonstrations. Shopkeepers closed their stores;yangban and peasants alike took to the streets, where the proclamation of independence was read aloud to cheering crowds. Protesters proudly waved the banned Korean flag and cried, `Mansei! Mansei!”-“May Korea live ten thousand years!” It was by all accounts one of the most inspiring moments in our nation’s history: men, women, and children joined in solidarity and love of country, love of freedom, proclaimingdemanding-their liberty. Even a few Korean policemen were moved to discard their black uniforms and join the protesters. There was no violence at first: The architects of the demonstration had laid down strict instructions not to provoke the Japanese military police and to submit peacefully to them.

But as the demonstrations continued over the next several days, with stores remaining closed and students refusing to attend schools, the Japanese authorities engaged in bitter reprisal. Unarmed, unresisting protesters were pounded with clubs or silenced with sabers. In one notably gruesome instance, a man’s ears were chopped off and his body hacked to ribbons by swords. Women who were not killed were often gang-raped by Japanese soldiers. There were massacres at places like Sungohun and Suheung, whose names went from obscurity to infamy in a matter of days.

In the span of just seven weeks, some two thousand Korean men, women, and children would die in the name of the bloodred sun of imperial Japan.

In Hawai’i, we first learned of all this in Sunday church services and the community’s response was predictably one of horror and outrage-inciting a militant nationalism in even those who had not previously been politically minded.

“The Japanese have finally shown their true face to the world,” our pastor declared. “Now it is time we show solidarity with our fellow Koreans!”

The founder of the Korean Christian Church, Dr. Syngman Rhee, was named head of a “provisional government” in exile, and his Korean National Association solicited donations on behalf of this government. Every family was exhorted to contribute five dollars for each adult member of the household. At a time when the average Korean family earned barely thirty dollars a month, this was a not inconsiderable sum; but we gave willingly, enthusiastically, in the common cause of our native country’s freedom.

I joined the newly formed Women’s Relief Society, whose members would often forego one bowl of rice each day in order to make rice cakes to be sold for fund-raising. Like many in the community, we boycotted Japanese goods such as soy sauce and bought our rice from Chinese merchants. Jae-sun, never kindly disposed toward the Japanese, seemed to harden his heart against them even more.

But by the start of the Year of the Monkey, in February of 1920, these distant horrors were eclipsed by one right here in our midst.

On December an epidemic of Spanish influenza broke out in Honolulu as it already had worldwide, going on to claim eighty-one lives in the islands in January alone. Hawai’i, of course, had a long and fatal history of Western plagues devastating the native population, and the ensuing panic drove people off the streets and into the presumed safety of their own homes. Churches suspended services out of fear of spreading the disease; movie theaters shut their doors indefinitely. Queen’s Hospital was quickly overwhelmed with cases of influenza and emergency hospitals were established at Quarantine island and, uncomfortably close to us, Palama Settlement.

By this time I was also three months pregnant with our second child. Not wishing to expose Grace Eun or our unborn child to unnecessary risk, Jaesun and I agreed that I would give up my job at the tailor shop, though I still took in some piecework I could do at home. We may not have made as much money, but neither did we want for anything of substance, and were even still able to donate our five dollars a month to the Korean Independence Fund.

So it came as something of a surprise when one morning my husband held up that day’s edition of Dr. Rhee’s Korean-language newspaper, the Korean Pacific Weekly, and said, “Here now, Grace Eun’s mother, do you see this?” He tapped the front page with his finger. “This is opportunity. Go on, read it.”

He handed me the paper, pointing out a story about the recent strike action taken by Japanese and Filipino laborers against O’ahu’s sugar plantations. The workers were seeking an increase in wages-from a base pay of seventy-seven cents a day to a dollar and twenty-five cents-as well as changes to the inequitable “bonus” system. I remembered the back-breaking toil at Waialua and could scarcely blame the strikers.

“The plantation owners need new workers to replace them,” Jae-sun said excitedly, “and are willing to pay up to three and a half dollars a day, plus bonuses!”

This seemed a huge sum and I was frankly skeptical. “Why would they pay someone three dollars a day when the strikers are only asking for a third of that? ”

“As a wedge to use against the union. The planters would lose much more money in the long run if they give in to the demands. But in the short run, there is opportunity for much money to be made by someone like myself.”

I was dismayed to hear this. “You wish to go back to the plantation?”

“Only for as long as the strike goes on. Even if it lasts only two more months, why, at three and a half dollars a day, I could earn nearly two hundred dollars in that time! Think of what we could do with such money! We could buy a home of our own. Or a boardinghouse! Perhaps even-open a restaurant.”

This last he spoke casually, almost diffidently, but I did not underestimate its importance to him. Still … “It does not seem right,” I said, “taking someone else’s job. Even a Japanese.”

“They have taken our country from us,” Jae-sun replied coldly, predictably. “I won’t shed any tears over taking one of their jobs! In fact, I will do it with pride, and as a spit in the face of the Japanese Empire.”

Seeing my hesitation, he softened this a bit. “No one will lose their jobs permanently,yobo. The strike will last a month or two, the laborers will eventually return to the plantation, and you and I will have some extra money in our pocket-that’s all.”

