Hawaii (123 page)

"We can warn them," one luna pointed out, "but can we enforce it?"

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"There's a way," Whip replied cryptically, and when the local elections came that year he stationed himself six feet from the Hanakai voting booth and as each of his qualified laborers approached he looked the man in the eye and said, "You know how to vote, don't you, Jackson?"

"Yes, sir, Mr. Hoxworth."

"See that you do it," Whip replied ominously, but he left nothing to chance. When Jackson was in the booth, with the protecting canvas about him so that no one could spy upon his ballot or the way he marked it, he reached for the voting pencil. It was tied to the end of a piece of string which led aloft, passing through an eyelet screwed into the ceiling of the booth, so that if he was about to mark his ballot Democratic, the string was ready to form a clear angle to the far right and thus betray his perfidy. But to make doubly sure, Whip had previously ordered that all pencils used for voting be of maximum hardness, and that the paper on the shelf of the voting booth be soft, so that when Jackson voted he was forced to punch his pencil strongly onto the ballot, leaving on the back side an easily read indication of how he had voted. Jackson folded his ballot and handed it to the Portuguese clerk, but that official paused before placing it in the ballot box, and in that moment Wild Whip was free to inspect the back.

"All right, Jackson," Whip muttered as the man left.

As soon as the voting was over, Whip assembled his lunas and reported: "Jackson, Allingham and Gates voted Democratic. Get them out of here before midnight."

"What shall we tell them?"

"Nothing. They know the evfl they've done."

And he stood in the shadows of the royal palms as the three traitors were thrown onto the public road, their bundles of goods under their ajms.

It was as a result of this election, and the dangers represented by it�Wilson ruling in Washington, men like Jackson beginning to vote Democratic on Kauai�that Wild Whip made his decision. "I'm going back to Honolulu," he told Dr. Schilling. "You're welcome to live here and take care of the pineapples."

"What are you intending to do?" Schilling asked.

"There's a spirit of rebellion in the world. Crazy liberal thinking. Probably infected my own company. I'm going back to take over control of H & H."

"I thought they threw you out? Exiled you?"

"They did," Wild Whip confessed. "But in those days I didn't own the company."

"Do you now?"

"Yes, but the Yale men running it don't know it."

"You going to chop off a lot of heads?" Schilling asked with the fiendish joy of childhood.

"Not if they're good men," Whip replied, disappointing his permanent guest. And by Christmas Eve, 1912, he was in sole,

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dictatorial control of the great H & H empire, and although heads did not roll in the Schilling sense of the word, every man who was suspected of having voted Democratic was fired. "In Hawaii and in H & H," Whip explained without rancor, "there is simply no place for such men."

ANY GENERAL CONCLAVE of the great Kee hui was apt to be impressive. The older sons, like Asia, who ran the restaurant, retained their Chinese names�Kee Ah Chow�and wore pigtails and bkck sateen suits; but the younger sons cut their pigtails and wore contemporary American dress. They also preferred the English translations of their names, such as Australia Kee instead of Kee Oh Chow.

When the hui converged upon the ugly house up Nuuanu, they formed colorful processions. Some brought their wives and by 1908 were able to bring grown grandsons along with their pretty Chinese and Hawaiian wives. On festive occasions great-grandchildren appeared in number, tumbling about the grounds on which the family still grew taro and pineapples. The Kees, counting their wives and husbands, now numbered ninety^seven, but of course they were never able to convene at one time, because a dozen or so were apt to be at school on the mainland. Neither Yale nor Harvard had yet known a Kee, but Michigan, Chicago, Columbia and Pennsylvania did, and it was possible for a Chinese in Hawaii to be born, financed, protected at law, married, tended medically and buried�-all at the hands of Kees. In addition, he could rent his land from them, and buy his vegetables, his meat and his clothes.

