Hawaii (101 page)

"I am going to get my son," Nyuk Tsin said stubbornly.

"Pake!" Apikela warned. "He is no longer your son."

Nyuk Tsin spoke unwisely: "Are the other four boys no longer my sons, either?"

Softly Apikela replied, "No, Pake, they are not yours alone. They are now my sons too." She did not have the words to explain that in the Hawaiian system the filial-parent relationship was completely fluid, and son-ship derived not from blood lines but from love. No child was ever left abandoned, and some of the most touching narratives of Hawaiian history stemmed from the love of some peasant woman who heard the cries of an unwanted girl baby whom the alii

had left beside the sea to perish, and the peasant woman had rescued the child and had raised it as her own until war came, or some other great event, and then the child was revealed in full beauty. It had happened again and again. Apikela was unable to explain all these things to her Pake friend, but she did add this: "In all the Hawaiian families you see, there will always be one child that was found somewhere. A friend gave the child to the family, and that was that."

Stubbornly Nyuk Tsin repeated her question: "Then my boys are not my sons?"

"Not yours alone," huge Apikek repeated. The little Chinese woman, steeled in the Hakka tradition of family, stared at her big Hawaiian friend, reared in the softer tradition of love, and each woman typified the wisdom of her race, and neither would surrender, but as always, it was the copious Hawaiian who made the overture of peace: "Surely, Pake, with four boys we have enough for two mothers." And the big woman was so persuasive that even though Nyuk Tsin despised the concept being offered, and saw in it an explanation of why the Hawaiians were dying out and the Chinese were thriving, she could not ignore the testimony of love that she saw in the happy faces of her sons. Even if they did have to live suspended between Hawaiian love and Chinese duty, they were thriving; so at last Nyuk Tsin allowed herself to be drawn into Apikela's great arms and cherished, as if she were a daughter and not an equal. Then the big woman said, "Now that our tempers are at peace, let us go see the governor's wife."

Sedately, she and Kimo and the Pake walked down Nuuanu to Beretania and then out toward Diamond Head, and when they got to the governor's big house, Apikela said softly, "I will speak," and as if she were an ambassador from the court of the Nuuanu taro patch to the high court of Beretania Street, she explained to the governor's wife: "The Pake thinks your seventh child is hers."

"Probably is," Governor Kelolo's wife agreed easily. "I think my husband found him on a boat."

"The Pake would like to take the boy home with her," Apikela said softly.

The governor's wife looked down at her hands and began to cry. Finally she said gently, "We think of the boy as our own."

"See!" Apikela said, and she withdrew from the interview, for there was obviously nothing more to say.

But Nyuk Tsin was just beginning. "I appreciate what you did for the boy. He looks very clean and intelligent. But he is my son, and I would like to . . ."

"He is very happy here," the governor's wife explained.

"He is my son," Nyuk Tsin struggled. She felt as if she were engulfed in a mass of cloud or formless foam. She could push it back, but always it returned to smother her. The three big Hawaiians were falling upon her, strangling her with love.

Again the governor's wife was speaking: "But we think of him as our son, too."

FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE 507

"If I went to court, what would the judge say?" Nyuk Tsin threatened.

Now both the governor's wife and Apikela began to weep, and the former said, "There is no need to involve the judges. Apikela said that you had your four sons with you. Why not leave the fifth boy with us? We love him very much."

"He is my son," Nyuk Tsin stubbornly argued, but the phrase really had little meaning to the three Hawaiians. Obviously, the attractive boy was a son in many more ways than this thin Chinese woman could understand.

At this point the governor himself entered, a tall, handsome man in his late forties. He was generous in his attitude toward everyone and listened patiently, first to Apikela, then to his wife, and finally to Nyuk Tsin. When he spoke he said, "Then you are the Pake Kokua?"

"Yes," Nyuk Tsin replied.

"Every Hawaiian owes a debt to you, Kokua." He formally extended his hand. Then he remembered: "It was about eight years ago. I was at the docks on some kind of business. I wasn't governor then, had just come over from Maui. And this ship came in with a sailor who had a screaming baby, and he said, 'What shall I do with it?' And I said, Teed it.' And he said, T got no tits.' So I took the boy and brought him home." He paused significantly, then added, "And we made him one of our sons."

