Hawaii (82 page)

Carefully he printed the name on a white card: "This man's official name is L. Akama." It was in this manner that the Chinese got their Hawaiian names. Ah Kong became Akona. Ah Ki became Akina, and sometimes the simple Ah Pake, The Honorable Chinese, became Apaka. As in the past, Hawaii still modified all things that came to it, and the Punti laborer Leong Ah Kam became L. Akama.

It was now Kee Mun Ki's turn, and when the interpreter asked him his name he said firmly, "Kee Mun Ki, and I want to be known as Kee."

"What did he say?" the Hawaiian asked.

"He said that he wished to be known as Kee."

"How would you spell it?" the Hawaiian asked. When he heard the reply he tested the name several times, found it satisfactory, and printed: "This man's official name is Kee Mun Ki," and the tricky little gambler felt that he had won a victory. But before

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he had time to savor it, he was faced by two new problems, for outside the fence of the immigration area a thin, sharp-eyed Chinese was calling in whispers to him, and the young gambler knew by instinct that this was a man he did not wish to see; but the calling continued and Mun Ki had to move toward the fence.

"Are you the one who brought the girl?" the wiry man asked in Punti.

"Yes," Mun Ki replied honestly.

"From the Brothel of Spring Nights?"

"Yes."

"Thank the gods!" the nervous visitor sighed. "I need a new girl badly. It looks like she's a Hakka."

"She is," Mun Ki replied.

"Damn!" the visitor snapped. "Did he knock off the price? Her being a Hakka?''

"There is no price," Mun Ki said carefully.

The wiry man's face grew stern. "What?" he asked.

"I am going to keep her for myself," Mun Ki replied.

"You thief! You robber!" The man outside began to make such a protest that officials came up on the inside of the fence and shouted at him. "That is my girl!" the infuriated Punti shrieked, forgetful of the fact that he was incriminating himself. One of the Punti interpreters called a Hakka clerk and together they addressed Char Nyuk Tsin.

"The man outside says that you were sold to him," the Hakka interpreter explained.

"What man?" Nyuk Tsin asked in bewilderment.

"That small, nervous man," the official replied, and from the manner of the questioning, and from the look of the excited little man, and from the great embarrassment of her husband, Nyuk Tsin slowly realized that she had been brought to Hawaii to be sold into a house no different from the Brothel of Spring Nights. She could feel once more the ropes about her wrists, and although it had been some weeks since she recalled the hideous nights with her kidnapers, she could now remember. She did not panic, but with real courage fought down the terror that welled into her throat. Brushing aside the Hakka interpreter, she went boldly to Mun Ki and Stood before him so that he would have to look at her.

His downcast eyes saw her big feet, her strong body, her capable hands and finally her unpretty but appealing face. He looked directly in her eyes for some moments and thought: "She is worth whatever she may cost. This one can work."

And with a clear voice, whose words Nyuk Tsin could understand, Mun Ki said, "This girl is not for sale. She is my wife."

No Hawaiians or Americans had so far become involved in this quarrel between two Chinese men, and as always the various interpreters were determined that the misunderstanding be settled within the Chinese community. So the Punti interpreter said, "That's all

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very well, but the man outside says he paid fifty dollars for this girl."

"He is correct," Mun Ki said. "And I will give him my own fifty dollars." He untied his wedding belt, dipped down into a pouch that his Kung wife had embroidered for him, and produced fifty Mexican dollars. It was like giving up part of his immortal spirit for Mun Ki the gambler to surrender these dollars, for he had intended to multiply them many times, but he passed them through the fence.

"It's better to handle everything among ourselves," the Punti official whispered, but the brothel proprietor began screaming that he had been robbed of an important asset, whereupon Mun Ki leaped to the fence, thrust his right arm through and caught the nervous little man by the neck.

"I will thrash you!" he cried. "I owed you money and like an honest man I have paid it."

"What's going on over here?" Dr. Whipple called.

"Nothing," the Chinese officials blandly replied.

"You, out there? What's the fighting about?"

"Me no fight!" the brothel keeper exclaimed, looking astonished that anyone should have thought that he was involved in trouble.

"What name did they give you?" Whipple asked Mun Ki. "Let's see the paper. Yes, Mun Ki. That's a fine name. Sounds Hawaiian. Interpreter, will you tell this man that I would like to have him and his wife work for me. Ask him if he can cook."

