Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  She therefore had her Harvard-trained great-grandson, Eddie Kee, study the new law and heckle the Immigration authorities until she understood every nuance. When the first language class convened, she was present, and although she was well over a hundred years old at the time, she drove her eager brain to its extent, and in the evenings sat listening to the English-language radio. But she was so ingrained in Chinese thought that English escaped her, and one night she faced up to her failure. She told Hong Kong, “I can’t learn the language now.

  Why didn’t somebody force me to learn it years ago? Now I shall never become a citizen.” And she looked disconsolately at her grandson.

  But then Eddie arrived with the exciting news that certain elderly Orientals would be allowed to take the examinations in their own tongue, provided they were literate in it, and at this news Nyuk Tsin covered her old eyes for a moment, then looked up brightly and said, “I shall learn to write.”

  Hong Kong therefore hired a learned Chinese to teach the old woman what was undoubtedly the most difficult language in the world, but after a while it became apparent that she was simply too old to learn, so Eddie went to the Immigration authorities and said honestly, “My great-grandmother is a hundred and six, and she wants more than anything else in the world to become an American citizen. But she can’t speak English …”

  “No trouble!” the examiner explained. “Now she can be examined in Chinese.”

  “But she can’t read and write Chinese,” Eddie continued.

  “Well!” The examiner studied this for a while, then went into the back office, and in a moment Mr. Brimstead, an official from Washington, appeared with one question: “You say this old woman is a hundred and six?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “She got a family?”

  “Probably the biggest in Hawaii.”

  “Good! We’ve been looking for something dramatic. Pictures we could use for publicity in Asia. You get the family together. I’ll give her the exam myself and we’ll waive the literacy. But wait a minute. Is she able to answer questions. I mean, is she competent?”

  “Wu Chow’s Auntie is competent,” her great-grandson assured him.

  “Because on the questions I can’t fudge. You know: legislative, executive, judicial.”

  “Can I accompany her, to give her moral support?”

  “Sure, but our interpreters will report her answers, and they have to be right.”

  “She will be right,” the young lawyer guaranteed.

  He therefore entered upon a long series of cramming sessions with his great-grandmother, teaching her in the Hakka tongue the many intricacies of American government, and this time, with citizenship hanging like a silver lichee nut before her, she summoned her remarkable energies and memorized the entire booklet.

  “The father of our country?” Eddie shouted at her.

  “George Washington.”

  “Who freed the slaves?” Hong Kong drilled.

  “Abraham Lincoln,” the little old woman replied, and Eddie reflected: “It’s difficult to believe, but she came to Hawaii in the year that Lincoln died.”

  On the day of her examination, the Immigration Department assembled several newsreel cameras, officials in white coats, and about two hundred members of the Kee hui, who were told to cheer when the old lady arrived in Hong Kong’s Buick. When she stepped down, brushing aside Eddie’s arm, she was very short, weighed less than ninety pounds, and was dressed in an old-style black Chinese dress above which her nearly bald head rose with its deep-set eyes, legendary wrinkles and anxious smile. She did not speak to her accumulated family, for she was repeating in her mind many litanies alien to ancient China: “The capital of Alabama is Montgomery; Arizona, Phoenix; Arkansas, Little Rock; California, Sacramento.”

  The cameras were moved into the examination room, and an announcer said in a hushed voice, “We are now going to listen in upon a scene that is taking place daily throughout the United States. A distinguished elderly Chinese woman, Mrs. Kee, after nearly ninety years of life in America, is going to try to pass her examination for citizenship. Mrs. Kee, good luck!”

  At the mention of her name, which in that form she did not recognize, Nyuk Tsin looked at the cameras, but her great-grandson said hurriedly, “Look over here. This is the examiner, Mr. Brimstead,” and the announcer explained who the distinguished visitor from Washington was. The lights were adjusted; Nyuk Tsin began to sweat in nervous apprehension; and Mr. Brimstead, who was proving to be quite a ham on his first appearance before a camera, asked in a sweetly condescending voice, “Now tell us, Mrs. Kee, who was the father of our country?”

