On the Makaloa Mat and Island Tales

by On The Makaloa Mat

  On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales

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  82

  "She is an impudent-faced and evil-mannered hussy," Mrs. Tai Fu

  accented.

  "Mrs. Chang Lucy was ever that," Ah Kim murmured like the dutiful

  son he was.

  "I speak of Li Faa," his mother corrected with stick emphasis.

  "She is only half Chinese, as you know. Her mother was a shameless

  kanaka. She wears skirts like the degraded haole women--also

  corsets, as I have seen for myself. Where are her children? Yet

  has she buried two husbands."

  "The one was drowned, the other kicked by a horse," Ah Kim

  qualified.

  "A year of her, unworthy son of a noble father, and you would

  gladly be going out to get drowned or be kicked by a horse."

  Subdued chucklings and laughter from the window audience applauded

  her point.

  "You buried two husbands yourself, revered mother," Ah Kim was

  stung to retort.

  "I had the good taste not to marry a third. Besides, my two

  husbands died honourably in their beds. They were not kicked by

  horses nor drowned at sea. What business is it of our neighbours

  that you should inform them I have had two husbands, or ten, or

  none? You have made a scandal of me, before all our neighbours,

  and for that I shall now give you a real beating."

  Ah Kim endured the staccato rain of blows, and said when his mother

  paused, breathless and weary:

  "Always have I insisted and pleaded, honourable mother, that you

  beat me in the house, with the windows and doors closed tight, and

  not in the open street or the garden open behind the house.

  "You have called this unthinkable Li Faa the Silvery Moon Blossom,"

  Mrs. Tai Fu rejoined, quite illogically and femininely, but with

  utmost success in so far as she deflected her son from continuance

  of the thrust he had so swiftly driven home.

  "Mrs. Chang Lucy told you," he charged.

  "I was told over the telephone," his mother evaded. "I do not know

  all voices that speak to me over that contrivance of all the

  devils."

  Strangely, Ah Kim made no effort to run away from his mother, which

  he could easily have done. She, on the other hand, found fresh

  cause for more stick blows.

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  "Ah! Stubborn one! Why do you not cry? Mule that shameth its

  ancestors! Never have I made you cry. From the time you were a

  little boy I have never made you cry. Answer me! Why do you not

  cry?"

  Weak and breathless from her exertions, she dropped the stick and

  panted and shook as if with a nervous palsy.

  "I do not know, except that it is my way," Ah Kim replied, gazing

  solicitously at his mother. "I shall bring you a chair now, and

  you will sit down and rest and feel better."

  But she flung away from him with a snort and tottered agedly across

  the garden into the house. Meanwhile recovering his skull-cap and

  smoothing his disordered attire, Ah Kim rubbed his hurts and gazed

  after her with eyes of devotion. He even smiled, and almost might

  it appear that he had enjoyed the beating.

  Ah Kim had been so beaten ever since he was a boy, when he lived on

  the high banks of the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse river. Here

  his father had been born and toiled all his days from young manhood

  as a towing coolie. When he died, Ah Kim, in his own young

  manhood, took up the same honourable profession. Farther back than

  all remembered annals of the family, had the males of it been

  towing coolies. At the time of Christ his direct ancestors had

  been doing the same thing, meeting the precisely similarly modelled

  junks below the white water at the foot of the canyon, bending the

  half-mile of rope to each junk, and, according to size, tailing on

  from a hundred to two hundred coolies of them and by sheer, two-

  legged man-power, bowed forward and down till their hands touched

  the ground and their faces were sometimes within a foot of it,

  dragging the junk up through the white water to the head of the

  canyon.

  Apparently, down all the intervening centuries, the payment of the

  trade had not picked up. His father, his father's father, and

  himself, Ah Kim, had received the same invariable remuneration--per

  junk one-fourteenth of a cent, at the rate he had since learned

  money was valued in Hawaii. On long lucky summer days when the

  waters were easy, the junks many, the hours of daylight sixteen,

  sixteen hours of such heroic toil would earn over a cent. But in a

  whole year a towing coolie did not earn more than a dollar and a

  half. People could and did live on such an income. There were

  women servants who received a yearly wage of a dollar. The net-

  makers of Ti Wi earned between a dollar and two dollars a year.

  They lived on such wages, or, at least, they did not die on them.

  But for the towing coolies there were pickings, which were what

  made the profession honourable and the guild a close and hereditary

  corporation or labour union. One junk in five that was dragged up

  through the rapids or lowered down was wrecked. One junk in every

  ten was a total loss. The coolies of the towing guild knew the

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  84

  freaks and whims of the currents, and grappled, and raked, and

  netted a wet harvest from the river. They of the guild were looked

  up to by lesser coolies, for they could afford to drink brick tea

  and eat number four rice every day.