"Can you cook?" the Punti asked Mun Ki.

"I was the best cook in the best brothel in Macao," the gambler replied.

"I don't think the American missionary would understand," the Punti thought. To Whipple he said, "The man says he can cook."

"Explain to him that if he works on the sugar plantations he earns three dollars a month, but as a cook boy only two dollars. His wife gets fifty cents a month. But there are many advantages."

"What?" Mun Ki asked.

"You learn English. You become skilled. And you live in town, so that if later you want to open a store . . ."

"I'll be your cook," Mun Ki said, for although the explanations given by Whipple were interesting, the young gambler had swiftly foreseen an additional advantage that outweighed all the rest: in the city he would be closer to the big gambling games.

It was for these reasons that Kee Mun Ki and his Hakka wife Nyuk Tsin became the household servants of the Dr. John Whipples; but as the Chinese stooped to recover their luggage, Mun Ki taking the light bedroll and Nyuk Tsin the heavy tub and basket, she saw tied to the latter the rope with which she had been lashed up in the Brothel of Spring Nights, and it reminded her that it was the quick, clever man who walked ahead who had saved her from such tilings and who, with his own cherished gold pieces, had purchased her freedom. So as she tagged along behind him, weighed down with burdens, she thought: "May that good man have a hundred sons."

FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE 413

ON CLOSER INSPECTION, Honolulu of 1865 proved far less glamorous than its physical setting. Because Hawaii could provide no lumber, nor skilled stonemasons to work the product of its quarries, the houses of the city were meanly built, each foot of timber being conserved for practical rather than aesthetic use. Buildings were therefore low, formless and hastily put together. In the central area they crowded in upon each other and were usually not painted. Streets were unpaved and very dusty, and although a few business thoroughfares had rude sidewalks made of granite ballast hauled from China, in most areas pedestrians had to use the fringes of the road. There were, however, a good police force and an active fire department, but judging from the numerous scars that showed where flames had gutted whole rows of attached buildings, the latter seemed to enjoy only a modest success.

Business establishments occupied big rambling buildings, often made of brick carried as ballast from Engknd, and stores sprawled aimlessly over many haphazard counters. At the corner of Fort and Merchant streets in a bright new brick building distinguished by green cast-iron shutters, Janders & Whipple had the town's largest emporium, but the most impressive commercial building stood on an opposite corner: Hoxworth & Hale's huge shipping headquarters. Sharp-eyed Mun Ki, comparing Honolulu's grubby appearance with the grandeur of Canton, where impressive stone buildings lined the waterfronts, was frankly disappointed in the contrast.

Meanwhile, other Punti from the Carthaginian were discovering that the lush tropical growth of the island was confined to the inaccessible mountains, whereas the land on which they were to work was really more bleak and barren than that which they had fled in China. This depressed them and they thought: "Uncle Chun Fat lied to us. Not even a Chinese can make his fortune on such a barren island." Out of a hundred average fields surrounding Honolulu, not less than ninety were desert, for on them no rain fell. The vast acreages west of Honolulu, which belonged to the Hoxworth family through inheritance from the last Alii Nui, Noelani, were practically worthless, thirsting for water. But scattered across the island there were small valleys in which an occasional bubbling stream fed the fields, and here the Chinese were put to work. Some grew rice for the booming California market. Others worked on small sugar plantations. A few lucky men were taught to ride horses, and became cowboys on the parched rangelands, and many were put to work growing vegetables; but as they started their new tasks, each man carried in his memory an exciting picture of Honolulu's close-packed streets and dusty enterprise, and all thought: "I've got to get back to Honolulu. That's where the life is."

Hawaii's reception of the Chinese was somewhat dampened by Captain Rafer Hoxworth's frightening account of his heroic escape from mutiny, and the newspapers were peppered with predictions from other seafaring men that Honolulu had entered upon a period

of maximum danger, when the possibility of an armed Chinese uprising, with all white men murdered in their beds by slinking Celestial fiends, was a distinct possibility. Captain Hoxworth volunteered several interviews with the press in which he contended that only his swift reaction to the first attempts at mutiny had preserved his ship, and thereafter he became known as the intrepid captain who had quelled the Chinese mutiny.

