Hawaii by James A. Michener
Captain Rafer Hoxworth stormed: “We brought those damned Chinamen here under the specific understanding that after five or ten years in the sugar fields they’d go home. Good God! Whipple wants them to stay! It’s by God downright indecent.”
Captain Janders’ son, and now Dr. Whipple’s partner in J & W, said, “The old man must be out of his mind! Why, one of our biggest problems in running the plantations is that as soon as the Chinese get a chance they leave us and open a store in Honolulu. I can take you to Nuuanu Street and show you half a dozen shops started by men who ought to be working for me right now, growing cane.”
But what infuriated Hawaii most was the sly manner in which the Chinese, who had no women of their own, had been stealing Hawaiian women, and marrying them, and having babies by them. In spite of the fact that the babies were some of the most handsome ever bred in the islands, extraordinarily intelligent and healthy, the white community was outraged and passed laws to stop these criminal marriages. One edict forbade any Chinese from marrying a Hawaiian girl unless he became a member of the Christian church. The speed with which Chinese men learned the catechism was staggering, and one Chinese passed along to another the correct answers to the critical questions, so that it was not uncommon for a Chinese to utter, as his first words in broken English, the complete Nicene Creed plus explanations of the Trinity, the Virgin birth and Calvin’s doctrine of predestination. One minister, after examining several such impromptu scholars, told a fellow Calvinist, “With my own ears I heard these men answer every important question correctly, and at the end I was tempted to ask one more, ‘What does it all mean?’ but I have never dared to ask even my Boston friends that fearful question, and I eschewed doing so here.”
Actually, the Chinese made good Christians and did so without reservation. They were determined to have women, and conversion seemed a cheap price to pay. Those lucky ones who married Hawaiian girls with land and who grew to great wealth from manipulating that land, founded substantial Christian families and supported the large churches that were built by other Chinese; but when a male grandson was born, these prudent men went quietly to the Punti store and worked out a proper Chinese name for the boy, and sent that name back to the village hall, where it was written in the clan book.
As for the Hawaiian women, they preferred Chinese husbands to any other, for there were no men in the islands who loved women and children more than the pigtailed Chinese, and it was not uncommon to see a thin, bedraggled Chinese man, who had slaved all day on the docks for H & H, come home to where a hugely fat Hawaiian wife watched in idleness as he did the laundry, washed the children and cooked the evening meal. A Chinese husband brought presents and spent time educating his sons. He saw that his daughters had ribbons, and on Sunday he would take his whole brood to church. It became recognized in the islands that the very best thing that could happen to a Hawaiian girl was to catch herself a Chinese husband, for then all she had to do was laugh, wear fine brocades and rear babies.
But there was a subtler reason why the Hawaiians tolerated Chinese marriages: they saw with their own eyes that Chinese-Hawaiian children were superb human specimens. When the first such girls began to mature Honolulu was breathless at their beauty. They had long black hair with just a suggestion of a wave running through it, olive skin, a touch of mystery about their eyes and handsome teeth. They were taller than their Chinese fathers, much slimmer than their copious mothers, and they combined the practicality of the Chinese with the gay abandon of the Hawaiian. They were a special breed, the glory of the islands; and practically every writer from America or England who took part in launching the lively fable of the beautiful Hawaiian girl, had in his mind’s eye one of these first Chinese-Hawaiian masterpieces; and they justified all that was written about romantic Hawaii.
The boys were promising in another way. They were quick to learn, good at games, very good at business and best of all at politics. They had a shameless charm in soliciting votes for their candidates, were gifted in repartee, and had a basic honesty which the public grew to respect. So the Hawaiians, who had been a vanishing race—400,000 in 1778, 44,000 in 1878—suddenly received a vital impetus from the Orient and began to re-establish themselves through the Chinese-Hawaiian mixture, until in later years the part-Hawaiian was to become the fastest-growing component in the islands.