  And Ah Kim had been contented and proud, until, one bitter spring

  day of driving sleet and hail, he dragged ashore a drowning

  Cantonese sailor. It was this wanderer, thawing out by his fire,

  who first named the magic name Hawaii to him. He had himself never

  been to that labourer's paradise, said the sailor; but many Chinese

  had gone there from Canton, and he had heard the talk of their

  letters written back. In Hawaii was never frost nor famine. The

  very pigs, never fed, were ever fat of the generous offal disdained

  by man. A Cantonese or Yangtse family could live on the waste of

  an Hawaii coolie. And wages! In gold dollars, ten a month, or, in

  trade dollars, two a month, was what the contract Chinese coolie

  received from the white-devil sugar kings. In a year the coolie

  received the prodigious sum of two hundred and forty trade dollars-

  -more than a hundred times what a coolie, toiling ten times as

  hard, received on the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse. In short,

  all things considered, an Hawaii coolie was one hundred times

  better off, and, when the amount of labour was estimated, a

  thousand times better off. In addition was the wonderful climate.

  When Ah Kim was twenty-four, despite his mother's pleadings and

  beatings, he resigned from the ancient and honourable guild of the

  eleventh cataract towing coolies, left his mother to go into a boss

  coolie's household as a servant for a dollar a year, a
nd an annual

  dress to cost not less than thirty cents, and himself departed down

  the Yangtse to the great sea. Many were his adventures and severe

  his toils and hardships ere, as a salt-sea junk-sailor, he won to

  Canton. When he was twenty-six he signed five years of his life

  and labour away to the Hawaii sugar kings and departed, one of

  eight hundred contract coolies, for that far island land, on a

  festering steamer run by a crazy captain and drunken officers and

  rejected of Lloyds.

  Honourable, among labourers, had Ah Kim's rating been as a towing

  coolie. In Hawaii, receiving a hundred times more pay, he found

  himself looked down upon as the lowest of the low--a plantation

  coolie, than which could be nothing lower. But a coolie whose

  ancestors had towed junks up the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse

  since before the birth of Christ inevitably inherits one character

  in large degree, namely, the character of patience. This patience

  was Ah Kim's. At the end of five years, his compulsory servitude

  over, thin as ever in body, in bank account he lacked just ten

  trade dollars of possessing a thousand trade dollars.

  On this sum he could have gone back to the Yangtse and retired for

  life a really wealthy man. He would have possessed a larger sum,

  had he not, on occasion, conservatively played che fa and fan tan,

  and had he not, for a twelve-month, toiled among the centipedes and

  scorpions of the stifling cane-fields in the semi-dream of a

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  continuous opium debauch. Why he had not toiled the whole five

  years under the spell of opium was the expensiveness of the habit.

  He had had no moral scruples. The drug had cost too much.

  But Ah Kim did not return to China. He had observed the business

  life of Hawaii and developed a vaulting ambition. For six months,

  in order to learn business and English at the bottom, he clerked in

  the plantation store. At the end of this time he knew more about

  that particular store than did ever plantation manager know about

  any plantation store. When he resigned his position he was

  receiving forty gold a month, or eighty trade, and he was beginning

  to put on flesh. Also, his attitude toward mere contract coolies

  had become distinctively aristocratic. The manager offered to

  raise him to sixty fold, which, by the year, would constitute a

  fabulous fourteen hundred and forty trade, or seven hundred times

  his annual earning on the Yangtse as a two-legged horse at one-

  fourteenth of a gold cent per junk.

  Instead of accepting, Ah Kim departed to Honolulu, and in the big

  general merchandise store of Fong & Chow Fong began at the bottom

  for fifteen gold per month. He worked a year and a half, and

  resigned when he was thirty-three, despite the seventy-five gold

  per month his Chinese employers were paying him. Then it was that

  he put up his own sign: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE.

  Also, better fed, there was about his less meagre figure a

  foreshadowing of the melon-seed rotundity that was to attach to him

  in future years.

  With the years he prospered increasingly, so that, when he was

  thirty-six, the promise of his figure was fulfilling rapidly, and,

  himself a member of the exclusive and powerful Hai Gum Tong, and of

  the Chinese Merchants' Association, he was accustomed to sitting as

  host at dinners that cost him as much as thirty years of towing on

  the eleventh cataract would have earned him. Two things he missed:

  a wife, and his mother to lay the stick on him as of yore.

  When he was thirty-seven he consulted his bank balance. It stood

  him three thousand gold. For twenty-five hundred down and an easy

  mortgage he could buy the three-story shack-building, and the

  ground in fee simple on which it stood. But to do this, left only

  five hundred for a wife. Fu Yee Po had a marriageable, properly

  small-footed daughter whom he was willing to import from China, and

  sell to him for eight hundred gold, plus the costs of importation.

