Honolulu (48 page)

“They are beautiful,” I said. “What are their names?”

“This is Willow-she’s seven. Plum Tree is five. The older boy is Brave One, he will be six next month; and the youngest boy we named Tiger, because he fought like one, at birth. I don’t think he wanted to come out of there at all.”

She beamed with obvious pride at these four fine children. “Your elder brother used to read me all your letters. As I recall, you have three children?”

“Yes. Grace, Harold, and Charles.”

“Such strange names, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“They do not sound nearly so strange in America,” I said with a smile.

“And your husband’s name is-Jae-sun?”

I nodded. “He was as disappointed as I that we could not get you into the country. Then we heard that you’d run away.”

“Yes. The passport was a great help to me, but so was Sunny.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“She taught me hangul, so that I might be able to read road signs and find work. The day I left, she invited me over to sew with her in her family’s inner Room, but instead I slipped out through a window. For two hours Sunny put on quite a show, talking and laughing as if I were still there-which allowed me to get a good head start on your father and brothers. By the time they even realized I was gone, I was halfway to Kimch’on!”

We shared a laugh at this, then she went on, “I wrote her asking for your address, so I could write you and tell you I was well, but I never heard from her.”

I took a shallow breath. “Yes. Well, there is a reason for that. I am sorry to tell you, Sunny died six years ago, in childbirth.”

“Oh, no! Our poor friend, how sad!”

“Yes. She was a good friend, to both of us.” We talked of Sunny for a while more, then I asked her where she went after she reached Kimch’on. Now she looked even sadder than she had on learning the news about Sunny.

“I went looking for my clan,” she said. “When I ran out of money, I would beg for food or do small jobs in exchange for meals. I finally reached our home village of Songso and asked anyone I knew if they’d heard from my family. One old neighbor of ours thought they’d gone to Chonjo, so I went to Chonjo.”

“But that is so far!”

“Yes, it took me two months to get there-working here and there for a week or two, earning enough money to travel another ten or twenty miles, then finding another job. I cried when I discovered they were not in Chonjo.

“I didn’t know where to look next. In desperation I even consulted a mudang. The woman shook her brass bells and tossed her coins into the air, and told me that I was troubled by ghosts.”

I smiled, thinking of Jae-sun. “Mudangs say everyone is troubled by ghosts.”

“She told me to exorcise the spirits by leaving some five-grain rice at a crossroads and to burn pine nuts on the fifteenth night of the First Moon.”

“Did you?”

“No, it seemed a waste of rice. And then I remembered a cousin of my mother’s who lived in Kwangju. I went to see him and it turned out he had received a letter from my mother-they were living in Chinju, not Chonjo. I took the address and worked in Kwangju until I had enough money for a train ticket to Chinju. I was so happy when I reached the station, and went directly to the address my mother’s cousin had given me. But …”

Whatever happened next now brought tears to her eyes.

“Father was very angry to see me,” she said softly. “He said he had brokered an honest sale to your father and that I had dishonored our clan by running away. He would not let me see Mother or my brothers and sisters. He told me to return to the house of my husband-it was the only honorable thing to do.”

Her composure cracked and she began weeping. I wrapped my arms around her as I had when she was a small child, sitting on the wall of the Inner Court, pining for her family. But this was so much worse: to find your heart’s dream and have it spurn you.

“Oh, my poor little sister,” I said, “I am so sorry.”

“It still hurts.”

“Of course it does. I feel the sting of my father’s hand to this day. We needn’t speak of this any further.”

“I left Chinju as quickly as I could … and on my way out of town, I left some five-grain rice at a crossroads, and burned a handful of pine nuts under a half-moon.”

“Oh, sister …”

She started to say something more when the door to the little house opened and a tall, good-looking man entered, and Blossom’s sorrow was quickly replaced by gladness.

“Husband! We have a visitor. This is my sister, come all the way from Hawai’i and America!”

Only a slight raise of his eyebrows betrayed his surprise. “I did not know you had a sister in America.” He took a step toward me and bowed. “I am Always Well”-yes, that was his name: Sang-Ook-“of the Yu clan of Kaesong. My parents named me this, I think, so that I might save time answering people who ask, `What is your name?’ and `How are you?’”

I laughed. “How thoughtful of them.” I bowed and introduced myself in turn.

