Honolulu (34 page)

“We should prepare them something special, then.”

“I was thinking perhaps misoyaki,” he said with studied casualness. “They are Japanese.”

I was more than mildly surprised, but said only, “Perhaps some mochi for dessert?”

“Yes, good.”

“When will they be coming?”

“Tomorrow evening at six o’clock.”

We spoke no more of it until the following evening at six, when a spindly Japanese man in a threadbare suit entered the restaurant with his wife and four children in tow. I was not looking at them but at him-there was an earnest grace to the way he bowed to me, smiled and said, “Hello. We have table. I am Taizo.”

I bowed in return. “Konicha wa, Taizo-san. I am honored to meet you. My name is Jin-my husband has told me much about you.”

“And he speaks of you with great fondness. This is my wife, Tamiko.”

I looked at the woman standing behind him, holding an infant child, and surely betrayed my surprise at seeing my old friend from the Nippon Maru.

Tamiko smiled and bowed, then said, as if we were meeting for the first time: “I am pleased to meet you, Jin-san. This is my daughter Sugi, my sons Hiroshi and Jiro, and our newest child, who is also named Jin. Is that not a coincidence?” Her eyes glittered with amusement. “In Japanese it means `tenderness.’ ”

Jae-sun appeared from the kitchen, greeting Taizo with evident warmth as he escorted the family to a table. As Tamiko and I followed behind our husbands we exchanged wordless smiles. But Jiro was regarding me uncertainly, perhaps with a faint memory of crackseed on his tongue. “I know you,” he said at last.

“Of course you do,” I said, pulling a chair out for him. “We are all going to be great friends.”

As these ties were renewed, so were others. At the start of the Christian New Year of 1924, I had received a letter from my elder brother, informing me that Blossom, now sixteen years old, had made another attempt to flee the Pak home. The weariness in which he couched this news made me think that perhaps the time was finally right to again broach a sore subject. What’s more, the following month would see the start of the Korean Year of the Rat. It had been the Year of the Rat twelve years ago, when Blossom first came to our home in Pojogae, and I took this as an auspicious omen. After consulting with Jae-sun, I wrote to Joyful Day:

It sounds as if little sister-in-law is becoming increasingly troublesome. Someone who so obviously hates where she is will hardly make for a pliant and dutiful wife. Would it not be better for all concerned if she were to come here to Hawaii instead?

My husband and fare prepared to offeryou the sum of one hundred dollars-two hundred yen-to dissolve Blossom’s obligation to the clan. We will also pay for her steamer fare to Hawaii. You need do nothing but apply for the proper papers. If Father will not consider sister-in-law’s well-being, perhaps he will consider what two hundred yen might do for his clan’s.

The reply, which arrived a month later, was brief and to the point:

Little Sister.

Father has given due consideration to your generous offer and wishes me to tell you that he agrees to your terms.

Please advise us on how you wish to proceed.

Your elder brother

I was ecstatic and wrote back to request they begin the process of applying for Blossom’s passport and visa. Once they had obtained these, we would send them a steamship ticket and either mail or wire them the hundred dollars.

But in order for Blossom to enter the country, she had to be engaged to marry a man in the United States. I discreetly inquired of several young men of our acquaintance whether they would be willing to lend their names to the fiction of an arranged marriage. Ronald Yun, the twenty-year-old son of a neighbor, agreed to assist in this bit of subterfuge-even to marry Blossom if there was no other way to get her into the country, a marriage that would later be annulled.

To lend credibility to the sham, I had Mr. Yun send Blossom fifty dollars in “earnest money,” which we provided.

My brother reported no trouble obtaining a passport for Blossom. I then had him apply for a visa on her behalf as the fiancee of an American-born man named Ronald Yun in Honolulu. Hundreds of women still entered the country this way, and I believed it would be only a question of how long we had to wait for the American embassy in Seoul to approve Blossom’s visa.

But though my timing had been right in approaching Father, in another respect it could not have been worse.