  Further, Fu Yee Po was even willing to take five hundred down and

  the remainder on note at 6 per cent.

  Ah Kim, thirty-seven years of age, fat and a bachelor, really did

  want a wife, especially a small-footed wife; for, China born and

  reared, the immemorial small-footed female had been deeply

  impressed into his fantasy of woman. But more, even more and far

  more than a small-footed wife, did he want his mother and his

  mother's delectable beatings. So he declined Fu Yee Po's easy

  terms, and at much less cost imported his own mother from servant

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  86

  in a boss coolie's house at a yearly wage of a dollar and a thirty-

  cent dress to be mistress of his Honolulu three-story shack

  building with two household servants, three clerks, and a porter of

  all work under her, to say nothing of ten thousand dollars' worth

  of dress goods on the shelves that ranged from the cheapest cotton

  crepes to the most expensive hand-embroidered silks. For be it

  known that even in that early day Ah Kim's emporium was beginning

  to cater to the tourist trade from the States.

  For thirteen years Ah Kim had lived tolerably happily with his

  mother, and by her been methodically beaten for causes just or

  unjust, real or fancied; and at the end of it all he knew as

  strongly as ever the ache of his heart and head for a wife, and of

  his loins for sons to live after him, and carry on the dynasty of

  Ah Kim Company. Such the dream that has ever vexed men, from those

  early ones who first usurped a hunting right, monopolized a sandbar

  for a fish-trap, or stormed a village and put the males thereof to

  the sword. Kings, millionaires, and Chinese merchants of Honolulu

  have this in common, despite that they may praise God for having

  made them differently and in self-likable images.

  And the ideal of woman that Ah Kim at fifty ached for had changed

  from his ideal at thirty-seven. No small-footed wife did he want

  now, but a free, natural, out-stepping normal-footed woman that,

  somehow, appeared to him in his day dreams and haunted his night

  visions in the form of Li Faa, the Silvery Moon Blossom. What if

  she were twice widowed, the daughter of a kanaka mother, the wearer

  of white-devil skirts and corsets and high-heeled slippers! He

  wanted her. It seemed it was written that she should be joint

  ancestor with him of the line that would continue the ownership and

  management through the generations, of Ah Kim Company, General

  Merchandise.

  "I will have no half-pake daughter-in-law," his mother often

  reiterated to Ah Kim, pake being the Hawaiian word for Chinese.

  "All pake must my daughter-in-law be, even as you, my son, and as

  I, your mother. And she must wear trousers, my son, as all the

  women of our family before her. No woman, in she-devil skirts and

  corsets, can pay due reverence to our ancestors. Corsets andr />
  reverence do not go together. Such a one is this shameless Li Faa.

  She is impudent and independent, and will be neither obedient to

  her husband nor her husband's mother. This brazen-faced Li Faa

  would believe herself the source of life and the first ancestor,

  recognizing no ancestors before her. She laughs at our joss-

  sticks, and paper prayers, and family gods, as I have been well

  told--"

  "Mrs. Chang Lucy," Ah Kim groaned.

  "Not alone Mrs. Chang Lucy, O son. I have inquired. At least a

  dozen have heard her say of our joss house that it is all monkey

  foolishness. The words are hers--she, who eats raw fish, raw

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  87

  squid, and baked dog. Ours is the foolishness of monkeys. Yet

  would she marry you, a monkey, because of your store that is a

  palace and of the wealth that makes you a great man. And she would

  put shame on me, and on your father before you long honourably

  dead."

  And there was no discussing the matter. As things were, Ah Kim

  knew his mother was right. Not for nothing had Li Faa been born

  forty years before of a Chinese father, renegade to all tradition,

  and of a kanaka mother whose immediate forebears had broken the

  taboos, cast down their own Polynesian gods, and weak-heartedly

  listened to the preaching about the remote and unimageable god of

  the Christian missionaries. Li Faa, educated, who could read and

  write English and Hawaiian and a fair measure of Chinese, claimed

  to believe in nothing, although in her secret heart she feared the

  kahunas (Hawaiian witch-doctors), who she was certain could charm

  away ill luck or pray one to death. Li Faa would never come into

  Ah Kim's house, as he thoroughly knew, and kow-tow to his mother

  and be slave to her in the immemorial Chinese way. Li Faa, from

  the Chinese angle, was a new woman, a feminist, who rode horseback

  astride, disported immodestly garbed at Waikiki on the surf-boards,

  and at more than one luau (feast) had been known to dance the hula

  with the worst and in excess of the worst, to the scandalous

  delight of all.

  Ah Kim himself, a generation younger than his mother, had been

  bitten by the acid of modernity. The old order held, in so far as

  he still felt in his subtlest crypts of being the dusty hand of the

  past resting on him, residing in him; yet he subscribed to heavy