“He told me the same thing when I first met him,” Blossom said. “I think he told it to all the girls.”

“No, just the prettiest ones,” her husband said, smiling.

“I was working in an apothecary’s shop in Seoul,” Blossom explained, “not long after the time I just spoke of to you. Mr. Yu came in to sell us what he said was the finest ginseng in the province, guaranteed to quiet one’s spirits, drive out fears, and act as a general tonic for the heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys.” She added with a shy smile, “The ginseng farmer, at least, proved a tonic for the heart.”

He blushed at this. Flustered, he asked me, “Have you seen our ginseng fields?”

“No, not yet.”

“Come then, let’s show you.”

They took me out to the straw-covered fields, arranged in vertical “beds” that reached high up the mountainside. “This land has belonged to my clan for generations,” Mr. Yu said, “though it was long considered worthless. My older brothers inherited the rice fields in the valley, and I could have worked them, for them. But I desired something I could call my own, and agreed to take these four hundred acres on the slopes of Mount Palygo. My brothers thought me a fool, but I knew there was wild ginseng growing here, and that I could harvest it.”

“But don’t the trees make your job more difficult?” I asked.

“Actually, quite the opposite,” Mr. Yu said enthusiastically. “Ginseng thrives amid trees. It’s a temperamental plant, and too much direct sunlight will kill it. Here, beneath a canopy of oak and poplar leaves, the root thrives in the shade. We plant the seeds during the Ninth Moon, cover the seedlings with straw during the winter and remove it in spring. Did you know that it takes seven years to grow a mature ginseng root?”

Blossom rolled her eyes and whispered, “If you did not, you will now.”

“You only get a crop every seven years?”

“Yes, but we stagger the plantings, so that every year brings at least one harvest. Then we plant goldenseal to refresh and replenish the soil. The joke is on my brothers now: I get paid more for one year’s crop of ginseng than they do for their rice harvests. And they have to give some of theirs to the Japanese, who took one look at my land, decided it was worthless, and have not bothered us since.”

“Isn’t it remarkable,” Blossom said, “how life clings to, and flourishes in, the oddest of places?”

“Yes,” I agreed, “so it is.”

“Right now it looks like the floor of a barn,” she conceded, “but in spring it’s like a green waterfall spilling down the mountain, with clusters of red berries everywhere. Oh, I wish you could see it! It’s like a paradise, it truly is.”

I smiled to hear her say this, but before I could reply there came shouts of “Mama! Papa!” and the fields were soon overrun by Blossom’s four children, returning home from school. They were even more beautiful in the flesh than in the photograph. When Blossom told them I was their Aunt Jin from Hawai’i and America, the younger children expressed excitement, but the oldest girl, Willow, assessed me skeptically and said, “I don’t believe it.”

“But I am,” I told her. “That’s where I live now.”

“Our teacher showed us this How-why-hee once on a globe, and it’s way in the middle of an ocean,” she pointed out. “How did you get here?”

“By boat.”

“How long did it take?”

“Nine days,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t believe it.”

“Willow!” her mother chided. “This is your aunt and she is from Hawai’i.”

“Can you prove that’s where you’re from?” Willow asked.

Amused, I thought for a moment and said, “All right. I’ll sing you a Hawaiian song.” And I proceeded to sing the first verse of “Aloha ‘Oe,” partly in Hawaiian and partly in English.

Willow’s eyes popped at these alien languages set to lovely melody, and when I had finished she allowed as how I must be telling the truth, and we were best friends from that point on.

I spent the rest of the day and that evening with Blossom and her family, sharing a fine dinner with them, and took great pleasure in seeing the love and affection my little sister-in-law showered on her children. “They will never have to peer over a wall, as I did, to wonder where their father and mother are,” she told me at the end of the evening, as the children dozed in their rooms and Mr. Yu left us to chat beside the smoldering embers of the brazier.

“I am happy to see what a wonderful family you have,” I told her. “It is no less than you deserved.”

“There was a time I could never have dreamed of it,” she admitted. “After my clan rejected me, I was in despair. I wanted to die.” In a low voice she added, “I considered dying.”

I took her hand in mine and squeezed it, but she shook her head as if to dismiss my concern. “No, it’s all right, you see. Because you stopped me.”

“Me?” I said.

