Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “She has fallen in love with a haole,” Nyuk Tsin replied. A hush fell over the assembly, for although the Kees, under Nyuk Tsin’s approval if not her outright urging, had always felt free to marry Hawaiians, none had yet made any signs of wanting to marry white Americans, and Ellen’s bold proposal represented a jolt in family procedures. The clan turned to look at Africa’s daughter, a bright-eyed, quick, handsome girl of twenty, and she looked back.

  “Who is the white man?” Asia asked, exercising his prerogative as oldest son.

  “Tell him, Sheong Mun,” the old woman said.

  In a soft voice taught her by the women teachers at the Episcopalian school, Ellen said, “He is a junior officer on one of the navy ships at Pearl Harbor.”

  A chorus of gasps came from the hui. A white man and a military man, too! This was indeed, as Wu Chow’s Auntie had warned, a major problem, and Europe, who had married a Hawaiian girl, said, “It’s bad enough to want to marry a white man, because they don’t make good husbands and they take money out of the family. But to marry a military man is really indecent. No self-respecting girl …”

  Australia interrupted: “We’re not in China. I know some fine navy men.”

  Europe replied stiffly: “I don’t.”

  Asia observed: “I had hoped never to see one of my family want to marry a soldier.”

  Australia snapped: “He’s a sailor, and there’s a big difference.”

  Europe said: “Military men are military men, and they make miserable husbands.”

  Australia cried: “Why don’t you take those ideas back to China? That’s where they came from.”

  At this, Nyuk Tsin intervened and said in her low, imperative voice, “It would be much better if Sheong Mun had fallen in love with a Chinese boy, or if she had come to me as a dutiful girl and said, ‘Wu Chow’s Auntie, find me a husband.’ But she has done neither of these things.”

  “The worse for her,” Asia said sadly. “In my restaurant I see many girls who stray from the old patterns, and they all suffer for it.”

  “Ridiculous!” Australia’s wife snapped. “Asia! You know very well that when I was a girl I used to hide in your restaurant and kiss Australia behind the dried ducks. And nothing bad came of it except that I married your lazy brother.”

  “That was the beginning of what I’m talking about,” Asia warned.

  “Ridiculous!” Australia’s wife, a high-spirited Ching beauty, laughed. “Because do you know who used to whistle at me to let me know your brother was waiting?” The Kees looked at the bright-eyed young wife, and with a dramatic gesture she pointed directly at Nyuk Tsin, sitting gray-haired and solemn at the head of the family. “That one did it! She’s worse than any of us!”

  The family roared at the old woman’s embarrassment, and finally Nyuk Tsin wiped her blushing face and said softly, “I must admit I arranged it. But remember that Ching Siu Han was a Chinese girl. And a Hakka. And could be trusted. Today we are talking about something much different. A white man. And a soldier.”

  “Wu Chow’s Auntie!” Ellen interrupted. “He’s not a soldier. You must forget your old prejudices.”

  Asia asked, “Will he bring any land into our hui? Any money?”

  “No,” Ellen said resolutely. “In fact, he’ll take money out. Because I have got to have two hundred dollars for clothes and more later for other things.”

  Together the Kees sucked in their breath and faced the day they had long feared. Sooner or later, some member of the family would want to marry a white man. Now it had come and those who dreaded the event suspected that Africa with the radical new ideas he had acquired at Michigan must somehow be at fault. Therefore, the older members of the family began staring at the lawyer, and he suffered from their harsh gaze. Finally Europe asked brusquely, “Tell us, Africa. What do you think of this?”

  There was a long hush in the hot room, and voices of children could be heard. Finally Africa spoke. “I am humiliated,” he said. “I am ashamed that it is my daughter who wants to marry outside our circle of acquaintance. I have given her a good education and her mother has tried to teach her to be a decent Hakka. I am humiliated and I do not know what to do.” Suddenly the pressure upon him became great and he hid his face in his hands, sobbing quietly. The disgrace he had brought upon the family immobilized his speech, so his wife added, “He feels that he must accept the shame for what his daughter has done.”

