Hawaii by James A. Michener
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 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 plantation 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 things 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.”
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 England, 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 Rafer 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 t
“Merchant, King, Hotel,” he explained. Then he left big Nuuanu Street and took a detour to the corner 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 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 ladled 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.
With tears in her eyes, she started to storm at Mun Ki, and he patiently listened for some minutes, then got mad. Flashing his pigtail about the kitchen he shouted that any fool could learn to make yeast in one week. He had been courteous and had studied for two weeks and now he wanted her out of the kitchen. Not understanding a word he was saying, she continued to mourn for the lost yeast, so he firmly grabbed her shoulders and ejected her onto the lawn. On Monday the new batch of yeast was as good as ever and she consoled herself philosophically: “It’s the same strain, sent forward by different hands.” Suddenly, she felt the elderly white-haired woman she was.
Mun Ki also had difficulty understanding why Americans ate so much, and he would consistently omit dishes to which the robust appetites of the white men had become accustomed. A typical Whipple dinner, served at high noon in the heat of the day, consisted of fish chowder, roast beef with Yorkshire pudding, creamed cabbage cooked in ham fat, delicious chewy biscuits made of taro and drenched in butter, mashed potatoes, candied yams, pickled mango, alligator pear salad with heavy dressing, French bread with guava jelly, banana pie marvelously thick and rich, followed by coffee with cream, and cigars. If guests were present, two extra vegetables were served and French brandy.
Later, the Chinese would eat steamed cabbage with no fat, a little fish cooked with soybean sauce, a bowl of rice and some unsweetened tea, and it was often remarked that Hawaii must agree with the Orientals, because even though they worked harder than the white men, they lived longer.
When she finished supervising the preparation of food, little Amanda Whipple, in her sixties, turned her attention to Nyuk Tsin and taught the hard-working Chinese girl how to care for a large house. Dusting was particularly stressed and caused some difficulty, because in China, Nyuk Tsin’s mother had waited for a likely omen before bothering to dust, whereas energetic Mrs. Whipple demanded that it be done regularly every day. The floors had to be dusted, the flowered china lamps, the chandelier, the rosewood love seat with its multiple curlicues, the endless embroidered decorations, the peacock chair from Canton and the bamboo furniture that never looked clean. Nyuk Tsin’s special nightmare was the great fish net on the parlor wall from which shells, leis and other keepsakes were hung. In fact, there was scarcely an inch of the Whipple house that did not contain some gimcrack whose main purpose was gathering dust.
In comparison, the Kee household contained one table bearing the genealogy book, a flint lighter, a candle and a wine bottle. There was also a rope bed above which hung the impressive sign: “May This Bed Yield a Hundred Sons.”
According to the agreement reached by Whipple and his Chinese, Mun Ki received two dollars a month and his wife was to have received fifty cents, but when Mrs. Whipple saw how excellent Nyuk Tsin’s work was, from five in the morning till nine at night, seven days a week, her generosity was touched, so she paid the girl a full dollar each month, and from this salary of $36 a year the two Chinese were required to clothe themselves, pay for the birth and education of their children, provide for entertainment and luxuries, and send money home to the official wife in China. They did all these things, but their problems were eased a bit by the unnecessary generosity of the Whipples. Unexpected gifts here and there added to the family treasury, and the allotment of an acre of good land which Nyuk Tsin could farm for herself allowed the couple to earn some real money, for Nyuk Tsin was a fine farmer and soon appeared on the streets of Honolulu with a bambo pole across her shoulders and two baskets of fresh vegetables slung from the ends. She hawked her wares mainly among the Chinese, accumulating from them a growing store of American dimes, Australian shillings and Spanish reals, for Hawaii had wisely decided that any of the world’s money could circulate freely within the kingdom.
The Kee funds were further augmented by some shrewd enterprise on the husband’s part, for each day as soon as breakfast was finished, he hurried down Nuuanu Street to Chinatown, where nondescript shacks huddled together in ugly profusion and where white men rarely went. His destination was a particularly disreputable hovel in which sat an elderly Chinese with wispy beard and a brush and book in which he entered bets as they were offered. Behind him, on the wall, hung a luridly colored sketch of a man, with twenty-eight parts of his body indicated: nose, ankle, knee, elbow … The game which had captured Mun Ki’s whole imagination consisted of placing a bet as to which of these words would appear in the sealed capsule that stood under a glass on the table before the game’s operator. Most of the
“You here again with the winning word?” the game’s manager asked sourly.
“Today it’s bound to be chin,” Mun Ki assured him. “I woke last night with my chin itching furiously, and I can read through the glass and see the word written on the paper.”
“How much are you betting?”
“Two dimes.”
The proprietor’s face betrayed his displeasure as he brushed the entry into his book. “You’re a clever man, Mun Ki,” he grumbled. “Why don’t you join me in this business?”
“I’m a cook,” Mun Ki replied. “It’s better to win from you than work for you.”
“What I have in mind,” the older gambler proposed, “is for you to collect bets at the far end of town and bring them in here by ten each morning.”
“Then I couldn’t bet for myself, could I?” Mun Ki asked.
“No, then you’d be part of the game.”
From one of the towers along the waterfront a clock struck eleven, people crowded in from the alleys of Chinatown, the excitement grew intense, and the proprietor ceremoniously lifted away the glass to uncover the capsule. To prevent the quick substitution of a word on which no one had bet that day—a trick that had often been tried in the past—a man was selected at random, and under the most careful scrutiny he opened the capsule and shouted: “Chin!” Mun Ki leaped with joy and cried, “I had two dimes bet, because I woke with a definite itch on my chin.” He explained to everyone the precise minute at which he had wakened and his thoughts at that propitious moment. With his two dimes and his dream he had won two months’ normal wages.