Captain Rafer Hoxworth, watching the beginning of this miracle, spoke for all his Caucasian friends except Dr. Whipple when he said, “Any Chinese who leaves a plantation to become a peddler should be immediately deported, but any who touches a Hawaiian girl should be hung.”
In the Honolulu Mail the Hewletts reported more moderate reactions: “Hawaii is ruined. The Chinese are fleeing the plantations, and who will raise our sugar?”
Dr. Whipple, having gained only contumely from his last public writing on the Chinese, confined his subsequent thoughts to his diary: “It was on the island of Oahu in 1824 that I first saw measles sweep through a Hawaiian village, leaving eighty per cent of the people dead, and it was soon after that I began considering what we could do to infuse new life into this lovable race which I had grown to cherish so dearly. I foresaw that only the introduction of some vital new blood could prevent the annihilation of these fine people. Erroneously, I thought that stronger Polynesians from the south might accomplish the reversal, but we imported such Polynesians and nothing happened. Later, I trusted that Javanese might suffice, and perhaps they would have, but we were unable to acquire them. And now the Chinese have arrived and they have served exactly as I long ago predicted they would. For my part in effecting this salvation of a race, I am humbly proud. At present the temper of the time is against me in this matter, so I keep my own counsel, but I am confident that the judgment of the future will support me. The best thing I ever did for Hawaii was to import Chinese.”
As he wrote in his lamp-lit study, Mun Ki and his wife, in their small house nearby, were starting another son, the Continent of Europe.
NYUK TSIN and her husband had been in Hawaii about a year when the entire Chinese community was aroused by news filtering into Honolulu from the island of Maui, where many Chinese workers were engaged on plantations. As the Chinese got the news, this is what happened: toward dusk one hot day an elderly clergyman with a limp and carrying a cane forced his way into one of the temporary Chinese temples erected there for the use of the laborers, and disrupted worship. One woman who had been in the temple at the time reported: “The little man struck everything with his cane, knocked down the statue of Kwan Yin, tore up the golden papers and shouted words at us. When we refused to leave the temple, for it was ours and built with our effort and none of theirs, his great anger turned toward us, and he tried to strike us with his cane, shouting at us all the time. But since he was an old man, it was easy for us to avoid him.”
The Chinese generally felt that this was but one more evidence of the hard life they were to have on the plantations, and much indignation resulted from the old man’s unexpected attack. Asked the Chinese, Punti and Hakka alike: “Don’t the white men respect gods?” And the divergence between the Chinese and the Caucasian increased.
To the white men, the incident at the Buddhist temple was deplorable, and planters both on Maui and on the other islands quickly got together small sums of money which they handed to the offended Chinese, so that some of the damage growing out of the attack was rectified. Dr. Whipple, as spokesman for the planters, went personally to Maui to mollify the laborers, and after a period of tension, reasonably good relations were restored, and all whites who employed Chinese took special pains to assure the strangers that they were free to worship as they pleased. Thus, in the mid-1860’s, a true religious freedom was established in the islands: Congregationalists, Catholics, Episcopalians, Mormons, Buddhists and Confucianists worshiped side by side in relative harmony.
When peace among the Chinese had been restored, the white planters took up the problem of wizened Abner Hale, and younger offspring of the old famil
“Years ago he did the same thing with the Hawaiians, as I understand,” Bromley Hoxworth explained. “One famous night when my mother was getting married to her brother, he burst into the ceremony and lashed about with his cane, destroying idols and raising merry hell. He still thinks he’s fighting the old Hawaiian gods.”
“Somebody’s got to advise him that things have changed,” one of the Whipple boys insisted. “Knocking down Hawaiian idols when it does no harm is one thing, but destroying Buddhas when we’re trying to keep our Chinese help happy is quite another.”
The group turned to David Hale and suggested: “Can you talk to him, Dave?”
“I’d rather not,” the alert young man evaded. “I’ve never been able to make much sense with Father.”