  At this solemn moment Australia interjected a happier note. “Of course it’s his responsibility. If a man goes to Michigan, he picks up foreign ways. I suppose that’s why we sent him to Michigan. Remember, Asia, it was your sons who went to Pennsylvania. It was your sons who brought American friends into our homes, and it was one of those friends who met Sheong Mun. Bang! They’re in love! Ellen, if your stingy father won’t give you the two hundred dollars I will.”

  “It isn’t the money that I want so much, Uncle Australia, as your blessing.”

  “You have mine!”

  “And mine!” Australia’s wife chimed.

  “Have I yours, Wu Chow’s Auntie?”

  The family turned to look at Nyuk Tsin, sitting with her worn hands in her lap. “I am concerned with only one problem, Sheong Mun,” the old woman said. “When your children are born they will be the children of a white man, and they will be lost to our family. Promise me that you will send me a letter each time you have a child, and I will go to the Punti scholar and find his true name, and we will write it in our book and send the name back to China, as we have always done.”

  “My sons will not want Chinese names,” hard-headed Ellen countered.

  “Later they will,” the old woman said. “They will want to know who they are, and in the book the information will be waiting for them.”

  As the Kees dispersed over the face of the world, marrying with men who worked in strange lands, letters arrived constantly for Nyuk Tsin. Her sons would read them to her, and she would note the births of all children. For each son she got a proper name, and registered it in China, and as she predicted this day in 1908, the time did come when the boy so named would want to know what the Chinese half of his ancestry signified, and men would arrive in Honolulu whom you would not recognize as Chinese, and they would meet old Nyuk Tsin, and she would take down a book she could not read, and the interpreter would pick out the information and the Chinese-German-Irish-English boy would understand a little better who he was.

  But on this particular day the old woman was concerned with Africa’s children, and after it had been grudgingly agreed that the lawyer’s daughter, Kee Sheong Mun, known locally as Ellen Kee, could marry her sailor, Nyuk Tsin coughed and said, “It is time we think again about getting Hong Kong into Punahou.”

  Asia groaned, America rose and left the room in disgust, and the rest of the family turned to stare at Africa’s youngest son, a square-headed, wrinkle-eyed boy of fifteen. Among the family it was believed that young Koon Kong, who was known as Hong Kong, had inherited his father’s intellectual brilliance. He was most able at figures, knew Punti, Hakka, English and Hawaiian well, and seemed unusually gifted at managing money, for he augmented whatever he got hold of by lending it out to his numerous cousins. His rate of interest was a standard, inflexible ten per cent a week which he enforced by meticulous collections on Friday after school. As his name Koon indicated, he was of the fourth generation—Koon Kong, Earth’s Atmosphere—and he was of the earth. In his generation of Kees there were twenty-seven boys carrying the name Koon, one brother and twenty-six cousins, and he was the cleverest of them all. If any Kee was ever going to elbow his way into Punahou, Hong Kong was the one, and as the problem opened for discussion, the family grew tense.

  “Will Hong Kong’s mother tell us how her son is doing in school?” the matriarch began.

  Mrs. Africa Kee, the older of the striking Ching girls, said, “His marks have been excellent. His behavior has been spirited but has brought no reprimand. I am proud of my son’s accomplishment and
feel that he merits the interest the family is taking in him.”

  “Does Hong Kong think he can do the work at Punahou … if he is accepted?” Nyuk Tsin asked.

  The boy was embarrassed by the attention focused on him, but he yearned to get into Punahou, so he bore the indignity. Hunching up one shoulder he said, “If the Lum boy can do the work, I can do the work.”

  At the mention of the Lum boy, the Kees grew bitter. For a dozen years they had been trying to get one of their sons into Punahou, Hawaii’s source of excellence, but for one reason or another they had never succeeded, even though they were a fairly wealthy family and could boast of Africa as a leading professional man. Yet the Lums, who really did not amount to much except that their father was a dentist and a man who loved to speak in public, had maneuvered one of their boys into the cherished haven.

  Nyuk Tsin said, “I think that this time we really have a good chance. I have asked a dear old friend to counsel with us as to what we must do to get Hong Kong accepted.” She gave a signal and a grandson ran out to bring back a tall, bald Englishman with outrageous white mustaches and a flamboyant energy that projected him into the hot room, where he kissed Nyuk Tsin and cried in flowery Chinese: “Ah ha! We plot against the white people! Strike the tocsin! China shall rise!”