"Now I want him," Nyuk Tsin said forcefully.

"And it would seem to me," the governor said, ignoring her, "that it might be a very good thing if this Chinese boy continued to grow up in this house, among the Hawaiians. We two races need to understand each other better." Then he stopped and said bluntly, "I love the boy as my own son. I don't think I could let him go."

"The judge will give him to me," Nyuk Tsin said coldly.

Tears came into the big man's eyes and he asked, "Have you no other children of your own?"

"I have four," Nyuk Tsin replied.

"Then leave the boy with us. Please don't speak of judges."

The governor's wife brought in tea, and Nyuk Tsin was invited to sit in the best brocaded chair, and Kimo asked if they happened to have any poi. The meeting lasted for four patient hours, and the little Chinese woman was positively beat down by love. When her son was summoned she saw that he was big and bright and strong. He was not told that the strange Chinese woman in the smock and trousers was his mother, for he called the governor's wife that, and after he was dismissed, many proposals were made, and Nyuk Tsin consented to this: her fifth son would continue to live with the governor, but he must be told who his real mother was . . . And here Nyuk Tsin began to get mixed up, because she also insisted that the boy be given the Chinese name Oh Chow, the Continent of Australia, and that twice each year he accompany his brothers to the Punti store when the money was sent to his real mother in China.

"His real mother?" the governor asked.

"Yes," Nyuk Tsin explained. "His real mother is in China. I am merely his auntie."

"I thought you gave birth to the boy in Kalawao," the governor

checked.

"I did," Nyuk Tsin assured him. "But his mother is in China."

The governor listened patiently and asked, "Could you please explain this again?" and as Nyuk Tsin repeated the curious rigmarole he realized that he was comprehending very little of it.

So Nyuk Tsin took Australia to the Punti store, where his name was duly forwarded to the ancestral hall in the Low Village, while he continued to be known in Hawaii as Keoki Kanakoa, the son of the last governor of Honolulu. He met his brothers, Asia, Europe, Africa and America, and then returned to the big rambling house. He called Nyuk Tsin, whose name he never knew, Auntie, and he vaguely understood that in China he had a real mother, to whom it was his duty to send money twice a year.

There was one other thing that Nyuk Tsin insisted upon. Four acres of Governor Kanakoa's choicest upland in Manoa Valley, then a wet, forested wilderness, were officially deeded over to the boy Australia Kee, otherwise known as Keoki Kanakoa, and after these were cleared, Nyuk Tsin grew pineapples on them. She was now thirty-two years old, and except for a really gaunt thinness and a lack of hair she was what one might call an attractive woman; but even though there was an appalling lack of women for Chinese men� 246 women; 22,000 men�none of the latter ever considered Nyuk Tsin as a wife. She had proved herself to be a husband-killer and she was probably also a leper.

So she lived spiritually apart from her sons and her community. Each night after the others were in bed, she stripped herself naked and with a small lamp inspected each area of her body, and when she had finally cleared even her big feet of suspicion she sighed and said to herself, "Still no leprosy." And if she avoided this, nothing else mattered.

WHEN WHIPPLE HOXWORTH RETURNED to Hawaii in 1877 he had brought with him only a hundred pineapple plants and a bag of miscellaneous seeds to show for his seven years abroad, but he had already become the man who was destined to rebuild the structure of the islands. He was tall, wiry-thin, quick both in muscle and wit and unusually well trained in the use of his fists. He had the insolent assurance of his paternal grandfather, Captain Rafer Hoxworth, plus the distinguished bearing that had characterized his maternal grandfather, Dr. John Whipple. He also exhibited certain other behavior patterns of those two men.

