Hawaii by James A. Michener
“I am afraid,” Mun Ki said.
“He told me he knew all the medicines,” Nyuk Tsin assured him, so when the dishes were washed and the four babies placed in the care of another Chinese woman, Nyuk Tsin led her husband slowly, and in breathless fear, down Nuuanu Street and across the river to Rat Alley. As they approached their meeting with the doctor, they formed an unusual pair, for Nyuk Tsin in her black smock and trousers did not hobble obediently behind her pigtailed husband, as Punti custom required; she marched side by side with him in the Hakka way, for she was his wife, and if what she suspected was true, in the days to come Mun Ki was going to need her as never before; and he sensed this need and was content to have his strong wife walking beside him.
When they reached Rat Alley, and saw the row of shacks where the girls lived, Nyuk Tsin experienced an abiding gratitude toward the man who had kept her for himself instead of selling her to the brothel keepers, and in apprehension of what her life would have been like had Mun Ki not bought her, she drew closer to him, and when the alley narrowed she even took his hand, and at first he was constrained to throw it back, but he held onto it, and he could feel her fingers softly protecting the unmanageable sore on his index finger, and in that wordless moment a compact was built, and each understood it, for Nyuk Tsin was saying: “No matter what the doctor reports, I shall stay with you.”
When the doctor saw them entering his shop he knew what their fears were, and he was certain that this meant money for him. He therefore held his soft, thin hands together professionally and smiled at the worried couple. “Did the medicine cure the itching?” he asked in Punti.
“No,” Nyuk Tsin replied. “And now Wu Chow’s Father has a sore on his toe.”
“I would like to see it,” the doctor replied, but when he had drawn a curtain aside so that sunlight could fall upon the floor where Mun Ki’s foot stood, and when he kneeled down to inspect the unhealed lesion and the sickly white flesh around it, he instinctively recoiled in horror, even though he had known, when he knelt down, what he was going to see, and Nyuk Tsin marked his action.
“Are there other sores?” the doctor inquired in a subdued voice.
“On his other toes, and this finger, and his shins hurt,” Nyuk Tsin explained in broken Punti.
Gravely the doctor examined each of these lesions. Then he rubbed his hands as if to cleanse himself of some terrible scourge. Nyuk Tsin watched this gesture, too, and asked bravely, “Is it the mai Pake, the Chinese sickness?”
“It is,” the doctor whispered.
“Oh, gods of heaven, no!” Mun Ki gasped. He shivered for a moment in the gloomy office and then looked like a thrashed boy pleading with his father. “What must I do?”
Now the doctor’s natural cupidity subdued any humane reactions, and he assumed his best professional manner—for he was not a doctor at all but a field hand who hated hard work—and assured Mun Ki: “There’s nothing to worry about, really. For the mai Pake I have an unfailing remedy.”
“You do?” Mun Ki pleaded with animal ferocity. “You can cure these sores?”
“Of course!” The doctor smiled reassuringly. “I have several patients, and not one has had to surrender himself to the white doctors.” But Nyuk Tsin was studying the man carefully, and she knew that he was lying. She therefore said, openly, “Wu Chow’s Father, this man has no cure. Right now we should turn ourselves in to the white doctors.” Her husband caught the phrase, “turn ourselves in,” and his wife’s implied promise that she would share the illness with him was more than he could at that moment bear, and he began to weep.
“Come,” Nyuk Tsin said bravely. “We will go now and talk with Dr. Whipple.”
But the Iwilei doctor, fearing to lose a patient who seemed to have money and a good job, protested, in rapid Punti: “Are you, a respectable Punti gentleman, going to give up a chance of escape simply because a stupid Hakka wife thinks she knows more about the mai Pake than I do? Sir, have you thought of what it means if you report to the white doctors?” And he began conjuring up evil pictures: “The police coming to capture you? The little boat at the pier? The cage on deck? The journey to the island? Sir, your wife is pregnant now. Suppose it is a son. Why, you’ll never see your own son. Have you thought about that? And all the time I have a certain cure right here.”
