Honolulu (7 page)

It all happened so fast that I had forgotten to put my silver pin in my hair. I would do it later when I combed out my hair, exchanging the braids of my maidenhood for the smooth rolled hairstyle of a married woman.

After the ceremonies we brides walked the customary three feet behind our husbands as we all crossed over the wooden causeway to the harbor’s esplanade, the men chatting among themselves in English. They no doubt assumed that none of us knew enough of the language to understand their conversation, or they would never have spoken as they did. Mr. Kam was congratulating Beauty’s husband, Mr. Yi, on getting “the pick of the litter.” Mr. Ha remarked, “Mine’s not bad for seconds, eh?” And then my husband shrugged and said, in a disgruntled tone, “Beggars can’t be choosers, I guess,” an American expression I did not know but the meaning of which seemed self-evident.

Everything else was now self-evident, too: Mr. Yi, clearly the wealthiest of the men, obviously had had first choice from among our batch of picture brides. I would later learn, in fact, that he had bribed the marriage broker, who then allowed him to pick the prettiest girl-Beauty-for himself.

My husband, on the other hand, appeared to be the least affluent, and had to settle for what was left. Me.

Somewhere I could hear my father laughing.

All of us save for Wise Pearl-whose husband took her away in a battered old wagon-walked to a nearby Korean inn, the Hai Dong Hotel, located a few blocks north of the harbor on the appropriately named Hotel Street. Mr. Noh and I were given a pleasant room with a bed, table, lamp, and window. We ate a well-prepared dinner of kimchi, noodles in black bean sauce, and fresh vegetables. Throughout this my new husband and I barely exchanged more than half a dozen sentences. Silence during meals was the norm in Korea-the better to appreciate the food-but I suspected my husband’s coolness toward me was more than mere custom, and I thought I knew why.

I had been last choice, yes, but even at that he must have looked at my picture-at this young woman wearing lipstick and kohl, all the artifice with which the matchmaker had prepared me to be photographed-and he must have thought, Well, she’s not too bad. And then he saw me in person for the first time at the immigration station and he realized that he’d been fooledeven as he and the other men had fooled us-by a doctored photograph. I did not need nunch i to tell me that he was probably feeling humiliated and angry. Could I blame him?

I never expected love or even passion that night, but I was to be denied even a trace of tenderness. In our room my husband simply told me to undress, which I did, quite self-consciously. He told me to get into bed, and I obeyed. Then he lay atop me and entered me without so much as a kiss or a soft word. I barely remember the rest of it; certainly I felt no pleasure. Soon afterward he fell asleep. I lay there beside this stranger, trying not to awaken him as tears slipped silently down my cheeks. But even as I tried so hard not to make a sound, I became aware of a muted sobbing not my own-though it could have been mine, imbued as it was with pain and loneliness. The sobs seemed to be coming from the other side of the wall behind our bed, and I remembered now that Beauty and her husband had taken the room next to ours. Through the thin clapboard wall I could hear the sound of Beauty’s weeping, in chorus with my own unvoiced grief. And though it would be some time before I learned what the locals called this little inn, I already knew all too well the singular character of a wedding night spent at the Hotel of Sorrows.

The next morning Mr. Yi-by all accounts a successful Honolulu drygoods merchant-spirited Beauty away in a new Model T Ford. She looked unmistakably like someone who had spent half the night crying, her eyes still red and swollen with remembered sorrow, but otherwise she maintained the stoic dignity of a woman who understood the meaning of han. I wished her well, wondering whether I would ever see her again. Jade Moon’s husband, Mr. Ha-despite the photograph of him posing impressively beside the Whippet automobile-did not seem to own a vehicle of his own, and they accompanied Mr. Noh and me to the nearby railway station. There the four of us were to board the Leahi, a steam locomotive bound for the northern shore of O’ahu. My husband was in a more cheerful mood today, in seeming good spirits as he and Mr. Ha chatted three steps ahead of us on the train platform. As we walked past, but not into, a luxurious mahoganypaneled passenger car, I realized that once again we were traveling steerage. In this case that meant second-class seats in a “combination car”-one that carried a mix of passengers, baggage, and mail. It also served as a smoking car, as I discovered not long into our trip when various prosperous-looking white men wandered in from first class and lit up a form of tobacco I had never encountered before. I was inured to the smell of Grandmother’s bamboo pipe, but nothing could have prepared me for the foul gases given off by these fat brown sticks called “cigars.”

