For the incarcerated Chinese, the New Year that began January 29 was especially depressing. Gu was unsuccessful in attempts to have earlier refugees released, since they had now been reexposed to the victims of the great fire. In terms that echoed the tone of white comments a month before, when Christmas brought not joy but the return of bubonic plague, a Chinese internee commented to a reporter that the great fire might prove to have been good for everyone in the long run if it ended the plague, but it was "awfully sad" in the short run. "And none of you can understand our feeling on this our great holiday." Ironically, the holiday began the Year of the Rat.'"
In addition to the lingering enmity they felt toward Honolulu's rulers, the Chinese refugees inside the camps remained deeply riven among themselves. Low-ranking laborers blamed their plight upon the wealthy Chinese merchants for whom they worked, believing that the latter should have been looking out for them rather than their businesses over the previous several months. Even before the great fire, they pointed out, wealthy Chinese families had persuaded the Board to let them foot the bill for special quarantine camps of their own, where they paid out of pocket for special services and accommodations that the Board was not providing in the ordinary camps. Poor Chinese women resented their more affluent counterparts whose bound feet made them "perfect nuisances" in the eyes of those who had to care for them under camp conditions.'"
Preexisting political animosities also worsened in the camps. Qing dynasty loyalists and overseas reformers blamed each other for putting Honolulu's Chinese in such a vulnerable position in the first place, politically riven with no powerful government back home to defend their rights. Detainees established rival political societies inside the camps. Fights broke out among them over jurisdictions within the camps, and those Chinese opposed to the emperor back home had their allies outside the camps send separate delegations to the Hawaiian Foreign Office to apologize for the actions of Consul Yang and to protest the fact that they had to be represented by him. This further strained the already uneasy relationship between Yang, who had been sent from Beijing, and Gu, the moderate Honolulu-based vice-consul. The Board's camp committees eventually divided the Chinese refugees formally into separate blocs to help maintain order."'
Li Khai Fai and Kong Tai Heong, the husband-and-wife physicians who had worked with Emerson, Day, and Wood from the outset of the plague crisis, experienced the intense hatreds inside the camps in very personal ways. From the time they helped report the first cases of plague in Chinatown, Li and Kong realized that many of their countrymen would criticize them and the other Chinese doctors who sided with them, like Tong San Kai, the director of the Wai Wah Yee Yuen hospital. But Li, Kong, and Tong continued to regard the attitudes of their traditional colleagues as backward, superstitious, and ultimately dangerous to their own patients, so they had pushed self-consciously ahead with their pro-Western activities, Li quite aggressively.
Now inside the Kalihi detention camp, where he and his family had been swept up with thousands of other Chinatown residents on the day of the great fire, Li became both a convenient human lightning rod for the frustration of his traditional rivals and a traitor in the eyes of many of the Chinese who had lost everything in the fire. "Curse him, that bastard of the white devils!" they shouted as they passed his barracks in the detention camp. "Let us never forget this zoth day of January, let us never forget that this man of our own race was the one who brought disgrace upon us!" They felt they had been ruined "because of that devil Dr. U.""