Koreans were not alone, it seemed, in their antipathy toward the Japanese. Apparently many on the American mainland, including prominent members of Congress, were looking at the number of Japanese immigrants in Hawai’i-and other parts of the western United States-with mounting alarm about something they called “Oriental colonization.” It was not a matter of race, they claimed, but of culture: Orientals, they said, were too alien in their values, and simply would not assimilate into American society. America’s culture and values had to be preserved against this invasion from outside its borders.

The 1920 Japanese labor action against O’ahu plantations only fueled Americans’ suspicions that the Japanese were out to undermine their economy and way of life. Immigration from China had been restricted before the turn of the century, and a so-called Gentleman’s Agreement between the United States and Japan in 1907 stopped any further immigration from the Japanese Empire, including Korea. The only exceptions to this had been for students studying abroad and for “picture brides” like myself. But now, it appeared, we had committed an unpardonable crime: We were reproducing.

Birth rates among Japanese and Koreans in the United States had soared in recent years as laborers married, settled down, and raised families. We were apparently doing it too well relative to the birth rate of Americans in general, and white Americans in particular.

I was pathetically ignorant of all this as I began excitedly preparing for Blossom’s arrival. We had purchased a two-tiered “bunk bed” for Harold and Charlie to sleep in, thus freeing up valuable floor space in our one-room apartment, in which we put the daybed that was to belong to my sister-inlaw. Even though Blossom’s arrival was still months away, I began excitedly cleaning house, making room in the closet, and clearing space for another family member.

But then, in December 1924, word came from my brother that Blossom’s visa to the United States had been denied.

At first I thought it was some sort of mistake, but a visit to the passport office here in Honolulu revealed the appalling truth.

That summer, the United States Congress had passed-and President Coolidge signed into law-the immigration Act of 1924, or as it was sometimes called, the Oriental Exclusion Act. Against the fear of a “Japanese conspiracy,” it closed the door on any further Japanese immigration, including and especially the importation of picture brides.

It closed the door on Blossom.

The only exceptions now were temporary visas for students entering “an accredited school, college, academy, seminary, or university … and who shall voluntarily depart from the United States upon the completion of such course of study.” Desperately I attempted to enroll Blossom in the Korean Girls’ Seminary in Honolulu, but as she had never received a formal education of any kind in Korea, she was judged by the American Embassy not a “qualified” applicant and a student visa was also denied her.

It was our last hope, cruelly dashed.

I blamed not Congress but myself: If only I had thought to do this a year ago! I wept bitterly, feeling the greatest loss and grief since the death of my first child; and in a way, this was a kind of death, the death of a dream long held. Jae-sun tried to comfort me, but I would not be consoled. During the day, with Harold and Grace at school and Jae-sun at work, I would look at the daybed we had bought for my little sister and I would burst into tearsalarming Charlie, who hardly understood grief and would never know what he was missing by Blossom’s absence in our home.

Just as I was beginning to reconcile myself to a life without her, I received another letter from Joyful Day-this one informing me that Blossom had once again run away. But this time she had done so bearing an Imperial Japanese passport. She could not travel to the United States with this docu ment, but she might have been able to use it to escape to Japan or China. Despite their best attempts, my family was unable to locate her.

Blossom was gone, and my clan had only fifty dollars in “earnest money” to show for it. Father had reason anew to hate me.

With my husband’s agreement I wired them the balance of the money owed them: they had, after all, lived up to their part of the bargain.

And now, in addition to my grief that my little sister-in-law would not be joining me in Hawai’i, I worried for her safety. The life of a runaway did not usually end well, and I fretted about where she was, whether she had money for food or a roof over her head. But all I could do was pray for her health and well-being.

My only consolation-a faint one-was the knowledge that Blossom would not, after all, become a Daughter-in-Law Flower growing in my family’s bitter garden. At least I had helped, in some way, to assist in her escaping this fate; and wherever she was, wherever she came to rest, I prayed for her eventual happiness, and hoped she would not forget me … even as I would never, could never, forget the first real sister I had ever had.