Of course Mun Ki had thought of these extremities, and now to hear his fears paraded openly had an appalling effect upon him, and he collapsed against the doctor’s table, mumbling, “Is it really the mai Pake?”
“It is the mai Pake,” the doctor repeated coldly. “The Chinese sickness. You have it; and in another month unless you cure yourself with my herbs, your face will begin to grow big, and your eyes will have a film upon them, and your hands and feet will begin to fall away. Look even now, you poor man!” And he grabbed Mun Ki’s index finger and pierced it with a dirty needle, and Mun Ki could feel no pain. “You have the mai Pake, my friend,” the quack doctor repeated, and as he saw his patient quivering with fear, he added, “The disease that the white doctors call leprosy.”
“You are sure?”
“Any white doctor will see that you have leprosy, and you know what they will do then? The cage on the little boat.”
“But can you cure me?” Mun Ki pleaded in terror.
“I have cured many patients of the mai Pake,” the herbalist replied.
“No, Wu Chow’s Father,” Nyuk Tsin pleaded, knowing in her heart that this doctor was a fraud, but the herbalist realized that only a little additional pressure was required to make Mun Ki one of his most profitable patients, so he interrupted forcefully: “Be silent, stupid woman. Would you deprive your husband of his only chance of salvation?”
This challenge was too reasonable for Nyuk Tsin to combat, so she retired to a corner and thought: “My poor, foolish husband. He will waste his money with this evil man, and in the end we shall have to run away to the hills anyway.”
So Mun Ki, in the silence, made his decision. “I will try your cures,” he said, and the quick-witted doctor replied, “It will take a little time, but trust in me and you will be cured. How much money did you bring with you?” Mun Ki, in panic, opened his purse and showed the doctor his meager store of dimes and shillings and reals, and the doctor said happily, “Well, this will more than pay for the first bundles of herbs, so you see it isn’t going to cost much, after all.” But when Nyuk Tsin started to draw back some of the reals, the doctor prudently slipped his hand over the coins and suggested: “I’ll give you more herbs so you won’t have to come all the way back to Iwilei so soon.”
“The herbs will cure me?” Mun Ki pleaded.
“Without fear,” the doctor reassured him, and with their cloth-wrapped bundle of herbs Mun Ki and his wife left the medical man and walked home.
But now they were a different couple, for the unspoken fears that had haunted them when they journeyed to Iwilei had become realities: Mun Ki was a leper, and the law said sternly that he must give himself up, and be exiled for the rest of his life to a dismal lepers’ island. He was different from all men, for he was irretrievably doomed to die of the most horrible disease known to man: His toes would fall away and his fingers. His body would grow foul, and from long distances it would be possible to smell him, as if he were an animal. His face would grow big and thick and scaly and hairy, like a lion’s; and his eyes would glass over like an owl’s in daylight; and then his nose would waste away, and his lips fall off, and the suppurating sores would creep across his cheeks and eat away his chin until at last, faceless, formless, without hands or feet, he would die in agony. He was a leper. Those were the thoughts of pigtailed Mun Ki on the hot July day in 1870 when he walked bedazed and in mental anguish back from Iwilei.
His wife, walking boldly beside him and keeping his doomed fingers in her protecting hand, had a much simpler thought: “I will stay with him, and if he must hide in the hills, I will hide with him, and if he is caught and sent to the leper island, I will go with him.” In t
When she led her stupefied husband back to the kitchen at Dr. Whipple’s she did exactly as the quack doctor had ordered: she brewed the ugly-smelling herbs and made her husband drink the broth. Where the doctor had pierced the finger with his dirty needle, she cleaned the wound, sucking it with her lips. Then she put Mun Ki to bed and cooked the evening meal, serving it by herself.
“Mun Ki not well,” she explained in the spacious dining room.
“Shall I look at him?” Dr. Whipple asked.
“No,” she said. “He be good quick.”
Nyuk Tsin had to keep her diseased husband—for the quack’s medication did no good whatever—away from public view, for that year there had been a general roundup of lepers, and some one hundred and sixty had been shipped off to the leper island to perpetual banishment and slow death; suspicious watchers had perfected tricks whereby to trap unsuspected lepers. One man boasted: “I can look at the eye of a leper and spot the disease every time. There’s a certain glassiness you just can’t miss.”