Like Captain Rafer, young Whip had an insatiable desire for women, and following quickly upon the Chinese girl who had taught him lessons at the age of thirteen, he had enjoyed the wild com—

FROM THE STARVING VILLAGE 509

panionship of strange women in most of the world's major ports. His entire earnings for seven years had been spent freely on these women, and he regretted not a penny of his loss, for he had made an essential discovery: he had it within his power to make women happy. Sometimes at a formal party, when as a budding second mate he was invited to a home of distinction in Perth or Colombo or Bangkok, he would enter the room and physically feel the lines of communication establishing themselves between him and certain women, and as the night wore on he would stare quietly, yet with insolent power, at the most likely of these companions, and he would seek her out for a dance and say certain modest yet fire-filled things to her, and the atmosphere often became so charged with passion that when he had maneuvered to find himself alone with the woman, she would thrust herself into his arms and encourage him to do with her as he wished, even though a few hours before they had not known of each other's existence. Whenever he entered a party he hesitated a moment at the doorway and thought: "Who will be in there tonight?" For he had found that there was always someone.

In his reflections during long days at sea young Whip never thought in polished terms of "milady's glove" or "my dear Miss Henderson." He thought of girls as strong young animals, naked and stretched out on a bed. That's how he liked women and that's how they liked to be when they were with him. They were utterly enjoyable playmates, and to think of them otherwise was a waste of energy. He made no distinctions as between married or unmarried women; he derived no special pleasure from cuckolding a married man; nor did he find women of any particular nationality or color especially desirable. If he could not gain entrance in Suez to the soiree of a French nobleman, he was quite content to pay down his livres at an established house and take his pick of the professional companions, but even though he often preferred this simple and direct method of acquiring a partner, he had also learned to be a professional gallant, and if he came upon some shy young lady who seemed worth the effort, he stood willing to humble himself before her as a traditional suitor out of a book, sending her flowers and candy, writing her short notes in his vigorous style, and dancing a rather impressive attendance upon her; for he always remembered his grandfather's advice: "When your great-grandmother Malama lay dying, she weighed over four hundred pounds, and her husband crawled in to see her every morning on his hands and knees, bringing her maile. That's not a bad thing for a man to do." Young Whip loved women passionately. He knew that they complemented his life and he was willing to do almost anything to make them happy.

As might be'expected, his behavior when he returned from his seven years' cruise took Honolulu rather by surprise. He completely terrified the Hale and Hewlett girls by professing to each in turn his Persian-Egyptian type of love, acquired, as he intimated, by long travels in a camel caravan toward ruined cities of antiquity. The poor girls never really understood what the dashing young man was talk-

ing about, but they did discover that he had a great determination to get their underwear off as quickly as possible, so that pretty soon it was agreed among the missionary daughters that they would prefer not to be escorted by their Cousin Whip. He discovered early that one of his full cousins, Nancy Janders, was amenable to his attentions, and they entered into a disgraceful series of performances that ended with Whip being caught in her bedroom completely stripped at five o'clock one morning. Nancy was not to be bullied by her parents and cried that a girl had a right to get to know young men, but that very night young Whip's gig was left stranded at the entrance to Rat Lane down at the Iwilei brothels because a violent fight had broken out over an Arabian girl, and Whip had got cut across his left cheek with a sailor's knife. The next day Nancy Janders' father packed her off to the mainland and young Whip started fooling around with a Portuguese-Hawaiian girl, a great beauty whose grandfather had reached the islands via the Azores. She and Whip engaged in a brilliant courtship, marked by her riding openly with him through the gayer streets of the city and then hustling secretly off to California to have a baby.

By this time some of the younger men of town had given the young seafarer his permanent name. It was bestowed following a brawl in which Whip fought three English sailors outside the impressive H & H building on Fort Street. His austere father rushed down from his offices above the street in time to see his lithe son stretched out cold from a combination of a British blow to the side of the head and a stiff British kick to the groin. While the handsome boy lay in the dusty street, a nearby bartender doused him with a bucket of cold water, but as the fallen fighter gradually began to feel the throbbing pain in his crotch, he bellowed, "Somebody hit me again!" He looked up to see his father's beard staring down at him and he wanted to faint from humiliation and pain, but he scrambled to his feet and hobbled off.