  It was Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, the mad schoolteacher and the trusted friend of all Chinese. He was older and stouter but no more subdued, and now he locked his hands behind his neck, rocking to and fro as if he were going to fall over. “Beloved and prolific Kees,” he said, “let us face the truth. There are good schools and there are great schools, and every family is entitled to send his ablest sons to the greatest. Iolani, where I slave for a pittance, is a good school. Punahou is a great school. It lends authority and glamour and caste. England is built on such foundations and so is Hawaii. Let a man use a wrong knife, and he is condemned to the Liberal Party for life.”

  “What’s he talking about?” one of Australia’s boys whispered.

  “I’m talking about you!” Uliassutai Karakoram Blake shouted in English, flailing his arms out and thrusting his head a few inches from the face of the startled young Chinese. “Stand up!” Awkwardly the boy rose and Blake pointed at him as if he were an exhibit.

  “Behold the scion of the Kee hui,” he said in erudite Chinese. “He has done well at Iolani School, but he has not yet been accepted at Punahou. He is therefore limited to a perpetual secondary acceptance in Honolulu. He cannot associate with the men who rule the city. He cannot learn to speak with their inflections. He lacks their peculiar polish. And he must remain the rest of his life a Chinese peasant. Sit down!”

  Blake turned his back on the boy and said to the elders, “The compassionate Buddha knows that at Iolani I have given you Chinese the salt of my blood and the convolutions of my brain, and I have raised you from ignorance into light, and the compassionate Buddha also knows that I wish I had done half as well with my light as you wonderful people have done with yours. If I had, I wouldn’t now be toiling out the evening years of my life as an underpaid schoolmaster. Africa, how much did you earn last year?”

  The Chinese loved this ridiculous man and his circumlocutions. With his British regard for proprieties and his Oriental love of bombast, he seemed Chinese, and now he got to the meat of his visit: “You might think that I, as an Iolani teacher who had brought Hong Kong to this point of his education, would object to the proposal that you now transfer him to Punahou. Not at all. A family like yours is entitled to have a son at the best school Hawaii can provide. There he will rub elbows with future lawyers, business giants, community leaders. If I were a Kee, I would suffer any humiliation to get my son into Punahou. Hong Kong, stand up. I tell you, Kees, there is as fine a boy as Hawaii has ever produced. He merits the best. Hong Kong, depart.”

  When the embarrassed boy had gone, Uliassutai Karakoram said, “Wu Chow’s Auntie, it will be very difficult indeed for you to get that boy into Punahou. He’s too intelligent, and your family is too able. The white people want to have one or two Chinese in their school, but not the best. They prefer slow, stolid boys of no great imagination. The Lum boy is ideal. Hong Kong is not, because even Buddha himself would refuse to prophesy what Hong Kong may one day accomplish. Africa, are you aware that you have sired a revolutionary genius?”

  “Hong Kong has far more power than I ever had, Mr. Blake,” Africa confessed to his old teacher.

  “Wu Chow’s Auntie!” Uliassutai Karakoram pleaded suddenly. “Would you not consider trying to get some other grandson into Punahou?”

  “No,” Nyuk Tsin replied evenly. “He is a brilliant boy. He deserves the best.”

  The big Englishman shrugged his shoulders and said, “If you’re determined to go against my advice, let’s see what evil tricks you ought to attempt this time. Who visited Punahou last time?”

  Mrs. Africa Kee, a handsome, modern Chinese wife, raised her hand. “Stand up!” Blake snapped. He studied her carefully, dressed as she was in western style, and said, “Couldn’t we send someone a little less … modern? White people feel safer when an Oriental looks more like a coolie.”

  There were some things the Kees would not tolerate, which was what made them a significant family, and now Africa said simply, “If my son applies to Punahou, his mother goes with him.”

  “May Buddha bless all stubborn people,” Blake said magniloquently, “for without them this would be a most miserable world. But could not your wife dress a little more inconspicuously? She must look prosperous enough to pay the tuition, yet not so self-assured that she would ever say anything in a meeting of the children’s parents. We want her to look unalterably Chinese, yet aspiring to become a decent American. We want her to look proud enough to clean her fingernails, yet humble enough to remain slightly stooped over as if she lugged baskets of pineapples about the town.” He bowed grandly to Nyuk Tsin and said, “Do you think your son’s wife can acquire the proper look of a Chinese appealing to white people for help?”