Another argued: “What you say’s true, but that comes late in the disease. The trick is to spot it early, before others can be contaminated.
The way to do this is to look for thickening of the facial skin. That’s the sure sign.”
“No,” the first man countered. “There’s only one sure sign. When you shake a man’s hand, dig your fingernail into his flesh, and if he doesn’t wince, you’ve got a leper every time.”
Nyuk Tsin, watching her husband carefully, felt relieved that neither his eyes nor his facial skin yet betrayed the secret ravages of the disease, but she also noticed that he shivered more noticeably than before and that the sores on his feet were growing. “Somebody will see them, and they will tell the police,” she thought. To prevent this she went to the Chinese temple, and ignoring Lu Tsu, who had betrayed her, she knelt before the statue of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and prayed: “Help me, gentle Kwan Yin, to keep Wu Chow’s Father free. Help me to hide him.”
These were evil years, indeed, in Hawaii. Before the coming of the white man, leprosy had been unknown. Then, in some unfathomable way, the alii contracted it, possibly from a passing sailor who had become infected in the Philippines, and from 1835 on, the great ravager had swept through the nobles of the island, so that the disease was secretly known as the mai alii, the sickness of the nobles, but coincident with the arrival of the Chinese, the virulent killer attacked the common people, who therefore gave it a permanent name: the mai Pake. In the areas from which the Hakka and Punti had come, leprosy was rarely known and it had never been a conspicuously Chinese disease, but the unfortunate name was assigned, and it stuck, so that in 1870 if a Chinese was caught with it, the measures taken against him were apt to be more stringent than those taken against others; so spies were more active among the Chinese, since rewards were greater.
These were the years when an otherwise decent man would study his enemy’s face, and when he saw a pimple or impetigo or eczema he would denounce his enemy, and the man would be hunted down, arrested and thrown into the cage. There was no appeal, no hope, never an escape. The doomed man had only one chance to enjoy even the meanest decencies during the long years of his exile: if some unafflicted person, fully aware of her actions, volunteered to accompany him to the leper settlement, she was free to go in expectation of making his inevitable death a little easier. The saintly persons who stepped forward to share the hell of leprosy became known as the kokuas, the helpers. Mostly they were Hawaiian women who thus surrendered their own lives to aid others, and sometimes they themselves contracted the awful disease and died in exile; so that from those agonizing years the word kokua was to gain a special meaning, and to say of a woman in Hawaii, “She was a kokua,” was to accord her a special benediction unknown in the rest of the world.
Therefore, in the middle of September, when Nyuk Tsin was pregnant with her fifth child and when it became wholly apparent to her that Mun Ki would not be cured and that the quack’s herbs were of no use whatever, she waited one day until the evening meal ended and then she sent the children away and knelt before her husband, sharing with him the resolve she had made more than a month before: “Wu Chow’s Father, I shall be your kokua.”
For some minutes he did not speak, nor did he look at the woman kneeling before him. Instead, he slowly picked up one of her needles and stuck it carefully into each finger of his left hand. When he had tested his fingers twice he said, “There is no feeling.”
“Shall we hide in the hills?” she asked.
“No one has spied upon me yet,” he replied. “Maybe next week the herbs will work.”
“Wu Chow’s Father,” she reasoned, “the doctor is a quack.”
He put his hand upon her lips and said, “Let’s try once more.”
“We have almost no money left,” she pleaded. “We must save it for the children.”
“Please,” he whispered. “I feel sure that this time the herbs will work.”
So she took the last precious dimes and reals of her family and plodded down to Iwilei in the hot September sunlight, and when she entered Rat Alley, she noticed that two men watched her carefully, and first she thought: “They think I am one of the girls,” but quickly she realized that they were not looking at her in that way, and she gasped: “They’re spies, watching to see who visits the doctor. If they report Mun Ki they’ll get a little money.” So she hurried down a different alley and then up another and finally slipped into the doctor’s office.