The friends of Dr. John Whipple were therefore apprehensive when the doctor took into his home the Kees to serve as cook and maid, and men stopped him several times on the street to ask, "Do you think it wise, John, to harbor in your home such criminal characters?"

"I don't find them criminal," Whipple responded.

"After the mutiny?"

"What mutiny?" he always asked dryly.

"The one that Rarer Hoxworth put down on the Carthaginian."

Dr. Whipple never openly refuted the captain's story, for he knew that what is mutiny to one man is not to another and it was his nature to make generous allowances, but he often did observe sardonically: "Even very brave men sometimes see ghosts." He was content to have the Kees working for him.

On the day of their arrival Dr. Whipple piled their luggage into his dray and then led his two servants on foot leisurely up Nuuanu Street toward his home, and although he could not speak Chinese, he explained the structure of the city to the young couple. "The first street we cross is Queen, Queen, Queen." He stopped and drew a little map in the dust and made them repeat the name of the cross street. At first they failed to understand what he was doing, so deftly he drew a ship and pointed back to the Carthaginian, and immediately they caught on, for it was Dr. Whipple's conviction that any man not an imbecile could be taught almost anything.

"Merchant, King, Hotel," he explained. Then he left big Nuuanu Street and took a detour to the comer of Merchant and Fort to show his Chinese the J & W store. "This is where I work," he said, and his servants were impressed, the more so when he picked up several bolts of dark cloth and handed them to Nyuk Tsin.

Finally, he came to the broad east-west street named in honor of Great Britain, Beretania, and when he had taught the Chinese how to say that important name, he showed them that they stood on the corner of Nuuanu and Beretania. They understood, and then he pointed to a substantial picket fence that surrounded a large property on the ocean-western corner, and when he had reviewed with them just where this stood, he opened the gate and said, "This will be your home."

They smiled, three people with three different languages, and the Chinese looked in awe at the Whipple homestead. Set amid three acres of land, it was built on coral blocks and consisted of a large one-story wooden building completely surrounded by a very wide porch. All interior rooms were thus dark and cool and were accessible

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to the veranda. The coral base of the house was masked by luxuriant croton plants, recently brought to Hawaii by the captain of an H & H ship, and these produced large varicolored leaves, iridescent in rain or sunlight, so that the sprawling house nestled in tropic beauty.

Dr. Whipple called, and from the front door his wife appeared, a small, white-haired New England woman wearing an apron. She hurried across the porch and onto the lawn, extending her hands to the Chinese. "This is my wife," Dr. Whipple explained formally, "and this is the cook Mun Ki and the maid Mrs. Kee." Everyone bowed and Mrs. Whipple said, "I should like to show you to your new home," and she demonstrated how the Whipple dining room stood at the rear of the big wooden house, and how there was a covered runway from it to an outside kitchen, where all the food was cooked, and another runway leading off to a small wooden house, and this was to be theirs. She pushed open the door and showed them a compact, clean room, which she herself had dusted that morning. Leading off from it was another, and while they stood there conversing they knew not how, the dray arrived with their luggage and stores of food, utensils and bedding.

"These are for you," Mrs. Whipple said warmly, taking Nyuk Tsin's hand and leading her to the boxes. That afternoon one of the Hewlett women asked, "Amanda, how will your Chinese learn to cook if they can't understand a word you say?"

"They'll learn," Amanda replied forcefully, for she shared her husband's New England conviction that human beings had brains; so for the first four weeks of their employment, the Kees went to school. Little Amanda Whipple was up at five, teaching Mun Ki how to cook American style, and she was impressed both with his clever mind and his fearful stubbornness. For example, on each Friday during the past four decades it had been Amanda's ritual to make the family yeast, and for the first two Fridays, Mun Ki studied to see how she performed this basic function in American cookery. He watched her grate the potato into a stone jar of almost sacred age and add a little salt and a lot of sugar, after which she poured in boiling water, allowing all to cool. Then, ceremoniously, she kdled in two tablespoonfuls of active yeast made the Friday before, and the strain continued. For forty-three years Amanda had kept one family of yeast alive, and to it she attributed her success as a cook. She was therefore appalled on Mun Ki's third Friday to enter the cookhouse full of ritualistic fervor, only to find the stone jar already filled with next week's yeast.