Honolulu (19 page)

I went back to the hotel and found Little Bastard sitting on the bed on his hind legs, howling as if he knew he had lost his best friend. Taking my life in my hands, I sat down beside him and stroked his head, but he did not bite or claw me; he even curled up in my lap and nuzzled his head against my hand, which I considered an outright miracle.

Then, after ten seconds of amity between us, he emitted an irritable little Nyep, bit me on the hand, and jumped out of my lap.

Neither of us, it seemed, expected to see May again anytime soon.

In nearly a year of thrifty living at Iwilei I was proud to have saved about thirty dollars, the bulk of which I was determined to set aside for Blossom’s steamer fare. Now I began searching for a furnished room, but soon discovered that the better rooms rented for at least seven to ten dollars a week. At that rate I could see my savings quickly evaporating, especially if I was unable to secure employment right away. Even a room at the
YWCA
cost a dollar and twenty-five cents a day. More than one landlord suggested, “Try look Palama or Chinatown, rents more cheap,” so I quelled my fears of being found out as a runaway wife and began exploring those neighborhoods that stretched from King Street to School Street, and from Nu’uanu Avenue to Liliha Street.

Here, crowded within less than one-quarter of a square mile, were thousands of Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiians, Portuguese, Koreans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos, living in a patchwork of racially mixed neighborhoods. Some of these neighborhoods took their names from the native Hawaiian language: Palama, ‘A’ala, Kamakela, Kauluwela. Some borrowed plantation terms: Tanaka Camp, Nishikiya Camp. Others were more colloquial: Tin Can Alley, Hell’s Half Acre, Corkscrew Lane, Mosquito Flats, Blood Alley. I started in Palama and worked my way mauka-toward the mountains-past fish markets, hardware stores, grocers, Chinese herbalists, and more, all reminding me of the marketplace in Taegu.

But I was not prepared for the sight of ramshackle tenements sprawling across entire blocks, their walls often rough and unpainted, as though still awaiting finishing years after they were built. Most looked more like long wooden sheds than apartment buildings-identical rows of them facing each other, like images in the same sad mirror. Some were single-storied, while others teetered on stilts-flimsy matchboxes stacked one atop the other. And these were luxurious accommodations compared to the tar-paper shacks that squatted amongst them, trade winds wailing through cracks in their cardboard walls.

I was frankly horrified at the thought of living here, but I worked up my nerve and entered one of the tenements in search of a manager-who told me there were no vacancies, but directed me down the street to another building, this one no more commodious than the last. It was actually two buildings built side by side, each two stories tall, connected by a sinew of stairways and clotheslines from which were strung freshly laundered shirts, trousers, dresses, and underwear. On the walls outside each room, pots and pans hung from hooks and crude shelving held brown water jugs, iron teapots, and other utensils of daily life. Most of the residents appeared to be either Hawaiian or Chinese. Children played in the muddy midway between buildings; men sat on stools or benches outside their rooms, smoking and playing cards. A dog was curled up nearby and when it saw me it got up, barked once, then, having fulfilled its obligations, returned to its rest.

The manager, Mr. Leung, showed me to a vacant room on the second floor as the keiki laughed and chased each other up and down the creaking wooden stairs. “This one nice unit,” Mr. Leung told me as he opened the lockless door. I stepped inside and tried not to show my dismay: it was tiny and narrow, like a shoebox with a window. Its only furnishings were a dining table with two chairs, a moldy old throw rug, and a bed draped with what appeared to be a horse blanket. On the far wall there was a single cupboard, but neither sink nor stove. A dry stratum of dust coated all of it.

“And where is the kitchen?” I asked.

“Out here-off verandah.” Mr. Leung led me down the long balcony to a communal kitchen, its rusty, coal-burning stove smeared with a thick scum of grease. Even worse were the shared bath and toilet facilities, of which I will not speak further. (Suffice it to say that rather than immerse myself in the scabrous old tub, I would wash my face at the sink and took to using, once or twice a week, the facilities of a local Japanese public bath, which was kept much cleaner than this. A shower cost only ten cents, and once a month, for a quarter, I would treat myself to a hot bath-complete with bar of soap, towel, and a washcloth.)