For Li, Kong, and their two small children, life at Kalihi was thus doubly miserable. Like all of the others, they were trying to make do with almost nothing in a temporary camp under armed guard; but they were also singled out as the agents of everybody else's misfortune. As Kong later remembered in poignantly poetic language:
The days in camp crawled slowly, as though the centuries had come to live with us. And even though our friends were constant and our spirits strong, still the hours of our existence seemed heavy, as though hung with the leaden weights of time, motionless as the waters of a lotus pond gone stagnant with the scum of rotting life. But the sun was bright in its sky each day, and the hours of the night were quiet with the utter exhaustion of the spirit grown limp and almost lifeless with the nothingness of nothing. Every day, I kept washing and washing everything which I could find that needed washing, even though I was allotted only one bucket of water a day.... Every day, after the day's work of uncertain living slid into the night's endurance of fitful dreaming, [we] tried to take care of the sick ones in the camp, in spite of the jeers of [a rival] and his friends, in spite of the melancholy of their voices counting and recounting over and over again their misfortunes, disagreements and dislikes.22
Though Li Khai Fai and Kong Tai Heong continued to live in Honolulu for more than fifty years after the great fire, many of their old opponents and professional rivals never forgave them for their actions during the plague crisis. Despite their large multiracial medical practices and their well-earned reputations as prominent civic reformers, Li and Kong continued to endure accusations that their betrayal of ethnic solidarity had led directly to the disaster of the great fire being visited upon their countrymen. After Li's death in 1954, gothic legends arose about his personally having thrown sick countrymen alive into fires ordered by the Dole administration for the purpose of eliminating Asians. Even today, oral traditions among some Honolulu Chinese still refer to Li as "Doctor Death."23
Less overt dissension appeared among the Japanese and Hawaiian refugees, most of whom apparently decided to make the best of the situation. Japanese consul Saito remained a steady and calming influence, both among the Japanese refugees and in the eyes of the Board of Health. Some tension arose over health care, and at least one of the Board's physicians was assaulted by a Japanese man who resented the physician's attempt to examine a sickJapanese woman. Camp managers also had trouble with criminal gangs among the Japanese refugees, some of whom had been running gambling and prostitution rings in the Chinatown district before they too had been swept up with the rest of the population on the day of the great fire. When the gangs started fighting among themselves and preying on fellow Japanese detainees, national guardsmen were called in to arrest them. Ordinary Japanese helped the Board's camp managers construct a jail on the Kalihi grounds to confine the worst of the criminals.24
Japanese wrestling match inside a detention camp. Hawaii State Archives
For the most part, however, the Japanese camps ran smoothly. Refugees later recalled that clothing, blankets, and even mosquito netting were supplied by the authorities, and mostJapanese considered the camps "fundamentally civil" under the circumstances. Food supplies in the Japanese sectors, which were supplemented by the Japanese Aid Society, proved more than ample. Once men and women were separated, the Japanese actively welcomed the "anti-septic" baths and "scrubbed one another in great glee; ... as they realized it was for their own benefit." Consul Saito offered prizes for wrestling contests, and children received impromptu schooling with the help of donated educational supplies.25
These strategies largely worked, especially at the Drill Shed camp. The English-language press generally portrayed Japanese internees as models of admirable behavior and lauded their industriousness, cleanliness, high morale, and cheerful order. Emerson, Day, and Wood granted "a Committee of Ladies" in Honolulu official permission "to establish a home for fallen women who wish to lead better lives" at the Kalihi camp, in order to help provide for Japanese prostitutes. Life in the camps remained exceedingly tedious, of course, and at least one young Japanese man-alone, sick, and depressed-hanged himself. At the time of his suicide, he was under surveillance as a potential plague case, though an autopsy revealed that he did not have the disease. Still, when Emerson, Day, and Wood granted special permission for a prominent white business manager to spend a night at the Drill Shed camp to see for himself just how well or how poorly his seventyfive Asian employees were being treated there, the business man
ager found conditions surprisingly comfortable. "The Board of Health and the men working for them certainly deserve the greatest credit," the visitor believed, for what they were able to provide under the circumstances."
