Hawaii by James A. Michener
“Can you sell pineapple?” Nyuk Tsin asked suspiciously.
Whip Hoxworth turned and pointed expansively back down the valley, and although trees cut off his view, that did not disturb him. “Every house you can see down there will want to buy your pineapples, Pake. Is it a deal?”
It was, and young Whip Hoxworth had made a shrewd guess, for Nyuk Tsin’s upper field was exactly the soil needed for the Formosa pineapple, which was markedly sweeter and in all ways superior to the grubby degenerates that had been introduced into the islands half a century before. Now Nyuk Tsin hiked out of her upper Nuuanu fields day after day, her back loaded with pineapples which she hawked through the city. Her vegetables from the lower field also prospered, but best of all, her four sons were learning their necessary lessons.
In only one venture was Nyuk Tsin failing and that was, as before, her taro bed, for not satisfied with selling the brutish bulbs to the natives, and the leaves to anyone who wanted to steam them for vegetables, while keeping the stalks to herself for pickling and serving with fried mullet, thus exacting three profits from the accommodating taro, she allowed Kimo and Apikela to talk her into boiling down the roots and converting them once more into poi. This time the procedure worked exactly right, and the resulting poi was a rich, gooey, purplish color that made the mouth of any Hawaiian water when he saw it, and a considerable market developed for this Pake poi, as it was called. But very few Hawaiians were able to buy any, for big Apikela and bigger Kimo worked so hard at cultivating the taro that when mealtime came they were famished, and Nyuk Tsin, gobbling a few handfuls of cold rice with perhaps a bit of pickled taro stalk, sat by aghast at the amounts of poi her two gigantic housemates consumed. Kimo, now weighing nearly three hundred and fifty pounds, would lumber over to the poi buckets, ladle himself out a quart or more and serve Apikela an equal amount. Pecking at half a dozen fish, some cold pork, a baked breadfruit and what was left of a can of Oregon salmon, they would dip two fingers, held scooped like loose fishhooks, into the poi, twirl them around the sticky mass, and swing them deftly to their mouths. With a sweet sucking sound they inhaled the delicious paste, and looked happily at each other as they did so.
With dismay, Nyuk Tsin realized that none of her poi was getting onto the market. Yet she did not complain, for these great placid people had adopted her children when she was with the lepers. Even now Nyuk Tsin felt that she could not get along without them, for they tended the boys, did the laundry, brought the gossip home from the poolroom, and took care of the poi. But in prudence Nyuk Tsin felt she had to protect herself, so at last she said to Kimo, “I would like to buy your upper fields.”
“Buy?” Kimo asked in astonishment. “You can have them.”
“Maybe it’s better if I buy them, properly.”
“They’re yours,” Apikela insisted.
“Could we go to the land office and sign the papers?” Nyuk Tsin asked. “And I’ll pay you.”
Big Apikela lifted her Chinese friend in the air and sat her on her lap, saying, “Kimo and I have no use for the land. We have no children.”
“You have the four boys,” Nyuk Tsin corrected.
“Good idea!” Kimo cried. “We’ll give the land to our boys.” So the three of them went down to the land office and registered the sale of the upper fields to the Kee boys, and when the white man asked, through his interpreter, “And what fee changed hands?” the two huge Hawaiians looked confused, and the official explained, “There has to be a recognized fee, or the sale isn’t legal.”
Nyuk Tsin began to say that she had a bagful of dimes and reals and Australian gold pieces saved for her sons’ education and she was willing, but Kimo interrupted, and with a grand gesture said, “We sell this Pake our land in return for all the poi we can eat.” And that was what Nyuk Tsin had been thinking about in the first place, and that was how the deed was registered.