  The official interpreter shot the question at the old lady in Hakka, and both Hong Kong and Eddie smiled superiorly, because they knew that Wu Chow’s Auntie knew that one.

  But there was silence. The cameras ground. Mr. Brimstead looked foolish and the Hakka interpreter shrugged his shoulders. “Wu Chow’s Auntie!” Eddie whispered hoarsely. “You know. The father of our country!”

  “Now, no coaching!” Mr. Brimstead rebuked. “This has got to be an honest examination.”

  “I wasn’t coaching,” Eddie pleaded.

  “He didn’t say nothing,” the interpreter said in English.

  “All right!” Mr. Brimstead snapped. “No coaching. Now, Mrs. Kee,” and his voice was all honey again, “who was the father of our country?” Again the interpreter droned in Hakka and again there was silence. In agony Hong Kong stared at his grandmother and opened and shut his fingers by his mouth, signifying, “For God’s sake, say something.”

  But the scene was too vital for old Nyuk Tsin to absorb. All her life she had wanted to belong: first to her brave and gallant father, whose head had perched in the village square; then to her Punti husband, who had scorned her big feet; then to her children, who were afraid of her possible leprosy; then to America, which had repulsed her as it did all Orientals. Now, when all that she hoped for was attainable, she fell mute. She heard no questions, saw no men, felt nothing. But she sensed inwardly that some golden moment, some crystal opportunity that would never come again was slipping by, and she looked up with mute anguish at the people about her.

  She saw kindly Mr. Brimstead, almost wetting his pants in his eagerness for her to say something so that he could appear in the moving pictures. She saw bright young Eddie, who had coached her. She saw resolute Hong Kong, who must be praying for her to save the family reputation. And then over Hong Kong’s shoulder she saw an official government etching of a long-dead hero with a determined chin and a three-cornered hat, and she heard as from a great distance the Hakka interpreter begging for the last time, “Mrs. Kee, tell the man, who was the founder of our country?” And with the floodgates of passion breaking over her, she rose, pointed at the etching of George Washington, and screamed, “That one!”

  Then she started: “The capital of Alabama is Montgomery; Arizona, Phoenix; Arkansas, Little Rock; California, Sacramento …”

  “Tell her that’s enough!” Mr. Brimstead shouted. “I didn’t ask that question yet.”

  “Keep those cameras grinding,” the director shouted.

  “You!” Hong Kong shouted at the interpreter. “Keep interpreting.”

  “The legislative passes the laws,” Nyuk Tsin cried, “and the executive administers them and the judicial judges them against the Constitution.”

  “It’s enough!” Mr. Brimstead shouted. “Tell her it’s all right.”

  “And the Bill of Rights says that there shall be freedom of worship, and freedom of speech,” Nyuk Tsin continued. “And no troops may search my house. And I may not be punished in cruel ways.” She was determined to omit nothing that might swing the decision in her favor. “There are two houses in Congress,” she insisted, “the Senate and the House …”

  When she left the Immigration building, with her citizenship proved and in her hand, the Kees who had been waiting outside cheered, and she passed happily among them, speaking to each and asking, “
What is your name?” and when they told her, she was able to place each one. And as she ticked off her great family she realized for the first time that they were neither Hakka nor Punti, for in Hawaii those old enmities had dissipated and all who had arrived in the Carthaginian had been transmuted into something new. In truth, the Kees were not even Chinese; they were Americans, and now Nyuk Tsin was an American too. Standing by Hong Kong’s car she whispered, “When you are a citizen, the earth feels different.”

  But these fine words did not erase from Hong Kong’s memory the anxiety he had suffered when in the examination room his auntie had sat in stolid silence like a Chinese peasant and now when he looked down at her citizenship paper, his former irritation returned and he protested with some petulance: “Oh, Wu Chow’s Auntie! You didn’t even pick up the right paper.” He took the document from her and showed her where the strange name was written: Char Nyuk Tsin. But when he had read this name aloud to her, she said quietly and yet with great stubbornness, “I told the helpful man, ‘Now that I am an American you must write on this paper my real name.’ ” And she climbed purposefully into the car, a small old woman who had made a great journey.