  “No,” Nyuk Tsin said coldly.

  “I thought not,” Blake said sadly. “Then you are prepared for Hong Kong to be rejected again?”

  At this point America, whose two sons had tried in vain to enter Punahou, returned to the meeting and growled, “We are prepared to be rejected forever, Mr. Blake.”

  “I am sorry that you were not all born a little more stupid,” the flamboyant Englishman said, “because then, with your money, you’d be accepted gracefully. But of course, if you had been more stupid … that one in particular,” and he pointed at Nyuk Tsin, “why you wouldn’t have the money you now have, and you would be kept out of Punahou on grounds of poverty.”

  “Do you think Hong Kong has a chance this time?” Nyuk Tsin pleaded.

  “No,” Blake said. “If I were a white man in Honolulu, I would never allow one of you damned Kees anywhere. You’re smart. You work. You gang together. You’re ambitious. First thing you know you’ll be teaching your daughters to lure white men into marriage.”

  “Sheong Mun is going to marry a naval officer,” Nyuk Tsin said softly.

  In the hot room Uliassutai Karakoram Blake stopped ranting. He looked at the fresh, handsome child he had once taught. Little Ellen Kee, who could sing so charmingly. Gravely he went up to her, kissed her on the cheeks and said, quietly, “May the compassionate Buddha have mercy upon us all. The years of our lives are so short and the currents of the world are so strong. Good-bye, dear Kees. You will not get into Punahou … not this time.”

  When he was gone the elders of the family considered the many ideas he had proposed, and Nyuk Tsin said, “That strange man is right. Hong Kong’s mother does look too modern, as if she were forcing her way upon the haoles. It will be too easy to reject her. This time we really must send someone else. How about Europe’s wife? She’s Hawaiian.”

  “No!” Africa cried. “He is my son, and he will report to Punahou with his own mother, and if they reject us again, let it be so.”

&nb
sp; “This time, then, I will go along,” Nyuk Tsin announced. “I will be barefooted and I will represent the old ways.”

  “No!” Africa protested again. “My wife, who will dress as she pleases, will take my son to Punahou and seek admission. I will tolerate no subterfuges.”

  “Africa,” the old matriarch said softly, “the school has shown that it will accept one or two Chinese. Now it is terribly important that one of our boys be chosen. Please, this time allow me to arrange things.”

  “I have business on the Big Island,” Africa said solemnly. “I shall go there and bear no part of this humiliation.” He left the room and the clan breathed more easily, for he was a stubborn man.

  “Now, when the Lums got their son into Punahou,” Nyuk Tsin counseled, “the boy’s mother wore a very plain dress, and her hair straight back, and she kept her eyes on the floor. I am therefore going to say flatly that Hong Kong’s mother cannot go this time.”

  “I will go with my husband to the Big Island,” Africa’s wife announced, and she too left the plotters.

  After much discussion, and after carefully studying the devices by which earlier Chinese families had managed to get sons into Punahou, the Kees hit upon an involved strategy. Barefoot Nyuk Tsin would go in smock and pants to give the proper coolie touch. Europe’s wife would go as a pure-blooded Hawaiian to show that the Kees respected local traditions. And Australia’s wife, the pretty Ching girl, would go in a very modest western-style dress to prove that the family knew how to eat with a knife and fork. The boy Hong Kong, who had an intellectual ability four levels higher than anyone then studying at Punahou, would tag along in a carefully selected suit that bespoke both the ability to pay tuition and a quiet gentility not common among newly rich Chinese families.

  It was a hot day when the four Kees drove up to Punahou in a rented carriage, it having been decided that this was slightly more propitious than walking, and in the interview the three women played their roles to perfection, but Hong Kong squinted slightly and thought just a little too long before answering questions, brilliant though his replies were, and in due time the family got the news: “We regret that this year, due to overcrowded conditions, we can find no place for your son, whose marks and general deportment seemed otherwise acceptable.”