It was a strange and yet typical Hawaii-like life that Nyuk Tsin now led. Her four sons spoke mainly Hawaiian and English, and she communicated with them only in broken Hawaiian. They were carefully taught to think of the shadowy woman in China as their mother, but they considered Apikela their mamma, just as she thought of them as her sons. Nobody in the household even knew Nyuk Tsin’s name, the Hawaiians always calling her merely the Pake, and her children knowing her as Auntie. In food, language and laughter the establishment was Hawaiian. In school-book learning, business and religion it was American. But in filial obedience and reverence for education it was Chinese.
Nyuk Tsin’s years fell into an almost sacred routine. On the first of March she went to the land office and paid her taxes on her two properties, and her most valued physical possession became a box in which she kept her receipts. For her they were a kind of citizenship, a proof that she had a right to stay in the Fragrant Tree Country.
In September and June she washed her one suit of clothes with special care, dressed her hair with a fresh cloth, and accompanied her four sons to discuss their education with Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, who found delight in talking Chinese with her and who said that her sons were doing well. Her insistence upon this was fanatical, and whenever she talked with Blake she hammered one question: “Which of my four sons has the best mind?” And the big, fierce man would reflect and reply, “America.” She was pleased to know that her brilliant son was doing well in school, for she loved to visualize the day on which he would set out to the mainland for his advanced schooling, to be supported by all the others.
In April and October, Nyuk Tsin faithfully trekked down to the Punti store with an appropriate number of dollars and sent them off to Kee Mun Ki’s family in the Low Village. Always she took her four sons with her, even though it meant keeping them out of school, for she impressed them with this: “Even more important than education is filial duty, and you are four brothers who must work extra hard to pay the respect due your father and his family.” She made each of the boys actually finger the money as it was turned over, and each of them touched the resulting letter. “Now you can go back to school,” she said. Sometimes she thought it strange that she should be inculcating these ancient Chinese virtues not in the powerful Hakka language but in a broken Hawaiian pidgin. However, the virtues were self-evident and the boys understood.
Such was the year of Nyuk Tsin, the Pake Kokua, the Auntie. For herself she had one blouse, one pair of trousers, no shoes and one basket hat. She had a bamboo carrying-pole, two baskets, a poi factory that made no money, and two parcels of land that would one day be worth more than a million dollars. But the revolution in which this slim-hipped Chinese woman was involved stemmed mainly from the fact that she had four bright boys in Iolani, and when they were ready to move into Honolulu’s economic life, fortified by Uliassutai Blake’s inspired learning and their Auntie’s frugal common sense, there would be little that could stop them.
And then one day in 1879, as Nyuk Tsin was leading her sons to the Episcopal church, she saw a Hawaiian family entering with seven children, and one of the boys looked Chinese. She began studying this child and concluded that he must be about eight years old, which would be the age of her missing son. She was not sure that he was Chinese, for he blended perfectly with his Hawaiian brothers and sisters, but when service ended she sent her sons home with thirteen-year-old Asia and quietly followed the Hawaiian family to their residence. She found it to be a large, rambling house on Beretania Street far out Diamond Head way, and the eight-year-old boy seemed fully at home there. She tried to ask a passer-by what the family’s name was but could not make the man understand.
She now revised her peddling routes and walked miles out of her way to keep check on the big Hawaiian house, and in time she found that the Chinese boy went to school, seemed normally bright, and was known only by a Hawaiian name. Once she lugged her pineapples onto the veranda of the house itself and tried to engage the mother of the household in conversation, but the latter wanted no pineapples. When she had exhausted all her own ingenuity, she decided to discu
“I don’t have to find out,” he replied simply. “That’s Governor Kelolo Kanakoa’s house.”
“Find out where they got the Pake child.”
“Good,” Kimo grunted, and he set off to the poolroom and in a short time reported: “The governor was on the docks one day when a ship came in with a little baby boy, and no one knew what to do with it, so naturally the governor said, ‘I’ll take him,’ and he did.” Kimo shrugged his shoulders as if to say, “Isn’t that simple?” And then he saw what Nyuk Tsin was driving at. “The boy belongs to Kelolo!” he warned. “He fed him. He brought him up.”