He was happy and hopeful. “Is your Punti husband getting well?” he asked graciously. And something in the man’s manner that day cautioned Nyuk Tsin, and she lied: “He’s very grateful to you, Doctor. All the sores have gone and much of the itching in his legs. It’s been a wonderful relief to us.”
The doctor was surprised at this news and asked, “But nevertheless you wish a few more herbs?”
“Yes,” Nyuk Tsin replied, sensing a great evil about her. “A little for the legs, and he’ll be cured.”
“He’ll be cured?” the doctor repeated curiously.
“Yes,” Nyuk Tsin explained, feigning happy relief. “It seems not to have been mai Pake after all. More like a sore from the taro patch.”
“Where does the cured man live?” the doctor asked casually, as he filled the jar, and the manner in which he spoke convinced Nyuk Tsin that he was in league with the spies outside, and that he was turning over to them the names of his clients, so that after the afflicted Chinese had used up all their funds on herbs, he could squeeze a few more reals from the government as a reward for turning them into the leper authorities.
“We live at Malama Sugar,” Nyuk Tsin said quietly.
“Nice plantation,” the doctor replied casually. “Which camp?”
“Number Two Camp,” Nyuk Tsin replied, but when the cautious, probing doctor handed her the herbs and started to pick up her family’s last coins, she could no longer tolerate him, and she swept the coins back into her own hand and grabbed a blue jar and knocked the top off and shoved the jagged glass into the doctor’s face, and when the glass cut him and his own quackery entered his eyes, causing them to pain, she threw the money in his face and whispered in a hushed, hate-choked voice: “Did you think you fooled me? I know you are reporting secretly to the police. You pig, you pig!” In uncontrollable fury she smashed half a dozen pots of herbs to the floor, kicked them about with her bare feet, and then grabbed the broken blue jar to assault the doctor again, but he fled whimpering to the rear of his office, so she hurried away down a side alley, but she paused long enough to peer back at the doctor’s shack, and when that man’s cries had continued for a moment, the two spies hurried up and went inside to rescue their conspirator, while Nyuk Tsin returned, by a devious path, to Dr. Whipple’s. When she reached home, she did not immediately go inside the gate, but walked on, stopping now and then to see if she were being f
“What did you do?” Mun Ki asked.
“I hope I cut his eye out,” Nyuk Tsin replied.
That night she matured her second plan, for when the evening meal was over, she left the Whipple grounds and moved quietly about the Chinese community, going to families which had come to Hawaii with her in the hold of the Carthaginian, for all such men were brothers, and she said to each, “Will you take into your home one of the sons of your brother Mun Ki?”
Almost invariably the Chinese would listen, say nothing, look at Nyuk Tsin, and finally ask, “Is it the mai Pake?” and without fear, for she knew that no Carthaginian man would betray his brother, she always replied honestly, “It is.” Then the man would ask, “And are you going to be his kokua?” And when Nyuk Tsin replied, “I am,” the man said either, “I will take one of your children,” or, “I can’t take a child myself, but let us see Ching Gar Foo, because I am sure he’ll take one.” But she noticed that they shuddered when they came near her.
By midnight Nyuk Tsin had disposed of her four sons and her household goods and had made arrangements with a cook for one of the Hewlett families that when her unborn child arrived, Nyuk Tsin would return it to Honolulu by ship from the leper island to be cared for by that cook. She was therefore in a relieved if not hopeful mood when she returned to tell her husband that his sons would be cared for, but when she reached the Whipple grounds she saw an unaccustomed light in her quarters, and she started running toward where Mun Ki was supposed to be sleeping, but when she burst into the little wooden shack she saw Dr. Whipple standing beside the bed with a lamp in his right hand.
The American doctor and the Chinese woman looked at each other in silent respect, and she saw that tears were running down the white-haired man’s face. He lifted Mun Ki’s hand and pointed to the lesions, and Nyuk Tsin, following the course that Dr. Whipple’s finger took across the doomed hand, had to look away. “It’s leprosy,” the doctor said. Then he held the lamp before his maid’s face and asked, “Did you know?”