The most conspicuous member was still Nyuk Tsin. In 1908 she was sixty-one years old, and although she no longer lugged pineapples through the streets in her famous twin baskets, she still grew them and supervised others in the peddling. Year by year she grew shorter, thinner, balder, and although her face showed the wrinkling of age, her mind retained the resilience of youth. Her life consisted of purposeful ritual. Each year, with solemn dignity, she accompanied her brilliant son Africa to the tax office to pay her taxes. Twice a year she took eight or ten members of her family to the Punti store where they sent money to her husband's real wife in China. She had died in 1881, but the family in the Low Village continued to write letters of grateful acknowledgment on her behalf. Every two or three years Nyuk Tsin assembled as many of her family as possible for the trip to the leper colony at Kalawao, where they reported to their ancestor. And each fall, as if she were sending sacrifices to the gods, she took six or eight of her ablest grandsons down to the Hoxworth & Hale docks and bought them tickets for the mainland. The old woman conserved human resources just as carefully as she had the irrigated land of her first taro patch.

Therefore, it was she who now called the great hui into formal meeting, for two matters of prime importance, and far beyond the

capacity of lawyer Africa to solve, had been brought to her attention; and while her great-grandchildren played in the dusty yard she talked to the thirty-odd elders who met with her.

The children of Africa Kee needed guidance, and Nyuk Tsin said, "Africa's oldest daughter, Sheong Mun, whom you prefer to call Ellen, is in deep perplexity, and I am not wise enough to counsel her."

"What has she done?" Asia's wife asked.

"She has fallen in love with a haole," Nyuk Tsin replied. A hush fell over the assembly, for although the Kees, under Nyuk Tsin's approval if not her outright urgings, had always felt free to marry Hawaiians, none had yet made any signs of wanting to marry white Americans, and Ellen's bold proposal represented a jolt in family procedures. The clan turned to look at Africa's daughter, a bright-eyed, quick, handsome girl of twenty, and she looked back.

"Who is the white man?" Asia asked, exercising his prerogative as oldest son.

"Tell him, Sheong Mun," the old woman said.

In a soft voice taught her by the women teachers at the Episcopalian school, Ellen said, "He is a junior officer on one of the navy ships at Pearl Harbor."

A chorus of gasps came from the hui. A white man and a military man, too! This was indeed, as Wu Chow's Auntie had warned, a major problem, and Europe, who had married a Hawaiian girl, said, "It's bad enough to want to marry a white man, because they don't make good husbands and they take money out of the family. But to marry a military man is really indecent. No self-respecting girl . . ."

Australia interrupted: "We're not in China. I know some fine navy men."

Europe replied stiffly: "I don't."

Asia observed: "I had hoped never to see one of my family want to many a soldier."

Australia snapped: "He's a sailor, and there's a big difference."

Europe said: "Military men are military men, and they make miserable husbands."

Australia cried: "Why don't you take those ideas back to China? That's where they came from."

At this, Nyuk Tsin intervened and said in her low, imperative voice, "It would be much better if Sheong Mun had fallen in love with a Chinese boy, or if she had come to me as a dutiful girl and said, 'Wu Chow's Auntie, find me a husband.' But she has done neither of these things."

"The worse for her," Asia said sadly. "In my restaurant I see many girls who stray from the old patterns, and they all suffer for it."

"Ridiculous!" Australia's wife snapped. "Asia! You know very well that when I was a girl I used to hide in your restaurant and kiss Australia behind the dried ducks. And nothing bad came of it except that I married your lazy brother."

"That was the beginning of what I'm talking about," Asia warned.

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"Ridiculous!" Australia's wife, a high-spirited Ching beauty, laughed. "Because do you know who used to whistle at me to let me know your brother was waiting?" The Kees looked at the bright-eyed young wife, and with a dramatic gesture she pointed directly at Nyuk Tsin, sitting'gray-haired and solemn at the head of the family. "That one did it! She's worse than any of usl"

The family roared at the old woman's embarrassment, and finally Nyuk Tsin wiped her blushing face and said softly, "I must admit I arranged it. But remember that Ching Siu Han was a Chinese girl. And a Hakka. And could be trusted. Today we are talking about something much different. A white man. And a soldier."

"Wu Chow's Auntie!" Ellen interrupted. "He's not a soldier. You must forget your old prejudices."

Asia asked, "Will he bring any land into our hui? Any money?"

"No," Ellen said resolutely. "In fact, he'll take money out. Because I have got to have two hundred dollars for clothes and more later for other things."