“What we really ought to do is to get him off Maui altogether,” Brom Hoxworth proposed. “Truly, he oughtn’t to be there alone. He messes up the Seamen’s Chapel and interferes with the Chinese. He’s really a dreadful nuisance, and I agree with the others, Dave, that you’ve got to talk with him. Convince him that he ought to live in a little house here in Honolulu … where we could watch him.”
“I’ve tried that. So has Micah. The old man simply won’t listen to any proposal which requires his leaving Maui. If you raise the question, he says stubbornly, ‘My church is here, and my graves are here.’ And that’s that.”
“Whose graves?” Brom Hoxworth asked.
“My mother’s grave, and your grandmother’s,” the intense younger Hale explained. “He plays gardener for them, and insists now and then upon preaching in the old stone church that he built. But I’m sure the minister would be delighted to see him get out of Maui.”
One of the Whipple boys spoke: “Looking at the whole thing frankly, the fact that he’s left alone on Maui reflects on all of us, really. It looks as if we had cut the old man off … didn’t want him, because he’s sort of wandering in his mind. Now, I know that’s not the truth. I happen to know definitely that my father invited Reverend Hale to live with him, and your mother, Brom, did the same, and of course we all know that both Micah and David asked him to live with them. So our skirts are clean, as it were, but even so we get a good deal of opprobrium for allowing him to stay in that filthy little house of his.”
“And now if he’s going to start meddling with the Chinese,” young Hoxworth pointed out, “he’s really got to be cleaned out.”
The group therefore proposed that Dr. Whipple be dispatched once more to Lahaina to reason with Abner, and with some reluctance the trim, white-haired leader of Janders & Whipple climbed aboard the Kilauea and ploughed his way through the rough channel to Maui. He had barely started down the pier when he saw his rickety old friend pecking his way among the crowd and accosting one of the sailors from the ferry.
“Did you happen to hear any news of a little girl named Iliki?” he asked querulously.
“No, sir,” the patient sailor replied, for he was asked this question at each arrival of the Kilauea.
Sadly the old man shook his head, turned and started for his home, but Dr. Whipple called, “Abner!” and the lame missionary stopped, turned about in the sunlight and studied his visitor. At first he could not quite understand who the thin, erect man in the black suit was, and then his mind cleared momentarily.
“John,” he said softly, still refusing to accord the apostate his former title of Brother.
“I’ve come over to talk with you,” Whipple explained patiently.
“You’ve come over to reprimand me for smashing the heathen temple,” Abner replied contentiously. “Don’t waste your words. If the bloody sacrificial rocks of the Hawaiians were evil and worthy to be destroyed, the gaudy red and gold temples of Buddha merit the same treatment.”
“Let’s walk along to our offices,” Whipple suggested.
“We used to talk here, John, and this is still good enough for me.” He sat down on a coconut log, under the kou trees, where he could see the roads. “Not many whalers come here any more,” he mused. “But do you see that skeleton of a ship on the reef over there? The Thetis. How long ago we shipped on that rare vessel, John! You and Amanda, I and Jerusha. Later, you know, it was Malama’s ship. Now it rusts on the rocks, like you and me.”
“That’s what I wanted to see you about, Abner,” Dr. Whipple said quietly. “All of your friends, and I in particular, want you to leave Lahaina and come over to Honolulu to live with us. You are rusting on the reef, Brother Abner, and we want to take you home.”
“I could never leave Lahaina,” the old man said stubbornly. “Jerusha is here, and so is Malama, and I couldn’t leave them. My church is here and all of the people I have brought to God. I see the Thetis every day …” and with mention of the old ship that had brought him to his triumphs and his troubles his mind grew dim, and he added pathetically, as if he were aware that he was losing the thread of his argument, “And I expect Iliki to come back soon, and I should not like to be absent on that day.” He looked up in childish victory at his old friend, as if this line of reasoning were irrefutable.
