Honolulu (45 page)

“Yes, ma’am. They say they would be honored to have our two families joined in this way.”

To my surprise, I saw my husband smile at this.

“Then we are honored as well,” he said. He stood and extended a hand, in the American fashion, and Jiro took it with a big grin on his face. Grace looked thrilled. Jae-sun seemed genuinely pleased for them.

Why, then, was I forced to congratulate them with a less than honest smile?

Later, when we were alone together, Jae-sun said, bemused, “Well, I cannot say this is not a situation of my own making. I welcomed Taizo and his family into our home, though I scarcely expected this to happen.”

“Are you upset,yobo?”

He shrugged. “How can I be upset about Jiro? He’s a sweet boy, we’ve known him since he was a little keiki. I admit, I had hoped she would marry a Korean boy, but … if they are happy together, who are we to say otherwise?” He noted my hesitation. “You don’t agree?”

“I agree that Jiro is a sweet boy, and I want Grace to be happy. I just … did not expect to feel this way.”

“And what way is that?”

I hesitated, only now articulating this to myself.

“By American custom and law, she will lose our family name and take his. Our own children already feel little connection to Korea … hers will feel even less. I can’t help but feel as though we are … losing something of what we are.

Jae-sun nodded. “Yes, I know. But this is inevitable, yobo. They have grown up in Honolulu. They speak Korean at home, English in school, and pidgin among their friends. They eat saimin and hamburgers as much as they do kimchi. As you once said, they are not just Korean, they are KoreanAmerican. But they are something else, too: children of this place, of Hawai’i.”

I nodded. “‘Local.’”

“Yes, local. I hear the word more and more, used with pride.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. “I ran as fast and as far away from Korea as I could, when I was a young girl. Why should I feel the loss of it now?”

“You feel the loss of the world of your childhood,” he said gently, “and of people left behind. Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.”

That summer Wise Pearl and her husband sold their carnation farm to a land developer, and for quite a bit more than they had paid for it. With this profit she was able to purchase a small house in upper Nu’uanu, which would now serve as both a family home and a small Korean-style inn. Mr. Kam’s heart condition had improved, but he was still in no condition to work-perhaps never would be-and I was more grateful than I could possibly express when Wise Pearl offered Jae-sun a position as chef and general manager of the inn.

Wise Pearl brushed aside my thanks. “Mr. Choi has skills which we need,” she said simply. “What could make more sense?” Soon, Jae-sun was happily working full-time-cooking for guests, doing repairs, anything that was called for-and was more content than I had seen him since the closure of the Liliha Cafe.

Alas, this was matched only by my own discontent once I began work at the new King-Smith factory. Despite my title of head seamstress, in reality I became merely one of two dozen seamstresses, mostly Japanese and Chinese, sitting in a room filled with the stutter of sewing machines and the whir of electric fans. While I once made buttonholes with a series of careful zigzag stitches, there was now an entire machine to do that for me. While I once felt part of an exciting new enterprise, I was now little more than an extension of my sewing machine. I quickly found that I missed my shop; I missed the customers.

I told myself I was acting like a spoiled, well-fed kitten amid starving alley cats, and should be grateful to have any kind of job in these hungry years-though it did not make the job any less tedious.

When I mentioned this at our next kye meeting, Wise Pearl pointed out, “Once, in Korea, we would have been satisfied to merely put food on our families’ tables. But here in America, we have had a taste of what is possible in life. Jae-sun aspired to be a chef; you aspire to be more than a seamstress. You should not be embarrassed by it. This is what America is: the opportunity to become something more.”

Beauty suggested, “Why don’t you start your own clothing line? You make such beautiful designs!”

“Yes,” Jade Moon agreed, “you can produce these `aloha’ shirts as well as Mr. Chun! You could borrow money from the kye.”

I shook my head. “No, there is too much competition. To do it right would require more capital than we have in the fund.”

“I have some money left over from the sale of the farm,” Wise Pearl offered without hesitation. “I would be honored to be your partner in such a venture.”