I sat by the open window, taking in deep breaths of the fresh sea air as we passed the harbor. Seeing the world-famous flag of stars and stripes flying from the masts of the many battleships at anchor brought home for the first time that I was actually, finally, in America. As we steamed up the leeward coast of O’ahu we saw swaying fields of tall green sugar cane, the occasional water buffalo working a taro patch, and gangs of Chinese kulis plowing rice fields. We skirted groves of algaroba trees and tall coconut palms bending in the wind as if bowing to us as we passed. I found myself unexpectedly captivated by it all. The train slowed and stopped at a succession of sleepy little stations with exotic names like ‘Aiea, Waipi’o, Leilehua, ‘Ewa, Nanakuli. Then the lush green hills and rolling farm fields gave way to black rocky promontories that I first took to be coal, but which, my husband told me, were forged from long-cooled volcanic lava. Such unique natural beauty! Hawai’i was more than living up to Mrs. Kim’s description of it as a paradise. I was heartened by what I saw, as I think jade Moon was too, though we seldom spoke during the trip and remained quiet, like good Korean wives.

After two and a half hours the Leahi finally pulled into a tiny station announcing itself as
WAIALUA
. Jade Moon and I obediently followed our husbands off the train and out of the station, where a horse-drawn wagon was waiting for us. This was a far cry from Mr. Yi’s Model T; its driver was a laborer of some sort, wearing a kind of checkered cotton shirt I would come to know as a palaka. He exchanged greetings with our husbands, who responded warmly, lifted our baggage into the rear of the wagon, then helped us up onto a wooden bench in front. In minutes we were on our way and I worked up the nerve to ask, “Honorable husband, where is it we are going?”

“Mokuleia Camp,” he replied. This meant nothing to me until we crested a small hill. Now we found ourselves looking down at a vast expanse of green-thousands of acres of sugar cane, an army of man-high green stalks marching toward a shoreline of pristine white sand. Irrigation water gushed like rivers down gullies cut in the rich red soil, and in the fields were stooped hundreds of laborers hoeing, cutting, watering, and hauling cane. And as if standing watch above all this, like a lighthouse somehow stranded far from shore, was the tall smokestack of a sugar mill, from which rose a constant plume of sweet brown smoke.

Jade Moon glanced at me with mounting anxiety as our wagon bounced along a dirt road bordering the cane fields, the wheels kicking up a great cloud of red dust. We passed through the first of many laborers’ camps: in one we saw nothing but Japanese faces gazing at us as we rode by; in the next, Portuguese; in the third, a mix of Chinese and Filipino; until we entered a camp that seemed to be shared by both Korean and Spanish workers. The driver reined in the horse and brought us to a stop. As in the other camps, there was one long barracks-like building as well as row upon row of small bungalows, all of which had tidy little front yards and not-so-tidy chicken coops in back. My husband helped me out of the wagon, and again I flinched as his calloused fingers clasped mine.

Mr. Ha looked up at a dun-brown bungalow with white trim and cheerfully announced, “Here we are.”

I was dismayed, but jade Moon’s expression was one of undisguised horror. “What do you mean?” she asked her husband. “Why have we come to this place?”

“Why, this is our new home,” Mr. Ha replied proudly. “You can smell the paint, it is so new! I lived in that horrible old barracks for years, but you and I have our very own house.”

Jade Moon stared at her husband in disbelief. “But you … sent me a firstclass ticket-”

“Yes, nothing but the best for my new wife! Like this house. Come, come inside.” Head held high, Mr. Ha entered the bungalow, expecting Jade Moon to follow. I alone saw the terrible disappointment and betrayal in her eyes: her “uncommon” man was, in fact, a common laborer.

Shamefaced, she followed him inside. What other choice did she have? What did I?

My husband now led me to our own house, a few hundred feet farther on. It was nearly identical to jade Moon’s, a wood frame cottage painted brown with white trim, its small front yard enclosed by a brown picket fence. It stood on a raised and slatted foundation a few feet off the ground; to enter it we had to ascend half a dozen porch steps.