Dr. Whipple, who had seen a good deal of the death of minds and men, showed no irritation with his old friend’s obstinacy. “Abner,” he reasoned patiently, “the younger men who run the plantations are most determined that you not be allowed to disrupt their good relationships with the Chinese.”
“Those pigtailed heathens worship idols, John. I tell you I have seen it with my own eyes!”
“The Chinese are rather difficult to handle at best, Brother Abner,” John quietly agreed, “but when you smash their temples, wholly extraneous problems are introduced.”
“John, you and I labored for many years to erase the evils of heathenism from these islands, and in our old age we certainly can’t sit idly by and see our victory snatched from us.”
“Brother Abner,” the doctor rationalized, “the Chinese problem is different from what we faced with the Hawaiians.”
Abner’s mind cleared and he stared coldly at his old friend. “Different?” he asked.
Dr. Whipple noticed that Hale’s eyes had lost their film, and he thought to make the most of these moments of lucidity, so he spoke rapidly: “The Chinese religion is an old and distinguished form of worship. Buddha and Confucius both existed long before the birth of Christ, and the systems of ethics which they evolved have dignity. They must not be confused with the raw, pagan rituals that we found here on Hawaii when we arrived. Furthermore, the Hawaiians were steeped in ignorance and required leadership to the light, but the Chinese had a flowering civilization while Massachusetts was still a wilderness, so they do not need the same kind of spiritual instruction that we had to give the Hawaiians. But what disturbs the younger men most, including your sons Micah and David, who commissioned me to come here to talk with you, is that the Hawaiians were never really a part of our society. They lived on the outskirts, as it were, but the Chinese we need. Our whole economy depends upon harmonious relations with them, and anything which runs the risk of driving them from the plantations cannot be tolerated.” He had ended his comments with a threat which he had not intended when he started, but there it was.
Abner missed the threat, for halfway through his friend’s monologue he had clearly caught its central theme, and now he drew back appalled at the ravages which years and success can effect in a man who had originally launched his career in honor and dignity. The lame little missionary studied his visitor with contempt, and pity, and said finally, with the sorrow of Jeremiah and Ezekiel in his voice, “Dear John, I am ashamed to see the day when wealth and concern for a sugar plantation could force you to come to Maui and tell me, ‘It was all right to
Dr. Whipple was stunned by the turn the conversation had taken, and he again resorted to threats: “Your sons say that if you don’t …”
With some dignity old Abner Hale rose to his unsteady feet and dismissed his visitor: “I was not afraid of the whaling captains, nor of their rioting sailors, and I am not afraid of my own sons. There is good in the world, John, and there is evil. There is God in the universe, and there are heathen idols, and I have never been confused as to whose side in the great Armageddon I fight upon. An idol is an idol, and if a Christian is tempted to make money from an idol, then that idol above all others ought to be destroyed, for as Ezekiel commanded: ‘Thus saith the Lord God, Repent, and turn yourselves from your idols; and turn away your faces from all your abominations.’ I wish to talk with you no further upon these matters, John, but when you have left I will pray that before you die you will recover once more the sweet, clean soul you brought to these islands … but lost somewhere among the sugar fields.”
The little missionary turned his back on his old friend and limped off to his small and dirty shack. When Dr. Whipple tried to overtake him and reason with him, saying, “Abner, you must come to Honolulu with me,” the missionary brushed him away and would not speak, and when Whipple followed him right to the door of the filthy hovel in which he was spending his last days, Abner slammed that door against him and Whipple could hear him kneeling against a chair and praying for the corrupted soul of his one-time roommate on the Thetis.
Dr. Whipple returned to Honolulu and issued instructions to his managers on Maui that they must assume responsibility for keeping Abner Hale away from the Buddhist temples, for it was imperative that the Chinese be protected from any additional disturbances. The Hale boys sent regular funds to Lahaina, in care of the plantation managers, so that their father could be insured good food and medical care. Twice a year they begged the weak old man to come to Honolulu and live with them, and twice a year he refused.