I was greatly touched by this and thanked her. “But I’m not sure this is the right time for such an enterprise.” Indeed, my thoughts, as Jae-sun had noted, were focused less on the future than the past.

It was in the Year of the Ox that my life had changed upon meeting Evening Rose, and it was in this Year of the Ox-1937-that it changed again, with the receipt of a letter from my eldest brother:

Honorable Little Sister:

It is with sadness that I must inform you of the passing of our father, Pak Dae Hyo, after a short illness. He died peacefully in his own bed surrounded by members of his clan. The cost of his medical care was paid in large measure by the money we received from you and your husband, for which Father was not ungrateful.

Mother has taken the news hard but we are doing all we can for her. She asked me yesterday to read again from your last letter to us, and smiled to hear of your life in Hawaii. She keeps the photographs of your children on her dresser. I think it would cheer her to hear from you.

Your elder brother

“Father was not ungrateful.” I supposed that was the closest thing to an apology I could hope for in this life. There was still a little knot of bitterness in my soul over the way Father had treated me-but the anger, at least, was past. I wrote back expressing condolences I did not feel in my heart. Instead I felt a stab of guilt: I had always intended to return someday to Korea to visit Mother and my brothers, but now Father’s death reminded me that time was not infinite. And then there was Blossom. Though I had no inkling of where she might be, I still harbored a faint hope that I might somehow locate her … or my old teacher, Evening Rose.

I found that I could think of nothing that day but Mother, Blossom, and Evening Rose, the three of them twined together in my mind like the stems of flowers in a vase. That night, as I lay in bed beside Jae-sun, I told him, “You were right, yobo, about the things I left behind in Korea. I think I would like to go back and see my mother … while I still can.”

He nodded knowingly.

“I agree, this is something you must do. But I confess, I worry for your safety on such a trip. Not so much on the high seas as in the Sea of Japan.”

I understood his concerns, of course. Several months ago, at the end of July, the long-simmering hostilities between Japan and China had come to a head when Japanese troops attacked and captured the city of Peking, capital of Chiang Kai-shek’s government. Even as the Japanese offered peace settlements, they continued to battle their way across China toward the city of Nanking, capital of a rival “nationalist” government, smaller but increasingly the last bastion against Japanese domination.

“The Japanese have a formidable naval blockade of China in place,” I noted. “Travel to Korea will not be a danger.”

“Perhaps if you booked passage on a ship of American registry,” he suggested. “America is still neutral. It would ease my mind a bit.”

I agreed this would be a prudent move and the next day I went to the offices of the Dollar Line to purchase a ticket-second-class fare, this time, not steerage-from Honolulu to Yokohama, Japan, aboard the steamship President Coolidge. I then went to the Japanese Embassy to renew my passport, where it was eventually stamped and approved. I wrote Joyful Day to tell him I was coming, then informed our children that I was going to Korea to see their grandmother, whom they had never met. They accepted this with the same aplomb as if I had said I was going down to the corner drugstore. Only Charlie seemed excited. “Are you taking the China Clipper?”

“No, we can’t afford an airplane. I’ll be traveling by boat.”

“Oh,” he said, sorely disappointed.

“I will only be gone a few weeks,” I assured them. “I will miss you all. I will bring your grandmother all your love.”

And so, in early December, my husband and children accompanied me to Pier 12 and saw me off on my journey. The President Coolidge was a luxurious vessel, elegantly appointed in a style that would later be termed “Art Deco,” but in these Depression days it was carrying little more than half its full capacity of nine hundred passengers. I watched from the stern, waving goodbye to my family as the ship slipped its moorings and was pushed by pug-nosed little tugboats into the channel. As the ship steamed away from Honolulu, I looked back at this city I had come to some twenty years before. Back then it had seemed a sleepy little port at the end of the world; today it was still a young city, slowly outgrowing the cradling green slopes of the Ko’olau Mountains. It did not take long before those mountains were only a small bump on the blue table of the horizon-a flash of green not unlike the kind seen for an instant as the sun sets-and then they were gone, and we were surrounded on all sides by wide ocean. All at once I thought of the kites which Blossom and I-perched like swallows atop the wall of the inner Court-had watched fly free on that fifteenth day of the First Moon, perhaps to fly as far as America. And I smiled to think that one of them was coming home.