In Korea, living spaces did not necessarily have inherent functions: a room became a bedroom when you unrolled a sleeping mat, and it turned into a dining room when you brought in a low floor table on which to eat. Here, I learned, things were different. Our home consisted of three small rooms: a bedroom, defined by a mattress surrounded by mosquito netting; a so-called living room furnished only by a straw mat and kerosene lamp; and a kitchen that looked out pleasantly on a leafy banana tree in the backyard. Nowhere was the difference between the two cultures more apparent than in the kitchen, in which stood a wooden table at least three feet high-more than twice the height of a Korean floor table. “Husband, what is this for?” I asked, puzzled.

“It’s a dining table. It’s where we will eat.”

“But we’re not eating now. Shall I take it away?” In Korea, dining tables were set out before meals, then taken away afterward.

“No, it is the custom here to have the table out at all times.”

“But it’s so high. What do you sit on, these things?” Tentatively I lowered myself into one of the straight-backed chairs. “Why does one need such an uncomfortable perch when there’s a perfectly good mat to sit on?”

He shrugged. “I never claimed it made sense.”

He showed me the backyard with its still-unpopulated, tin-roofed chicken coop. Between our home and our neighbors there was a communal toilet with two stalls reserved for our household by a stenciled sign reading
NOH
. All told, the house was barely a step above the kind of dwelling a peasant family in Korea might occupy, but with none of the warmth or charm of a typical Korean home.

Mr. Noh wasted no time in putting me to work. It was nearly midday and he had to go to work, belatedly, in the fields. He said, “Wife, pack me a bento,” then went into the bedroom to change out of his frayed business suit and into a pair of dungarees and a shirt. I stood there in a panic. What on earth was a bento? The word sounded Japanese but I had never heard it spoken by any Japanese in Korea. Since it was something to be “packed,” I thought it might be some article of clothing, so I began rooting about in the bedroom closet, hoping something would present itself as being particularly bento-like. But my husband just looked at me quizzically and said, “What are you doing over there? I told you to pack me a benro.” I swallowed, apologized for my ignorance, and told him I did not know what that was. He blinked at me, then conceded, “No, I suppose you don’t. Back home we call it a do-sirak”-a box lunch. “There’s a denim bag in the kitchen. Pack me a water bottle and something to eat.”

Relieved, I thanked him for his explanation and went into the kitchen, which was another problem altogether. The pantry was poorly stockedsome uncooked rice, tinned salmon, another tin of sardines, a jar of fermenting kimchi, a bottle of rice wine. I found a loaf of bread that had not yet gone stale and sliced off a few pieces. The kimchi seemed ripe enough and I poured some into a smaller jar. I filled the water bottle, threw in the tinned salmon and a pair of chopsticks, and hoped it would suffice. Mr. Noh took his lunch, said offhandedly, “You can wash my work clothes while I’m gone,” and left for work.

The minute he was gone, my legs buckled under me and I sank into a sitting position in the middle of the kitchen floor. Where was I? What world was this? What had I done? I cursed myself for a fool and wept, trying desperately to think of a way out. But the reality was, I was now married to this man-and even if there were some escape from that, how would I get back to Korea? And what would I do once I got there? There was no returning to my father’s house. Surely this one could be no worse-could it?

After long and careful consideration, I decided that the only thing to be done was the laundry. And so I got up off the floor.

I found Mr. Noh’s clothes easily enough-they were piled high as a burial mound in the bedroom-and could just as easily see that they were encrusted with the blood-red dirt that seemed to permeate everything on the plantation, even the air itself. Korean soil did not stick to the shoe even when dry, like this did. Each pair of trousers was so stiff with dried mud that I was tempted to see if it could stand up on its own legs. I took the clothes behind the house, where I washed a pair of pants in a cement sink, then wrung them out. But no matter how many times I rinsed and wrung, the pants continued to bleed into the sink.

After half an hour of this, my plight was noticed by a woman in the adjoining yard, a young Spanish housewife with flowing black hair named Marisol, who hurried over to set me straight. “No good, no good,” she told me in a kind of English that was not quite English, “too duro-hard. Mo’ bettah this way.” From under the sink she produced something I’d never seen before: a steel scrub board. She draped the dungarees over the board, then pounded them with a wooden paddle not unlike our laundry bats back home. She alternated the pounding with a hard brush, and now when she rinsed out the pants I could make out the blue of the denim for the first time.