  That night, terribly tired from the ordeal of citizenship, she lit her oil lamp, undressed, and inspected herself for leprosy. There were no lumps on her arms; her fingers were still good; her face was not deformed; and her legs were clean. Greatly relieved, she put the lamp on the floor so that she could examine her big feet, and in the morning Hong Kong found her there, a frail, naked, old dead body of bones, beside a sputtering lamp.

  AS THOUSANDS of once-proscribed Orientals gained citizenship and the vote, and as labor attained fresh power, haoles gloomily predicted that their day in Hawaii was ended, and no one felt this more strongly than Hoxworth Hale, for he was passing through a period of mist and fog, and his bearings were insecure: he was unable to understand his mercurial daughter or to communicate with his elfin-minded wife, who flitted from one inconsequential subject to the next. He tried diligently to maintain control of both H & H and of Hawaii, but he suspected that each was slipping away from him. Finally, the great pineapple crisis of 1953 struck and it looked as if Hawaii itself were crumbling.

  The disaster first became known when a luna on Kauai inspected one of the far fields and discovered that all the plants which should have been a rich bluish green were now a sickly yellow. He immediately thought: “Some damn fool forgot to spray for nematodes.” But when he consulted the records, he found that the field had been sprayed to control the tiny worms, so one of the pineapple botanists employed by The Fort flew over to inspect the dying plants and said, “This isn’t nematodes. As a matter of fact, I don’t know what it is.”

  In the second week of the blight, the once-sturdy plants fell over on their sides, as if some interior enemy had sapped their vitality, but there were no scars, no boring insects, nothing. The botanist became frightened and phoned Honolulu to discover that plants on scattered fields throughout the islands were beginning to show similar symptoms.

  It would be an understatement to say that panic struck the pineapple industry. A raging fear swept the red fields and echoed in the Fort Street offices. Hoxworth Hale bore the brunt of the anxiety, because H & H had a good deal of its wealth in pineapples, while outfits like Hewlett’s and J & W, who looked to him for leadership, were even more vulnerable. The loss in one year alone threatened to exceed $150,000.000, and still the botanists had no clue as to what was happening to their precious charges.

  The famous Englishman, Schilling, who had licked mealy-bugs and nematodes, was now dead, but research scholars went through his papers to see if he had left any clues as to further apprehensions. But that was only a figure of speech, for the drunken expert had left no orderly papers and no suggestions. He had died one night in a fit of delirium tremens in a poverty ward on the island of Kauai, the nurses not recognizing who he was until after his death. Nevertheless, the botanists repeated all of Schilling’s work on the pineapple and assured themselves that the fault lay not with iron, nor bugs, nor nematodes. They discovered nothing about the current disease except that hundreds of thousands of plants seemed determined to die.

  In desperation, Hoxworth Hale suggested: “We know we’re being attacked either by some invisible virus or by some chemical deficiency. It doesn’t seem to be the former. Therefore, it’s got to be the latter. I am willing to spray-feed every plant in the islands. But what with?”

  A young chemist from Yale suggested: “We know the complete chemical component of the pineapple plant. Let’s mix a spray which contains everything that might possibly be lacking. We’ll shoot blind. At the same time, you fellows compare by analysis a hundred dead plants with a hundred unaffected ones. Maybe you can spot the deficiency.”

  The young man mixed a fantastic brew, a little of everything, and sprayed one of the dying fields. Almost as if by magic the hungry plants absorbed some tiny, unspecified element in the concoction, and within two days were both upright and back to proper color. It was one of the most dramatic recoveries in the history of pineapple culture, and that night for the first time in several months, Hoxworth Hale slept peacefully. In the morning his board asked him, “What was it that saved the crop?”

  “Nobody knows. Now we’re going to find out.”

  He encouraged the scientists, who withheld from the magic brew one component after another, but the fields responded dramatically no matter what was sprayed on them; and then one day zinc was omitted, and that day the plants continued to die.

  “Zinc!” Hale shouted. “Who the hell ever heard of adding zinc to pineapple soils?”