Jae-sun earned barely two hundred dollars for an entire year’s work at the cannery; to make such a sum in only two months’ time did seem miraculous. “So,” I said resignedly, “you have accepted a job, then?”

He looked surprised. “No, of course not. I merely wish to know what you think of the idea. Though I hope you will agree that this is an opportunity that does not come often in a man’s life.”

It wasn’t the wistfulness in his eyes when he spoke of opening a restaurant that swayed me. Nor was it the money, though I did consider what it might mean for my children’s future, as well as Blossom’s. No, in the end what persuaded me was simply … that he had asked me. My father would have made such a decision on his own and only informed my mother after the fact. That Jae-sun sought my opinion-my consent-meant more to me than I could say. And because of that, I could not gainsay him this job.

“I see the wisdom in what you suggest. It is a great opportunity.” I was not nearly as confident as I sounded, but the gladness in his face almost convinced me. “How soon would we leave?”

Startled, he said, “No, you misunderstand. I would go to the plantation, you and Grace would remain here, in Honolulu.”

Had I heard him correctly? “You would go there-alone?”

“It will be better that way. You would not have to move, and I can always come into the city on Sundays to visit.”

“But-my place is with you,” I protested. “Our place-Grace’s, too.”

I had not expected the sudden panic I saw in his eyes. “No!” he blurted out. “You mustn’t bring the children!”

His voice was raised not in anger but in alarm. Now I understood.

“Husband,” I said, gently, “no harm will come to them. Or to me.”

“You don’t know that! A plantation is a dangerous place to raise a child.”

I took his hand in mine and felt it tremble like a sparrow’s wing.

“Yobo, no harm will come to us. I promise that I will not work in the fields if you do not wish me to. I will not bring Grace or our unborn child into the fields. And consider this: Given the spread of influenza here in Honolulu, it might even be safer for them there, away from the city.”

He thought about that a long moment.

“You will go nowhere near the fields,” he finally said-not a command but a restatement. I nodded.

“I lost a child on the plantation, too,” I reminded him. “I promise you, I will not lose another.”

Jae-sun had no trouble securing a job at the O’ahu Sugar Company in Waipahu, just outside Honolulu, and it took less than a week to pack up our belongings and arrange for transportation. Before we left, I stopped and said goodbye, for the moment, to the Kahahawais. The past year had seen Joseph Sr. remarry to a pretty eighteen-year-old Hawaiian woman named Hannah Pipi, with whom he soon had a young son named Arthurthe first of four boys and two daughters. Esther, in order to make ends meet, had taken a job sewing burlap bags at the Hawaiian Fertilizer Company in Iwilei, where she met and began seeing a fellow employee, an easygoing Portuguese named Pascual Anito. With typical Hawaiian tolerance and aloha, all parties seemed to accept and embrace this extended ‘ohana. Joey-now, at the mature age of eleven, preferring to be called Joe, like his fatherseemed happy to have a younger brother.

He even seemed to have gained something of an older brother in the form of a family friend named William Kama, who worked with Joe Sr. as a streetcar conductor, and who was visiting when I dropped by. Bill was a serious young man in his mid-twenties, of medium height and build, but he might have been ten feet tall for the way Joe Jr. looked up to him. A graduate of the prestigious Kamehameha School, Bill hoped to become a police officer.

“Joe’s a good kid,” he told me. “He just needs somebody to remind him of it.” Bill promised me he’d do his best to keep him from playing hooky with Mack and Shorty, and “out of pilikia.”

On Friday morning my family and I boarded a train bound for Waipahu, a few miles north of Pearl Harbor. Grace cried at first at the clamor of the locomotive as it clattered out of the station, but quieted when I held her up to the window to watch the landscape rolling past. It was a short trip to Waipahu-only nine stops, less than forty minutes-which helped reassure me that I was not leaving too far behind us the life we had begun building for ourselves in Honolulu.

We were not the only strikebreakers arriving that day, but were among a group of about thirty laborers-Chinese, Hawaiian, Korean, Portuguesewho disembarked at Waipahu. None of us, however, had expected to be escorted onto the plantation by a contingent of fifteen local police officers, who formed a buffer between us and a small number of Japanese gathered along Waipahu Depot Road. Some were local shopkeepers, but many were laborers who had been forcibly evicted from their plantation homes after the strike was called. They had taken refuge in nearby schools and temples and now looked upon us, their replacements, with understandable discontent. Once on the plantation grounds we even passed through what had been the Japanese camp-silent as a town full of obake, ghosts, the houses hauntingly empty, their doors and windows actually nailed shut.

In contrast to the white sands and crashing surf at Waialua, there was a lonely monotony about the landscape here. Waipahu was a flat, landlocked plain-acre upon acre of sugar cane and rice paddies-with only the stooped shoulders of low hills in the distance. When we reached the Korean camp we found that it stood within sight of the gracious homes of the plantation managers, but our own housing was so far removed from this it might have been on the other side of the world. We were to live in what amounted to a long barracks, four families to a building, each so-called “apartment” separated by freestanding walls that stopped well short of the roof. We had no privacy to speak of and were never free from the chatter of neighbors or the crying of their children. We also shared the housing with other, unwanted residents: cockroaches, centipedes, even scorpions, which stubbornly held their ground until repulsed by torches made of old newspaper.