Like most of the other Japanese from Chinatown, Soga Yasutaro, assistant editor of the Hawaii Shimpo, also ended up in the Kalihi camp. There he roomed with his senior editor and the senior editor's wife, and together they all made do "in what seemed like a hut with a thousand other people." Bored, restless, and no doubt uneasy with the awkward housing arrangement, Soga slipped through the police lines one night, jumped the quarantine barrier, and headed for the home of friends elsewhere in the city. He eventually hid out "in the dirty, little upstairs room in Ishimura's Cook School on Kukui Street," along with the printing equipment his white friend had helped him salvage on the day of the fire. In less than a week, by acting as if he had never been in quarantine in the first place, he was able to resume his activities in support of Honolulu's Japanese leaders. He played a major role in organizing the Provisional Japanese Council to address the needs of the hundreds of homeless Japanese still inside the camps.21
Affairs seem to have run most smoothly among Hawaiian refugees, who were fewer in number than the Chinese or Japanese. From the beginning of the fire policy, most displaced Hawaiians had been quarantined in separate camp facilities, many of which were specially constructed on sites owned by various members of Hawaii's deposed royal family, and the hundreds of Hawaiians driven from Chinatown by the great fire joined those already interned in those separate camps. Partly owing to their favorable living conditions, refugees in the Hawaiian detention camps were generally well fed and seem to have maintained good morale. The Hawaiian Aid Society raised large amounts of money on their behalf. Hawaiians who corresponded directly with the Board of Health about various problems were answered promptly in their own language."
Hawaiians certainly did voice their disgust with what had happened and with the hardships visited upon them by the government. In particular they grieved the great loss-actual and symbolic-of their Kaumakapili Church, and they placed the blame for its destruction squarely upon "the ineptness of the Board of Health." They also grieved the loss of so many other landmarks of "Old Honolulu," and they protested the treatment of Hawaiians who had lived in the Chinatown area for generations. Only the "cruel and merciless" would allow dignified elderly women, who had lost all of their family mementos, to be "herded up like horses and mules and coralled." But even the most inveterate antigovernment editors ultimately accepted the medical rationale that lay behind the tragic incident. KeAloha Aina urged Honolulu's Hawaiians to remain calm, keep the peace, and go after individual wrongdoers-like guards who committed robbery-rather than attempt to revolt.29
One of the most difficult problems the three physicians faced in the weeks after the fire was the tension that resulted from having to house large numbers of various racial and cultural groups together in the same detention camps. Japanese refugees did not want to be intermingled with Chinese refugees, whom they regarded as backward and dirty. The Chinese, who were already subdivided among themselves along political and social lines, felt the same way regarding the Japanese. Hawaiians from the outset had sent "committees to meet with the Board of Health and the government to ask them to separate all Hawaiians ... so that they are not mixed together with the Chinese and Japanese." George Boardman's EuroHawaiian ancestry had provoked a flap on the eve of the great fire over where and with which groups he should be held.30
Emerson, Day, and Wood had attempted to minimize racial and cultural tensions during the first three weeks of the fire policy by maintaining de facto segregation among the quarantine camps; to the extent possible, they unofficially put Chinese in one camp, Japanese in another, and Hawaiians in their own. As a practical matter, that also facilitated the job of the relief societies, who continued their practice of targeting their own. Only the white aid societies, which seemed especially solicitous of Hawaiian refugees, and the government itself, under the direction of the Board of Health, had been dispensing goods and services across racial and cultural lines. Emerson, Day, and Wood had sometimes also allowed individuals who were willing to pay for special services, including several whites and a few wealthy Chinese, to be quarantined separately in hotels commandeered for that purpose, rather than in the public camps. But the great fire forced the Board physicians to place people wherever space was available."
