“No,” she said quietly, “it is the plague.”
“No plague!” the furious Chinese cried. “Your husband own my store. He say all time, ‘More rent! More rent!’ I not pay so he decide to burn.”
“No,” Mrs. Janders argued reasonably. “Mr. Apaka, it is the plague. Believe me, it would not otherwise be done.” But the Chinese knew better, and through the long night of January 19 they watched the mysterious lights of the city and waited in bitterness for the fires to begin.
Fortunately, the twentieth was a calm day with no wind that might have agitated the planned blaze. At eight in the morning the firemen, according to a schedule worked out to provide maximum protection for the rest of the city, poured liberal amounts of kerosene over a small shack diagonally across from where the Whipple mansion, burned earlier, had stood. The shack certainly merited destruction, for it had already caused the deaths of five plague victims and the illness of three others. At eight-ten a match was applied to the kerosene, and the filthy hovel exploded in flame.
As it blazed, a slight breeze started blowing from the northeast. It crept down from the mountains and as it funneled into the valleys that led into Honolulu it increased in speed, so that by the time it reached the flaming shack it was prepared to blow the sparks in exactly the opposite direction from that intended by the Fire Department. Within three minutes half a dozen shacks not on the list were ablaze, but they were easily evacuated and were of little value, so the fire fighters simply surrounded them and beat out any sparks that might escape toward the center of the city where property was of real value.
Then at eight-thirty the capricious wind blowing down from the hills arrived in an unpredicted gust and whipped a flurry of sparks high into the air. Fortunately, the land across from the fire had already been razed, so there was no danger of spreading the flames in that direction, but the wind seemed sent from hell, for it suddenly veered and deposited many active sparks on the large Congregational church that had been completed in 1884 directly across from where the old Whipple mansion had stood. The church had two soaring steeples, for the king had reasoned: “A man has two eyes so he can see better and two ears so he can hear better. My church has got to have two steeples so it can find God better.” Now the steeples were in peril, and firemen noted that if any of the embers flamed to life on those tall spires, the rising wind would surely whip sparks clear across the areas previously burned and throw them down into the valuable center of the city, so two brave Hawaiians scrambled up the sides of the church seeking to reach the steeples, and one man arrived in time to stamp out the fires beginning on his, but the other did not, and when he pulled himself onto the upper ledge of his steeple, he found it already ablaze and he barely escaped.
In a few minutes the great tall church became a torch. Its bell plunged to the basement, clanging through the flames. The famous pipe organ, imported from London, melted into lumps of useless metal, and stained-glass windows crashed into the fire. As the church burned furiously in the morning wind, many who had helped build it with their dimes and personal labor gathered to weep. But what was most important was not the loss of the church, but the fact that its unusual height made it a target for every gust that blew down the valley, and even as the people gathered at its foot to mourn, far over their heads the wind was scattering a multitude of sparks. Had the fire occurred at night, the sight would have been one of fairylike splendor, with stars of fire darting across the dark sky; but in an ominous daylight the passage of the flames occasioned no beauty and only dread. For they sped high in the air across the already burned-out areas, a few falling harmlessly on charred land but most flying on into the very heart of the city, where they descended upon dried-wood roofs, there to ignite the fires that were to destroy almost all of Chinatown. With Old Testament accuracy the embers which flew out from the Christian church fell only upon heathen homes. If the Christians of Honolulu had righteously planned to destroy every Chinese building in the city, they could have accomplished the fact no more skillfully than did the sparks erupting from their doomed church.
The first blaze in downtown Chinatown occurred at nine-forty, when a sizable ember fell upon a closely packed area of houses and ignited a central one. Gangs of firemen quickly surrounded the house to extinguish the fire, and after considerable effort succeeded in doing so; but while they were at that job, another ember struck a house of somewhat special nature. On the outside it looked like an ordinary home, but when it started to burn, all the Chinese nearby fled, and Hawaiian firemen alone were left to fight its flames.
“Come back!” an old Chinese man kept wailing in a language the firemen could not understand. Grabbing a young Chinese he shouted, “Tell them to come back!”