The room rented for nine dollars a month. It wasn’t worth even that, but I signed a lease and moved in. Little Bastard walked the length of the room, surveying it with what seemed a contemptuous sneer. I couldn’t say I blamed him. I did my best to make the place livable, washing, dusting, and scrubbing everything twice over, but I could not work miracles, for which the cat never forgave me.

To be sure, these unsightly tenements were a thorn in the eye, and amazingly they stood barely a mile from stately homes on the slopes of Punchbowl Hill. I was told these slums had their beginnings in the wake of a fire that destroyed the greater part of Chinatown in 1900. Shanties and shacks sprang up beside government-built temporary housing for the displaced, but eventually that temporary housing became the very permanent slums of Kauluwela.

Now that I was situated, however grimly, I turned to the matter of employment. Esther Kahahawai suggested I apply at the Hawaiian Pineapple Company in Iwilei. Although the cannery was nearing the end of that year’s “ratoon” harvest, they apparently needed a few extra workers and hired me as a “white cap”-after the white headcaps we all had to wear over our hair-and put me to work in the trimming and packing room. “Brown caps” were women who relieved white caps who had to go to the bathroom or couldn’t keep up with production, and “blue caps” were the strict forewomen who oversaw the department. As on the plantation, I was issued my own bango and identification number, as well as a white gown and a pair of rubber gloves.

At the heart of each production line, in a room separated from us by a dust-proof partition, was an elaborate mechanism called a Ginaca machinea massive collection of gears, chains, turrets, and rotating knives which, when operating, looked like the machinery of Hell itself. Pineapples were pushed by a “feed chain” into the maw of a rotating “sizing” knife that removed the outer skin of the fruit with surgical precision, leaving behind a cylinder of pineapple. While a mechanism quaintly called an eradicator squeezed the juice from the discarded skin, another guided the fruit cylinders into something resembling the six-barreled chamber of a revolver. A tube then removed the core of the cylinder, which was eventually cut into doughnut-shaped slices to be canned at the rate of fifty pineapples a minute.

My job was to inspect the cylinders for quality as they rolled past me on a conveyor belt, grabbing them with my thumb in the core hole, and trimming away with a knife any rough edges or blemishes. This may sound relatively easy, but I assure you, having fifty pineapples a minute lobbed at you like mortar shells can be more than a little intimidating. I was dismayed and embarrassed when a brown cap had to step in and catch some of the blemishes and pineapple “eyes,” which I had failed to trim as they rolled past me. And I was told by fellow workers that I had only three days to master the task or I would be let go.

Have I mentioned that all this took place against a background of the most ungodly noise I had ever heard? The Ginaca machines produced such a hideous clamor-together with the clatter of tin cans as they rattled along the conveyor belt-that workers and forewomen often had to communicate through a series of hand signals: “stop work,” “come here,” “hurry up,” and so forth. The trimming room was also hot and muggy, and I quickly tired of the sickly sweet, ever-present smell of pineapple. By the end of each day my wrists throbbed, and sometimes my arms would even go numb up to the elbows. But the worst part was the acid burns I would get on my fingers from the pineapple juice, which managed to penetrate even the gloves I wore.

I was distracted and nervous at first, but as my reflexes and facility with the knife improved over the next several days, I soon fell into step with production. Most of the women on the line were also Asian and the room was filled with gossip and chatter in English, Japanese, Chinese, even Korean. They asked me where I was from, when I arrived in Hawai’i, and I answered truthfully, up to a point; then, when I reached that point, I claimed to be a widow, forced to move to Honolulu to seek work.

I was cordial with these women but did not encourage friendships outside of work. I was too wary of someone putting the lie to my story. I was far lonelier than when I had been living with May in the stockade.

And I was poorer as well: the job paid only fifty-nine cents a day, or about fifteen dollars a month. After rent, that left me with all of six dollars a month for other living expenses. Fortunately, rice sold for less than ten cents a pound, and I was able to subsist on that and canned salmon (fifteen cents each), sardines (a nickel a tin), and kimchi (the ingredients for which cost mere pennies apiece). But this left me with almost nothing left over at the end of the month. Clearly, I was not going to be adding much to Blossom’s steamer fare while working at Hawaiian Pineapple.