At the Drill Shed camp, where approximately twelve hundred Japanese and Chinese refugees were situated, the Board received demands from the refugees themselves that the two groups be segregated. As a solution, the Board acquiesced in the construction of a high fence through the middle of the site. After that, the Drill Shed camp calmed considerably. Following separation, two of the Chinese residents in that camp wrote public letters assuring others in Honolulu that "all the Chinese [here] are very satisfied" and thanking the authorities-albeit somewhat sarcasticallyfor the "great kindness" of employing the Japanese to clean the camp every day while providing adequately for the Chinese. Visitors reported that the Kerosene Warehouse detention camp, which covered about four acres, resembled "a little cosmopolitan city." Since "segregation by nationalities has been the rule, ... a tour of the place reminds one very much of a trip among the villages of different nationalities at the World's Fair." But this was a fair that no one had wanted to attend.32
s the state of emergency continued during the weeks following the Chinatown fire and the constant problems of maintaining the quarantine camps began to mount, the medical triumvirate encountered distrust and uneasiness throughout Honolulu. Several whites started a rumor that dead bodies had been clandestinely spirited out of the Queen Hotel, where a number of whites in quarantine were living under guard. The three physicians issued formal public rebuttals and strong denials, but the stories kept resurfacing in letters to the press. In private session, Emerson, Day, and Wood seriously considered filing lawsuits against the individuals who were accusing them of perpetrating a cover-up.'
The physicians' relations with recalcitrant whites declined further when they learned from informers in executive session that some white women who lived next to each other in a well-to-do neighborhood had been conspiring to ignore the emergency regulations regarding rats. The women had been secretly burning dead and dying rats instead of reporting their presence to the Citizens' Sanitary Commission or the Board of Health and surrendering the carcasses for bacteriological examination. The women did not want to risk the possibility that their homes might be condemned as possible plague sites. When Ng Gee, a Chinese servant who worked for one of them, died of plague, Emerson, Day, and Wood promptly invoked his death as a reason to burn the women's houses. The women and their families were sent to quarantine camps.'
Accusations of fiscal irregularity and outright fraud on the part of some Citizens' Sanitary Commission agents peppered both the daily newspapers and the three physicians' daily meetings. Questions were raised about items allegedly being charged at public expense by sanitary agents in the fieldincluding whiskey, cigars, and clothing-and about unequal rates of compensation for the small army of sanitary inspectors who continued to make their twice-daily rounds throughout the city. Even the most supportive businessmen in the city began to wonder aloud about the continued wisdom of spending vast sums of public money on nothing more than the say-so of three doctors, who lacked business acumen and faced no system of checks and balances. White opponents of the Dole administration pictured Hawaii on the brink of fiscal disaster as a consequence of the medical triumvirate's power to draw unlimited funds from the republic's treasury.`
More ominous still were rumors of petty blackmail, protection rackets, and shakedown schemes. Since nearly three-quarters of Honolulu's Asian residents had lived outside Chinatown all along, and more than half the Asian businesses in Honolulu were also located outside the quarantined zone, the lives and property of most of the city's Asians had not been directly affected by the great fire.
Life for them continued more or less as usual, and the restrictions on them were not theoretically different from the continued restrictions on everyone else in Honolulu, including whites. Yet with Chinatown gone and plague cases continuing to break out around the city, Asians elsewhere in Honolulu grew understandably fearful of becoming targets themselves. A few Citizens' Sanitary Commission inspectors, or people posing as sanitary inspectors, took advantage of those fears by demanding gifts in exchange for omitting their businesses from the list of possible plague sites. One of these shakedown cases reached the front pages of the daily papers, where it touched off a round of mutual recrimination and interracial accusations. Since the Citizens' Sanitary Commission appointed exclusively male agents, rancor persisted as well over the propriety of their intimate personal inspections of women.4
Enduring divisions within the white medical establishment also hindered the ongoing campaign against plague. Although "the great doctors' meeting" three weeks earlier had produced a superficial impression of unity, serious philosophical disagreements persisted beneath the surface. On one side were those physicians who accepted both bacteriology and the Board's policy of selective burning. Those physicians typically volunteered to per form medical services under the Board's direction, often at considerable risk to themselves and with no compensation. On the other side were the physicians who continued to be skeptical of both bacteriology and the Board's approach to fighting plague. Many of the latter had absented themselves from "the great doctors' meeting," and even those who attended had shown themselves more interested in eliminating conditions they considered likely to enable disease than in trying to kill specific microbes, whose practical relevance they doubted.
Plague and Fire Page 19