“But he’s a Pake,” Nyuk Tsin argued. “He’s mine.”
“Of course!” Kimo agreed. “He’s your boy, but he belongs to the governor.”
Patiently, but with swelling emotion, Nyuk Tsin reasoned: “I did not give the child to the governor. I sent him to you, to keep for me till I got home.”
“But what did it matter who got the child?” Kimo reasoned back. “The boy has a home and parents who love him. He has others to play with and enough food. What does it matter?”
“I want him to grow up to be a Chinese,” Nyuk Tsin argued, growing nervous.
“I don’t understand,” Kimo said blankly. “When I was young my father always had two or three sailors who had fled their ships, hiding out in our fields up there. Swedish, Americans, Spaniards, it didn’t matter. Sometimes they had babies with my sisters, and where are the babies now? I don’t know, neither do my sisters. And are they Spanish or Hawaiian? Who cares?”
Nyuk Tsin found herself making no headway with Kimo, so against her better judgment she enlarged the debate to include Apikela, and as she suspected, the big Hawaiian woman instinctively sided with the boy’s Hawaiian mother. “You must think of how much the governor’s wife has grown to love this boy,” Apikela reasoned.
“But she has six children of her own!” Nyuk Tsin replied in growing despair.
“They aren’t all her own!” Apikela replied triumphantly. “Some were left in the street and one I know comes from Maui.”
“I am going to get my son,” Nyuk Tsin said stubbornly.
“Pake!” Apikela warned. “He is no longer your son.”
Nyuk Tsin spoke unwisely: “Are the other four boys no longer my sons, either?”
Softly Apikela replied, “No, Pake, they are not yours alone. They are now my sons too.” She did not have the words to explain that in the Hawaiian system the filial-parent relationship was completely fluid, and son-ship derived not from blood lines but from love. No child was ever left abandoned, and some of the most touching narratives of Hawaiian history stemmed from the love of some peasant woman who heard the cries of an unwanted girl baby whom the alii had left beside the sea to perish, and the peasant woman had rescued the child and had raised it as her own until war came, or some other great event, and then the child was revealed in full beauty. It had happened again and again. Apikela was unable to explain all these things to her Pake friend, but she did add this: “In all the Hawaiian families you see, there will always be one child that was found somewhere. A friend gave the child to the family, and that was that.”
Stubbornly Nyuk Tsin repeated her question: “Then my boys are not my sons?”
“Not yours alone,” huge Apikela repeated. The little Chinese woman, steeled in the Hakka tradition of family, stared at her big Hawaiian friend, reared in the softer tradition of love, and each woman typified the wisdom of her race, and neither would surrender, but as always, it was the copious Hawaiian who made the overture of peace: “Surely, Pake, with four boys we have enough for two mothers.” And the big woman was so persuasive that even though Nyuk Tsin despised the concept being offered, and saw in it an explanation of why the Hawaiians were dying out and the Chinese were thriving, she could not ignore the testimony of love that she saw in the happy faces of her sons. Even if they did have to live suspended between Hawaiian love and Chinese duty, they were thriving; so at last Nyuk Tsin allowed herself to be drawn into Apikela’s great arms and cherished, as if she were a daughter and not an equal. Then the big woman said, “Now that our tempers are at peace, let us go see the governor’s wife.”
Sedately, she and Kimo and the Pake walked down Nuuanu to Beretania and then out toward Diamond Head, and when they got to the governor’s big house, Apikela said softly, “I will speak,” and as if she were an ambassador from the court of the Nuuanu taro patch to the high court of Beretania Street, she explained to the governor’s wife: “The Pake thinks your seventh child is hers.”
“Probably is,” Governor Kelolo’s wife agreed easily. “I think my husband found him on a boat.”
“The Pake would like to take the boy home with her,” Apikela said softly.
The governor’s wife looked down at her hands and began to cry. Finally she said gently, “We think of the boy as our own.”