I wrote my brother with my new address-heaven knows what he thought of all these moves, but if he suspected anything was amiss he did not embarrass me by inquiring about it. In my loneliness I became rather voluble, and found myself telling him:

Work is hard, of course, as it is everywhere … but at least here a woman can work if she so desires. She can walk the streets without a veil, can go anywhere she wishes to go, without an escort or having to ask permission from a man. She is not condemned to live her life within the same three rooms. She is not a prisoner of tradition. It is a freedom I cannot ever imagine myself giving up.

I had never articulated this thought before, even to myself, but it was true: Now that I was here, now that I knew what it felt like to be truly free, I realized I could never go back to wearing the shackles of Confucian dictates.

I was grateful for the companionship of the Kahahawais, and often visited them after work. Joey was growing taller by the day, and the boy who had stumbled gathering kiawe beans was developing prowess as an athlete. I spent several afternoons on the athletic field at Kauluwela Grammar School, watching him play a game of softball on a team that included his schoolmates Henry Chang, “Mack” Takai, Benny Akahuelo, and Horace “Shorty” Ida-the “Kauluwela Boys,” as they liked to call themselves. The first time I saw a player wielding a bat, I did wonder about this supposed boys’ game that appeared to be played with laundry implements, but I was proud of Joey as he swatted the ball over the fence and onto the grounds of the Japanese hospital next door, necessitating someone to chase it down as Joey ran the bases.

I had been working at the cannery perhaps a month when-as I entered the main building one morning along with hundreds of other workers on my shift-I first noticed a man staring at me from across the building’s lobby. Like me, he was part of the work force crowding inside: he wore denim overalls over a palaka shirt, with a dungaree hat tilted back on his head, and his face beneath the brim of the hat was recognizably Korean.

I felt a stab of panic and quickly looked away, wondering whether he might be someone who had worked at Waialua Plantation and was now trying to place my face. When I dared to glance back in his direction, his figure was lost amid dozens of other men going to work, and I exhaled in relief.

A few days later, as the steam whistle signaled the end of my shift, I was disturbed to notice the same man looking at me from a closer vantage point as we left the cannery. I didn’t know how long he had been gazing at me, but I was growing more certain that he recognized me. Could I have stood in line behind him at the paymaster’s office at Waialua? Or passed him while shopping at Mr. Fujioka’s store? Worse-could he have been one of Mr. Noh’s gambling acquaintances, who now wondered what his friend’s wife was doing working here?

I hurried out of the building, doing my best to melt into a mass of female white caps making their way up Iwilei Road. I didn’t look back until I reached King Street, and when I did, the Korean man was thankfully nowhere to be seen.

I was terrified to go into work the next day. I even considered quitting my job before I was exposed, then chided myself for my timidity-and for what were, as yet, baseless fears-and forced myself to go back to the cannery.

That afternoon, I glanced up to see the man standing only about twenty feet away from me, at the far end of the trimming line.

I let out a startled gasp, which he could scarcely have heard over the din of the Ginaca machines. He seemed to be trying to get my attention with hand signals, as the foreladies did to make themselves “heard” above the clamor, but these were hand signals I had never learned and did not recognize. He pointed first to me, then to himself; made a kind of ladling motion with his hand; and motioned toward the exit. At a complete loss to under stand him, I told one of the brown caps I needed to go to the bathroom and, working up my courage, went up to the man and asked in Korean, “I don’t know that signal, what does it mean?”

He smiled and said, “It means, `Will you have lunch with me tomorrow?’ ”

I was so surprised and relieved that I just laughed and told him, “Yes, certainly.”

He smiled again, said he would come by tomorrow at lunch time, then bowed and left the trimming room. Not only had I not been exposed, I now had, as May had sometimes called it, a “date.”

I was of two minds about this, of course. I feared getting to know anyone who might uncover my secret, but at the same time I was gladdened that a man, any man, had noticed me in this way. The next day he showed up at the trimming room in his checkered shirt and dungaree hat. It may sound odd, but even though his face had for days been so prominent in my thoughts and fears, it wasn’t until today that I really considered what he looked like. He was not unhandsome, with cheerful eyes that brightened his long, typically stoic Korean face, but he was much older than I. It turned out he was thirty-eight, hardly a doddering ancient-but to a girl of twenty, all I could think of just then was that he was nearly twice my age.