Together the Kees sucked in their breath and faced the day they had long feared. Sooner or later, some member of the family would want to marry a white man. Now it had come and those who dreaded the event suspected that Africa with the radical new ideas he had acquired at Michigan must somehow be at fault. Therefore, the older members of the family began staring at the lawyer, and he suffered from their harsh gaze. Finally Europe asked brusquely, "Tell us, Africa. What do you think of this?"

There was a long hush in the hot room, and voices of children could be heard. Finally Africa spoke. "I am humiliated," he said. "I am ashamed that it is my daughter who wants to marry outside our circle of acquaintance. I have given her a good education and her mother has 'tried to teach her to be a decent Hakka. I am humiliated and I do not know what to do." Suddenly the pressure upon him became great and he hid his face in his hands, sobbing quietly. The disgrace he had brought upon the family immobilized his speech, so his wife added, "He feels that he must accept the shame for what his daughter has done."

At this solemn moment Australia interjected a happier note. "Of course it's his responsibility. If a man goes to Michigan, he picks up foreign ways. I suppose that's why we sent him to Michigan. Remember, Asia, it was your sons who went to Pennsylvania. It was your sons who brought American friends into our homes, and it was one of those friends who met Sheong Mun. Bang! They're in love! Ellen, if your Stingy father won't give you the two hundred dollars I will."

"It isn't the money that I want so much, Uncle Australia, as your blessing."

"You have mine!"

"And mine!" Australia's wife chimed.

"Have I yours, Wu Chow's Auntie?"

The family turned to look at Nyuk Tsin, sitting with her worn

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hands in her lap. "I am concerned with only one problem, Sheong Mun," the old woman said. "When your children are born they will be the children of a white man, and they will be lost to our family. Promise me that you will send me a letter each time you have a child, and I will go to the Punti scholar and find his true name, and we will write it in our book and send the name back to China, as we have have always done."

"My sons will not want Chinese names," hard-headed Ellen countered.

"Later they will," the old woman said. "They will want to know who they are, and in the book the information will be waiting for them."

As the Kees dispersed over the face of the world, marrying with men who worked in strange lands, letters arrived constantly for Nyuk Tsin. Her sons would read them to her, and she would note the births of all children. For each son she got a proper name, and registered it in China, and as she predicted this day in 1908, the time did come when the boy so named would want to know what the Chinese half of his ancestry signified, and men would arrive in Honolulu whom you would not recognize as Chinese, and they would meet old Nyuk Tsin, and she would take down a book she could not read, and the interpreter would pick out the information and the Chinese-German-Irish-English boy would understand a little better who he was.

But on this particular day the old woman was concerned with Africa's children, and after it had been grudgingly agreed that the lawyer's daughter, Kee Sheong Mun, known locally as Ellen Kee, could marry her sailor, Nyuk Tsin coughed and said, "It is time we think again about getting Hong Kong into Punahou."

Asia groaned, America rose and left the room in disgust, and the rest of the family turned to stare at Africa's youngest son, a square-headed wrinkle-eyed boy of fifteen. Among the family it was believed that young Koon Kong, who was known as Hong Kong, had inherited his father's intellectual brilliance. He was most able at figures, knew Punti, Hakka, English and Hawaiian well, and seemed unusually gifted at managing money, for he augmented whatever he got hold of by lending it out to his numerous cousins. His rate of interest was a standard, inflexible ten per cent a week which he enforced by meticulous collections on Friday after school. As his name Koon indicated, he was of the fourth generation�Koon Kong, Earth's Atmosphere�and he was of the earth. In his generation of Kees there were twenty-seven boys carrying the name Koon, one brother and twenty-six cousins, and he was the cleverest of them all. If any Kee was ever going to elbow his way into Punahou, Hone Kong was the one, and as the problem opened for discussion, the family grew tense.

"Will Hong Kong's mother tell us how her son is doing in school?" the matriarch began.

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Mrs. Africa Kee, the older of the striking Ching girls, said, "His marks have been excellent. His behavior has been spirited but has brought no reprimand. I am proud of my son's accomplishment and feel that he merits the interest the family is taking in him."