  Nobody had, but over the years the constant leaching of the soil and the introduction of chemical fertilizers had minutely depleted the zinc, whose presence to begin with no one was aware of, and when the critical moment was reached, the zinc-starved plants collapsed. “What other chemicals may be approaching the danger line?” Hale asked.

  “We don’t know,” the scientists replied, but prudence warned him that if zinc had imperceptibly fled from the fields, other trace minerals must be doing so too, and he launched what became perhaps the most sophisticated development in the entire history of agriculture: “We are going to consider our famous red soil of Hawaii as a bank. From it we draw enormous supplies of things like calcium and nitrate and iron, and those are easy to replace. But we also seem to draw constant if minute supplies of things like zinc, and we haven’t been putting them back. Starting today, I want the chemical components of every scrap of material harvested from our pineapple fields analyzed and their total weight calculated. If we take out a ton of nitrate, we’ll put a ton back. And if we withdraw one-millionth of a gram of zinc, we’re going to put the same amount back. This marvelous soil is our bank. Never again will we overdraw our account.”

  It was strange what depletions the scientists found: zinc, titanium, boron, cobalt, and many others. They were present in the soil only in traces, but if one vanished, the pineapple plants perished; and one night when balance had been restored to the vast plantations, and the economy of Hawaii saved, Hoxworth Hale, who had refused to surrender either to nematodes or to the depletion of trace minerals, suddenly had a vision of Hawaii as a great pineapple field: no man could say out of hand what contribution the Filipino or the Korean or the Norwegian had made, but if anyone stole from Hawaii those things which the tiniest component added to the society, perhaps the human pineapples would begin to perish, too. For a long time Hale stood at the edge of his fields, contemplating this new concept, and after that he viewed people like Filipinos and Portuguese in an entirely different light. “What vital thing do they add that keeps our society healthy?” he often wondered.

  When Hong Kong Kee had served on various boards of The Fort for a testing period the unbelievable happened. He was summoned to the chambers of Judge Harper, who had married one of the Hoxworth girls, and was advised by that careful Texan: “Hong Kong, the judges have decided to appoint you one of the trust
ees of the Malama Kanakoa Estate.”

  Hong Kong stepped back as if the good judge had belted him across the face with a raw whip. “You mean that without applying, I’ve been appointed?”

  “Yes. We felt that with Hawaii’s commerce and politics falling more and more into the hands of our Oriental brothers, certain steps ought to be taken to recognize that fact.”

  In spite of his cynical knowledge of how The Fort and its ramifications operated, Hong Kong was visibly moved by the appointment, for he knew that when the evening papers revealed this story the extent of the Hawaii revolution could no longer be ignored. With bright young Japanese politicians taking over the legislature, the only remaining bulwark of the old order was the great trusteeships, and for The Fort voluntarily to relinquish one was an event of magnitude. Hong Kong was therefore inspired to complete frankness, for he wanted to be sure that Judge Harper knew what he was doing.

  “I am deeply touched by this gesture, Judge Harper,” he said with real humility. “I guess you know what it means to be the first Chinese on such a board. You judges are giving me an accolade I’ll never forget. But do you know how I stand on land tenure? Leasehold? Breaking up the big estates that don’t use their land creatively? You understand all those things, Judge?”

  Big Judge Harper laughed and pointed to a paper on his desk. “Hong Kong, you apparently forget who your brother trustees will be. Hewlett Janders and John Whipple Hoxworth. You think they’re going to let you run wild with any crazy idea?”

  “But even with such men, Judge, ideas repeated often enough sometimes catch on … where you least expect them.”

  “We judges think you’re the kind of man who will bring good new ideas, but we certainly aren’t going to back you against your two fellow trustees.”

  “I’m not looking for a fight, Judge.”

  “We know. That’s why we’ve appointed you. But before you take the job, Hong Kong—and I appreciate even better than you how signal an honor this is, because we have been petitioned for years to appoint some Oriental—I want you to understand with crystal clarity the nature of the task you’re undertaking.” The big man adjusted his considerable bulk in his judge’s chair and told his secretary he didn’t want to be interrupted.