“Yes. In the still middle of the night, when I could easily have slit a vein and bled to death before morning, I reminded myself that someone had loved me, had wanted me, enough to bring me across the ocean, to be a part of her family.” She smiled through the tears that now came to her. “And this was what saw me through that longest of nights.”

The two of us cried, then, and held one another. “I do love you, little sister. And you are part of my family. You always will be.”

We went on talking about our lives and our families well into the night; and then I dozed contentedly on a mat for a few hours, until it was time for the children to set off on their downhill trek to school the next day. I was to accompany them, as I was told I could use the telephone in their schoolhouse to call for a taxicab. But before we left, Blossom said, “There is something I would like you to have,” and she handed me a copy of the photographic portrait of her and her family. I thanked her, tucked the photograph safely into my travel bag, and we embraced one last time. Neither of us knew whether we would ever meet in person again; but whenever I thought of her, I would always picture her amid the trees of this wooded hillside in spring, with green ginseng cascading down its face, and I would know that she was happy.

It was only when I pulled the picture from my bag on the train that I noticed what Blossom had written on the back of the photograph, in neat hangul lettering.

Dearest sister-in-law:

A road need not be paved in gold to find treasure at its end.

Love always-Blossom

The tears I cried were joyful, cleansing. I could finally stop worrying for her-stop wondering. As I could for Evening Rose. I mourned for my teacher, and for Sunny, but rejoiced for Blossom: she was a bright patch of yellow on my chogakpo, alongside two of blackest black.

Bidding farewell to my mother was difficult, as both of us knew we were unlikely to see one another again. She wept much of the day before I was to leave, but when I left Pojogae she was calm and happy and presented me with a farewell gift. She handed me a bundled wrapping cloth, but there was nothing inside: the cloth itself was the present. It was the embroidered print I had always loved, the white cranes dipping their beaks into a river filled with gold-flecked fish. I thanked her, told her I loved her, hugged her, and never wanted to let her go. But eventually I did, and my elder brother took me by wagon to Taegu Station.

Ten days later, as the President Coolidge steamed into Honolulu Harbor, I felt a rush of gladness at the sight of Diamond Head, sitting on its brown haunches like a faithful dog waiting at the door. I stood by the bow railing as a cool afternoon rain shower drifted across the city, sprinkling us with a light mist that smelled sweet and fresh. The mist gently bent the sunlight into a rainbow that had one foot in the city and another in the green foothills of the Ko’olaus.

Hawai’i is not truly the idyllic paradise of popular songs-islands of love and tranquility, where nothing bad ever happens. It was and is a place where people work and struggle, live and die, as they do the world over. Charlie Chan and Sadie Thompson are not real people; but Chang Apana and May Thompson were, and I treasure my memories of them as I love and treasure the real Hawai’i, which has offered me so many possibilities. I began to understand how my children-my keiki-must have felt about their island home. And when they and Jae-sun met me at the docks-Harry draping a pink plumeria lei around my neck, with its sweet perfume-I realized that I, too, was home.

A few weeks later, Mr. Chun did not hold it against me when I gave him my notice, telling him of my intentions to open a small dress shop of my own. By this time King-Smith was producing not just shirts but swimsuits, bathrobes, trousers, a whole line of Hawaiian sportswear. Mr. Chun hardly considered my shop serious competition and wished me well, thanking me for my years of hard work. I borrowed money from the kye, pooled resources with Wise Pearl, and found a small storefront to rent on Kalakaua Avenue, ‘ewa of the Ala Wai Canal. Above the shop was a workspace large enough to accommodate four sewing machines, two cutting tables, a press, and four seamstresses. I scrubbed and cleaned the floors and windows, and Jae-sun built yards of wooden shelving along the walls, suitable for holding a hundred or more bolts of fabric. I ordered as much yukata cloth from Japan as I could afford and drew up some simple patterns, which we now set about fashioning into ladies’ dresses-as yet only a small part of the aloha wear market, but one I felt certain would expand in time. I called the shop “Gem’s of Honolulu.” Our first original design was of a flock of white cranes with long beaks, hand-blocked onto a blue silk skirt. In these humble circumstances the four of us-myself, Wise Pearl, my sister-in-law Tamiko, and after her classes, Grace Eun-shared our own thimble time, the hum of the sewing machines making a kind of music, as our laughing chatter became the rising notes of a song we would sing together for many years to come.