“See!” Apikela said, and she withdrew from the interview, for there was obviously nothing more to say.
But Nyuk Tsin was just beginning. “I appreciate what you did for the boy. He looks very clean and intelligent. But he is my son, and I would like to …”
“He is very happy here,” the governor’s wife explained.
“He is my son,” Nyuk Tsin struggled. She felt as if she were engulfed in a mass of cloud or formless foam. She could push it back, but always it returned to smother her. The three big Hawaiians were falling upon her, strangling her with love.
Again the governor’s wife was speaking: “But we think of him as our son, too.”
“If I went to court, what would the judge say?” Nyuk Tsin threatened.
Now both the governor’s wife and Apikela began to weep, and the former said, “There is no need to involve the judges. Apikela said that you had your four sons with you. Why not leave the fifth boy with us? We love him very much.”
“He is my son,” Nyuk Tsin stubbornly argued, but the phrase really had little meaning to the three Hawaiians. Obviously, the attractive boy was a son in many more ways than this thin Chinese woman could understand.
At this point the governor himself entered, a tall, handsome man in his late forties. He was generous in his attitude toward everyone and listened patiently, first to Apikela, then to his wife, and finally to Nyuk Tsin. When he spoke he said, “Then you are the Pake Kokua?”
“Yes,” Nyuk Tsin replied.
“Every Hawaiian owes a debt to you, Kokua.” He formally extended his hand. Then he remembered: “It was about eight years ago. I was at the docks on some kind of business. I wasn’t governor then, had just come over from Maui. And this ship came in with a sailor who had a screaming baby, and he said, ‘What shall I do with it?’ And I said, ‘Feed it.’ And he said, ‘I got no tits.’ So I took the boy and brought him home.” He paused significantly, then added, “And we made him one of our sons.”
“Now I want him,” Nyuk Tsin said forcefully.
“And it would seem to me,” the governor said, ignoring her, “that it might be a very good thing if this Chinese boy continued to grow up in this house, among the Hawaiians. We two races need to understand each other better.” Then he stopped and said bluntly, “I love the boy as my own son. I don’t think I could let him go.”
“The judge will give him to me,” Nyuk Tsin said coldly.
Tears came into the big man’s eyes and he asked, “Have you no other children of your own?”
“I have four,” Nyuk Tsin replied.
“Then leave the boy with us. Please don’t speak of judges.”
The governor?
“His real mother?” the governor asked.
“Yes,” Nyuk Tsin explained. “His real mother is in China. I am merely his auntie.”
“I thought you gave birth to the boy in Kalawao,” the governor checked.
“I did,” Nyuk Tsin assured him. “But his mother is in China.”
The governor listened patiently and asked, “Could you please explain this again?” and as Nyuk Tsin repeated the curious rigmarole he realized that he was comprehending very little of it.
So Nyuk Tsin took Australia to the Punti store, where his name was duly forwarded to the ancestral hall in the Low Village, while he continued to be known in Hawaii as Keoki Kanakoa, the son of the last governor of Honolulu. He met his brothers, Asia, Europe, Africa and America, and then returned to the big rambling house. He called Nyuk Tsin, whose name he never knew, Auntie, and he vaguely understood that in China he had a real mother, to whom it was his duty to send money twice a year.
There was one other thing that Nyuk Tsin insisted upon. Four acres of Governor Kanakoa’s choicest upland in Manoa Valley, then a wet, forested wilderness, were officially deeded over to the boy Australia Kee, otherwise known as Keoki Kanakoa, and after these were cleared, Nyuk Tsin grew pineapples on them. She was now thirty-two years old, and except for a really gaunt thinness and a lack of hair she was what one might call an attractive woman; but even though there was an appalling lack of women for Chinese men—246 women; 22,000 men—none of the latter ever considered Nyuk Tsin as a wife. She had proved herself to be a husband-killer and she was probably also a leper.