In Korea the number three is considered a lucky number, and sixbeing twice three-is thought to be a profitable one. So on the sixth anniversary of the Liliha Cafe, we celebrated the luck and the profit that had come our way by inviting all the friends who had supported us to a private party at the restaurant. The buffet table was abundantly stocked with everything from kimchi and mandu dumplings to kulolo pudding and-for the children present-hamburger sandwiches. Jae-sun was kept busy cooking much of the time as I greeted our guests, which included my Sisters of Kyongsang and their clans, the Anito and Kahahawai extended ‘ohana, our friends from church, and beachboys Tarball, Steamboat, Hiram-but notably not Panama Dave, the end of whose romance with Beauty had come as a shock to none save Beauty herself. It was pleasing to see so many faces dear to us gathered in this place that was both business and home to our family, and when I wasn’t carrying in hot dishes, I drifted from one table to the next, visiting and chatting with one group of friends before moving on to another.

I stopped by the Kahahawais’ table, where Joe, his family, and Bill Kama were raptly listening to Chang Apana casually relate how, over the course of his long police career, he had been pushed out of a second-story window, stabbed six times, run over by a horse and buggy, attacked with a sickle, and once even been shot at point-blank only to have the bullet stopped by his badge. Yet as celebrated as Chang had become for his true-life exploits, he had recently gained even greater notoriety for some that were purely fictional. An author of mystery stories, Earl Derr Biggers, had the previous year published a novel called The House Without a Key, which introduced a Honolulu police detective named Charlie Chan. Almost immediately upon publication of the story in The Saturday Evening Post, Honolulu was abuzz with speculation that Chan was based upon Chang Apana.

Now, it was true that Chang was also renowned for his powers of deduction: he once solved a crime by means of a silk thread found on a floor, and captured a murderer by identifying a certain kind of mud on the man’s shoes. But that was all he and Charlie Chan had in common. Where Apana was wiry and two-fisted, Chan was fat and intellectual; where Chang was a man of a few choice words, his counterpart spouted aphorisms like “Alibi have habit of disappearing like hole in water” or “Death is the black camel that kneels unbid at every gate.” Derr Biggers, who had vacationed in Honolulu in 1919, apparently ran across a news story about Chang smashing an opium ring and thought a Chinese police detective would be a refreshing change from the diabolical Oriental villains so common to mystery stories in those days. The character immediately caught the public’s fancy and Chang Apana now found himself jokingly addressed as “Charlie” by his fellow officers, and his autograph was eagerly sought by tourists. He obligingly signed these “Charlie Chan. ”

“Detective,” I asked him, “have you seen the chapter play yet?” Pathe had just released a ten-part motion picture serial based on The House Without a Key, starring the Japanese actor George Kuwa.

“Oh yeah, plenty times,” he replied with a grin. “Eh, what do you know! Never knew I was Japanee!”

Everyone laughed, but the gleam in Chang’s eye was not one of annoyance but amusement. I think he was flattered by the notion that his exploits had inspired a movie hero, if an unlikely one.

I moved over to where Joe Kahahawai was sitting next to his father. “And how are you, Joe?”

“Eh, good, how you-I mean, how are you, Aunt Jin?” Joe spoke pidgin among his friends, but was always careful to speak more conventional English around his elders, especially Esther.

“He’s thinking about going back to school,” Joe Sr. said proudly. Joe, having fared better on the football field than in the classroom, had dropped out of St. Louis College two years ago, when he was fifteen.

Joe wagged a thumb at his father: “He’s thinking about me going back to school. Me, I’m not so sure.”

I knew that since leaving school, Joe had drifted back into the company of his fellow Kauluwela Boys-or, as the police called them, the School Street Gang. This was not quite as sinister as it sounded: youth gangs in Hawai’i sometimes engaged in petty theft, but they were as likely to be found playing barefoot football on vacant lots as they were scuffling with rivals over “turf.” Such conflicts generated their share of black eyes and broken bones, but never deaths as with mainland gangs. Far better, his father reasoned, for such clashes to take place not on the street but on the gridiron.