This ocean crossing passed far more pleasantly than my first: the second-class cabin was small, with narrow bunk beds and merely functional plumbing, but the accommodations were grandiose compared to steerage. I shared the cabin with a young Japanese woman returning to Tokyo from San Francisco, and found her a gracious roommate, even though, with my limited knowledge of Japanese and her equally modest command of English, we could rarely communicate more than a few words at a time. The Coolidge was so sparsely populated that at times it seemed like a ghost ship; every dinner table held empty seats and untouched place settings. When we reached Yokohama after nine uneventful days, there was distinct tension on the part of the customs officials, who took care to confirm our nationalities and intentions. “What is your destination, and the purpose of your visit?” one of them asked me sternly, to which I replied, innocently I hoped, “Pojogae, Kyongsang Province, Korea. A family visit.” He looked me up and down, decided I posed no threat, and cleared me to board a rickety little ferry bound for Pusan, Korea.

The next day, I was surprised by the depth of the feelings that were stirred by my first glimpse of Mount Hwangnyeonsan and Mount Geumjeongsan, still straddling the city like the towers of some vast bridge. The chill in the morning air was bracing, colder than anything in Hawai’i. I headed down the ship’s gangway and began the short walk to Pusan’s railway station. I heard the music of my native tongue being spoken all around me; Korean faces greeted me with a well-bred lack of expression. Even the air seemed palpably Korean, fragrant with garlic and sesame and the mouth-watering smell of simmering red beans. The only notable differences I saw were that horse-drawn carriages, hand carts, and rickshaws, though still in evidence, were nearly outnumbered by trucks and automobiles; and there were more people wearing Western-style business suits or Japanese kimonos than there were a quarter of a century ago. Nor were women wearing the long hoods my mother and I had once been forced to wear outside our homes-and though the women I saw on the street were deferential to men, they interacted with them with a bit more familiarity than I remembered. Other than this, I felt as if I were cocooned in a memory of my youth, swaddled in the welcome sounds and smells I had grown up with.

Even the sight of the occasional brown-garbed Japanese military police posted on street corners did not distress me too much. A few of the policemen stood beside large washtubs, the purpose of which I couldn’t fathom, but I gave it little thought, intent as I was on taking in the city’s charms. One of these was an old man coming toward me wearing the traditional Korean white jacket and trousers: in Hawai’i, few Korean men wore these anymore, and I took pleasure in surveying the crisp white linen, the baggy trousers with their sensibly flexible waistline.

But as the pedestrian passed a Japanese policeman standing on the corner, the officer promptly dipped a bucket into one of the washtubs-scooped up a bucketful of dark, dirty water-and inexplicably hurled it at the man in white!

I stood, stunned, as the man came to a sputtering stop, his clothes now dripping with foul-smelling sewer water. A second policeman joined the first and threw another bucket onto him for good measure. The man’s fine white suit was soaked-filthy. The police laughed and ridiculed his appearance, though they themselves were the cause of it. The old man said nothing, for fear of his life. He simply bowed to them, turned, and hurried away.

I did not dare ask the police why they had done this thing. When I saw one of them turn and look at me, I, too, hurried away, toward the railway station.

Shaken, I purchased a ticket for Taegu and within an hour boarded my train, the image of the old man’s humiliation still livid as a wound in my memory. I wanted to ask one of the people sitting around me what it had meant, but I dared not since there was a Japanese police officer sitting a few rows behind me.

I distracted myself with the scenery passing by, intrigued not just by what was the same but by what was different. Many of the byways we passed were no longer dirt paths but rather modern, paved roads. There were newly built bridges and steel trestles; a man sitting beside me told me of a new dam the Japanese built that had put an end to the seasonal flooding that once plagued his village. Perhaps he mentioned this for the benefit of the policeman behind us, but it did seem as though Japan had brought much material progress to Korea. Gradually I began to wonder whether what I had seen in Pusan had merely been some sort of isolated prank.