A group of daring Chinese hurried forward toward the burning house, grabbed the firemen by the hands and pulled them away. “Mo bettah you come back!” they yelled.
The firemen, who were terribly afraid of the Chinese after the troubles of the night before and who had been cautioned that the Orientals might attempt a riot when the burnings started, interpreted this strange behavior as the start of communal rioting, and stopped fighting the fire in order to protect themselves from the Chinese, and it was fortunate that they did so, for as they left, the house exploded. In a golden, smoky gasp of flame, the little house simply disintegrated, and then the firemen understood: it was one of the closed sheds in which some trivial Chinese merchant had kept his kerosene. But what the firemen did not understand was that the explosion, frightful though it had been, was merely the beginning of something worse; for now from the ruins a series of fantastic fiery rockets exploded through the city. Some threw stars into the air. Others pinwheeled through streets, and still others went up with a crazy, violent zigzag through the morning sky, falling at last on the roof of some new house, there to burn with vigor until its shingles too were ablaze; for the shed had harbored not only kerosene but also a store of fireworks for the Chinese New Year.
With the explosion of the shed, any hope of saving downtown Chinatown was lost, and for the next seven hours the anguished Chinese on the Punchbowl hillside, huddling behind the barbed wire of their refugee camp, could spot the progress of the huge blaze from one of these kerosene dumps to the next. All day the little sheds exploded with violence, throwing their flames into new areas, and wherever the fire went, sooner or later it found out a horde of fireworks, and when they soared into the air with their burdens of flame they seemed invariably to fall back onto areas that were not yet ablaze. And to make the destruction of Chinatown certain, the vagrant wind kept blowing from its unusual quarter in the hills. By midafternoon, it was apparent that hardly a Chinese house in mid-city would be spared.
When it became obvious that all was doomed, the Chinese fell into panic. Old men who could barely walk after forty-five years of work in the cane fields began running into burning houses to salvage some item of family life which they prized above any other, and they soon appeared in the crowded streets hauling carts, or running with bamboo carrying-poles, each with some useless treasure. No one thought to bring blankets or food, both needed in the refugee camps, and soon the streets leading out from Chinatown were jammed with a miscellaneous horde: barefoot old women in blue smocks, men in laboring shirts, pretty young girls, their hair in braids, and round-faced babies. From a Japanese tea house two geisha girls, their faces ashen with talcum powder, hurried nervously in pin-toed, mincing steps that kept their brightly colored kimonos swaying in the smoke, while old Punti women hobbled behind on stubby feet. The pigtailed men tried to lug burdens which would have staggered horses and which soon staggered them. The escape routes became a litter of lost wealth and it was pitiful to see families who had never owned much, stooping as they ran, picking up valuables they had always coveted, only to abandon them later in the same breathless way as their owners had had to do.
Now the major tragedy of the day approached, for as the fleeing Chinese, with flame and firecracker at their back, sought to break out from Ch
inatown they ran into solid rows of impassive policemen whose merciless job it was to hold them back within the plague-ridden area. There was no intention whatever—absolutely none, the police commissioner later swore—to trap the Chinese within the fiery area, but there was an ironclad insistence that they move out by established routes that would take them not into the uninfected parts of Honolulu but into the barbed-wire refugee camps, where doctors could watch them for new outbreaks of the plague.
“They won’t let us out!” a poor, dimwitted Chinese woman began screaming. “They want us to burn, in the houses they set afire.”
She made a futile attempt to dash past a policeman, but his orders required him to push her back toward the burning area, from which there was an orderly escape route, could she but find it.
“He’s pushing me into the fire!” the woman screamed, and men who had been free from panic suddenly realized that they were not going to be allowed out of the doomed area, and they began a concentrated rush toward the policemen.
“They’re breaking out!” the officers called, and behind them, from the parts of the city where there was no plague, white volunteers rushed up bearing clubs and crowbars and guns.
“Get back!” they shouted. “There’s a safe way out!”
At this point, when a deadly general riot seemed inevitable, the United States army marched onto the scene with several hundred trained soldiers, guns at the ready, and they were moved into position along all the main exit routes from Chinatown. “Under no circumstances are you to fire unless I, give the order,” their captains said, and they marched stolidly on until they stood shoulder to shoulder with the police.
To the distraught Chinese, bombarded by their own fireworks, the arrival of the soldiers was intolerable. To them it meant that any who tried to escape the burning area were to be shot, and because language between the groups was such a difficult barrier, no one could explain that the soldiers were there merely to halt the spread of infection. There was a way out of Chinatown, and it led to safety, but tempers were growing so violent that it seemed unlikely that this way would ever be found.
“They’re coming at us again!” a corporal cried, as sixteen Chinese prepared for a mass dash through the lines.
“Don’t fire!” the captain of that sector shouted. “Don’t you dare fire.”
“What am I supposed to …” There was a wild crush. Policemen beat at the pigtailed bodies while soldiers jammed at their bellies with the butts of their guns. The defense line sagged for a moment until volunteer reserves rushed up with boards torn hastily from picket fences. Lustily they clubbed the panicky Chinese over the head, driving them back toward the fire.
“We can’t hold next time!” the corporal warned, and as if to accent the peril of the moment, a large store of fireworks exploded, adding to the frenzy of all.
“Don’t you fire!” the captain warned each of his men.
“By God, if I go down beneath a bunch of damned Chinks I’m gonna fire!” the corporal shouted, disregarding the cautions of his superior, and it was then apparent that on the next charge from the Chinese a general massacre must surely begin.
At this moment, when the frightened captains were licking their lips and preparing to give the only sensible order they could: “Fire to repel rioters,” Dr. Hewlett Whipple rushed up and shouted, “Let me through! And for Christ’s sake, don’t fire!”
He forced his way through the police lines and ran into the middle of the central group of terrified Chinese. Putting his arms about the shoulders of the ringleaders he pleaded: “Don’t try to break out of here! Don’t run toward the lines again. Please, please!”
“You want us die?” a laundryman screamed at him.
“We won’t die,” Whipple said as calmly as he could, and something in the unexpected manner in which he said “we” disarmed the Chinese and they listened. “We’re going to run up Nuuanu,” he explained. “We can all get out there.” And pushing the principal rioters before him, he started running up Nuuanu, and the plague-ridden Chinese ran behind him, and in time the riot abated and the trembling young soldiers, wiping their ashen foreheads, returned their guns to safety and marched away.
Of the Chinese families that were stricken on that awful day of January 20, 1900, when Chinatown was burned—by the will of God, the haoles said; by plan, the Chinese claimed—none was struck so hard as the Kees. When the first kerosene depot exploded, its flames burned down Africa Kee’s office and destroyed his records. A whole barrage of firecrackers ripped through Asia Kee’s restaurant and the resulting fires leveled it. Europe’s Punti store was completely lost and so was America’s dry-goods emporium. Every business building owned by the Kees was burned, including the homes of two of the brothers. Their families escaped with what they wore and little else. Only the cluttered house up Nuuanu was saved, but even its occupants—except Nyuk Tsin, who was working in the forest fields—had been herded into the concentration camps.
When Nyuk Tsin came barefooted out of the hills, with her two swaying baskets filled with pineapples, and found that much of Honolulu had been destroyed, including all the possessions of the Kee hui, and when she found that her family was dispersed—many of them dead, she supposed—she experienced a sullen terror, but she fought against it and said, as she stared at her empty home, “I must find my sons.”
Fortunately, by force of habit she kept with her the swaying baskets of pineapples, so that when she had climbed the steep sides of Punchbowl and had come to the refugee camp the guards were pleased to see her and shouted, “Thank God, at last a Pake with food!” They let her pass, and after an hour of milling through the crowd she succeeded in collecting four of her five sons. No one had seen Asia leave his restaurant after the firecrackers had ripped it apart and it was reported that he was dead.
On the hillside overlooking Pearl Harbor, where the night lights of distant ships could be seen coming on, Nyuk Tsin convened her dazed family. They sat on rocks and looked down upon the desolate ruins of Chinatown, and in the silence of their crushing defeat Nyuk Tsin’s Hakka instinct warned her that now was the time for her clan to pull courage out of its spasmed belly. As a woman she knew that on such nights of despair men were apt to surrender to the fate that had overtaken them, but it was a woman’s job to prevent them from doing so. In the fading twilight she could see in the sensitive, shocked faces of Europe and America a willingness to declare the Kee empire ended. Blunt-faced Africa showed some of the fighting spirit to be expected in an educated man, but not much, while young Australia was burning with outrage because a soldier had struck him in the gut with a rifle. It was not much of a family that Nyuk Tsin had that night, nor was she herself in condition to inspirit her sons, for inwardly she was grieving for Asia, lost in the fire.
But she said quietly, so that no one else could hear, “It is unthinkable that the government will ignore what has happened.”
“They destroyed all of Chinatown,” America said with anguish in his voice. “They burned our stores on purpose because we wouldn’t work on their sugar plantations.”
“No,” Nyuk Tsin reasoned, “the wind came by accident.”
“That isn’t so, Wu Chow’s Auntie!” Europe cried, ugly with despair. “The merchants wanted this done. Last week they threw all the food I had ordered from China into the bay. They were determined to wipe us out.”
“No, Europe,” Nyuk Tsin calmly argued, “they were afraid your shipments might bring more of the plague.”
“But they didn’t throw the haole shipments overboard!” Europe shouted, with tears in his voice. “They came from China, too.”
“They’re afraid,” Nyuk Tsin explained. “Men do strange things when they’re afraid.”
“I never want to see Honolulu again,” America groaned. “They burned our stores on purpose.”
“No,” Nyuk Tsin patiently reasoned, “they were afraid that …”
“Wu Chow’s Auntie!” America cried. “Don’t be a fool!”
Ther
e was a harsh slap in the night and Nyuk Tsin said, “Behave yourself.” Then she drew her sons closer about her and began again: “It is inconceivable that we will be left without compensation. Surely, surely we must believe that the government will pay us for what has happened.”
For the first time Africa spoke. Cautiously and with the slow accent of a lawyer he asked, “Why do you think so?”
“I knew Dr. Whipple,” Nyuk Tsin replied. “The old one. And men like him, Africa, simply do not allow injustice to stand.”
“It was men like him who burned our stores on purpose,” America whined. There was another harsh slap and Nyuk Tsin cried furiously, “No more words about the past! There was fire. We have lost everything. Now we are going to gain everything.”
Africa’s studious voice asked, “Wu Chow’s Auntie, do you think that men like old Dr. Whipple will be listened to in the days to come?”
“Perhaps they won’t be,” Nyuk Tsin admitted, “but there is something new in Hawaii. The United States cannot afford to see us treated badly. Out of pride … or to show the world that they look after their people …” Her voice trailed off and she reflected for a moment. Then she said vigorously, “Sons, I am absolutely convinced that either our own government or the United States will pay us back for this fire. Let’s not argue about it another minute.”
“What you are thinking of,” Africa said slowly, thinking aloud, “is that we must protect ourselves and see to it that we get our share of whatever money is distributed to those who have lost, regardless of where the money comes from.”
Nyuk Tsin thought: “No matter how much we paid for his education, it was worth it.” And she was also pleased at the way in which Africa’s sensible statement of the problem awakened in her sons their old hui spirit; the Kee hui was again in operation. “I think,” she said, “that Africa must devote his whole time to organizing a committee right away for just payment to all of us who have lost in the fire. Make the world realize that there is no question of whether claims will be paid. It is only a question of how much. Africa, you must appear on every platform. Whenever there is a meeting, you must speak. You must become the voice of all the Chinese. You will represent everybody and you will let it be known that you refuse to accept any fees. Work, work, work. Give statements to the paper and let them print your picture. But always speak as if you were positive that the money will be paid. Soon you will have others saying it, and in time they too will believe it.” She paused, then added, “The money is absolutely going to come.”
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