Honolulu (25 page)

I was privileged to have met Lili’uokalani in life and felt obliged to bid her farewell now. I joined a long procession of mourners who filed through the coral-block church for one last glimpse of this woman who might have lost a kingdom but never the hearts of her subjects. They paid homage to her with ceremonial wails and chants, visceral expressions of grief unlike any I had ever heard. Finally, I neared the casket on its funeral bier, surrounded by attendants bearing the distinctive royal staffs. I gazed down at the queen in her ivory silk holoku-at her white nimbus of hair resting on a yellow pall-and I bid goodbye to this woman who had, by the grace of her dignity and courage, become my queen as well.

On Saturday, her body was taken to’Iolani Palace and to a place she was able to return to only in death: her former throne room. It was here that her state funeral took place the following day. Government officials who had conspired to depose Lili’uokalani now eulogized her amid the enshrined beauty of a monarchy that safely existed only in memory. Later, kukui torches lit her way to the Royal Mausoleum in Nu’uanu Valley, where she was laid to rest, the last of the reigning ali’i, near her brother David in the Kalakaua Tomb.

Seven months later, when the time came to name my newborn daughter, I had occasion to think of Lili’uokalani. Jae-sun and I agreed that since our daughter was to be born an American, she should have an American name. But I wanted her to have a Korean name as well, and one in particular: “Eun,” which means “blessing.” And as I lay abed with this tiny, precious newborn at my breast, I promised her that she would never, ever feel that she was anything but a blessing to her parents.

But “Eun” can also mean “grace,” which reminded me of Lili’uokalani; and so it pleased me in many ways to christen our daughter Grace Eun Choi.

Now, in accordance with Korean custom, I, too, became known by a different name. As strange as it may sound to Western ears, from this point on my husband would usually address me as “Grace Eun’s mother.” Even in identifying myself to others I would most often tell them, “I am Grace Eun’s mother.” Admittedly, this was an antiquated holdover from Confucian tradition, in which a woman was defined by the children she had borne. But as someone who had had many different names already in a relatively young life, one more did not particularly bother me … especially when it held within it the name of my daughter.

Like the Japanese women on the plantation who carried their babies into the cane fields, I now brought Grace Eun with me each day to the tailor’s shop. Mr. Ku’uana enjoyed having a little keiki around, and at first Grace merely dozed amid swaddling in a cardboard box as I stitched away beside her. When she started to crawl, I constructed a playpen for her out of wardrobe racks on rollers.

The tailor shop was not far from Mr. Yi’s general store; I would sometimes go there to meet Beauty and we would eat at an excellent Chinese restaurant next door. On one such day she was shelving some yard goods when I arrived, and upon seeing me enter the store holding Grace, she waved to me, picked up her purse, and started for the door.

How I wish I had looked away just then! Had I glanced out the window, or down at my feet, or anywhere else, I would not have seen the young stock clerk, Frank Ahn, as he caught Beauty’s eye from behind the counter and smiled fondly at her. Nor would I have seen her smile back-so tender a glance that I blushed to witness it. Flustered, I turned away and earnestly began considering some tableware stacked in a display near the door.

When Beauty joined me moments later, I said nothing about what I’d seen. Nor did she say anything to me, which was a source of great relief. The matter was none of my business, after all, and thereafter I did my best to ignore, if not quite forget, the whole embarrassing moment.

Now that I was no longer living in dread of revealing my whereabouts to Mr. Noh, I wrote to jade Moon at Waialua Plantation, telling her of my new life in Honolulu, my husband and daughter, and my job at the tailor shop. In her return letter she expressed an interest in knowing how much I received in salary. This discussion of money made me somewhat uncomfortable, but I dutifully responded that I made between fifteen and twenty dollars a month depending on the hours I worked. “But of course, these are poor wages in this wealthy city,” I added, trying not to seem as though I were bragging.

There followed a lag in our correspondence, and the longer I did not hear from jade Moon the more I worried that I had offended or embarrassed her.

Then one afternoon I was in the midst of mending an Australian naval uniform-I’d had some trouble matching its coarse, canvaslike fabric until I hit upon the idea of using sail-cloth from a sail maker’s shop down the street-when Mr. Ku’uana came into the back of the store and told me, “‘Ey, you got visitors. Look like ‘ohana.” I had no family here, of course, other than Grace and Jae-sun. Thinking perhaps it was Beauty and her daughter, Mary, I went out to the front of the shop to greet them.

But it was a different picture bride who was waiting: I was startled to find Jade Moon standing there in the shop, a baby in one arm and a suitcase in the other. Her husband, Mr. Ha, was carrying in three more pieces of luggage, including a large steamer trunk.

“We have come to live in Honolulu,” Jade Moon announced with no preamble. “Can you recommend a place to stay?”

I was dumbstruck. Mr. Ha turned to his wife. “Yobo, we’ve disturbed her during working hours. Perhaps we should come back later.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jade Moon chided him. “Let me handle this.”

Her husband acquiesced quickly, meekly: “Yes,yobo.”

I finally found my voice. “It … it’s wonderful to see you, dear friend, but-what made you decide to come to Honolulu?”

“You did,” she declared. “You make as much money here in a month as my old man and I do combined! So why in heaven should we stay on the plantation?”

The phrase Jade Moon used to denote her husband-“my old man”was common idiom in Korean for one’s husband and not a deliberate slight concerning his age. Or so I hoped.

“I liked Waialua,” Mr. Ha said wistfully. “I liked our little house.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. For thirty dollars a month you do not have to like where you live.”

The smile that came to Mr. Ha’s face was a very Korean smile of embarrassment. He had the look, it seemed to me, of a man who had awakened one day to find himself clinging to the cattle catcher of an express train: under the circumstances, all one could do was to hang on.

Mr. Ku’uana generously gave me the afternoon off to help settle my old friend and her family in Honolulu. As we all struck up Nu’uanu Avenue in search of rooms, with jade Moon and I both hoisting our children aloft, I inquired of the toddler in her arms, “And what might your name be, little one?”

“His name is Woodrow,” Mr. Ha said proudly, “after President Wilson.”

His wife said, “I wanted to call him Screaming Voice in the Night, or perhaps Endlessly Hungry and Teething, but I deferred to the boy’s father.”

“He’s very sweet.”

“Yes, I suppose he is,” Jade Moon allowed. “And another is on the way.”

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

“Yes, I suppose it is,” she said with a sigh. “We’ll need at least two rooms.

They had sufficient funds for a two-room flat in one of the less ramshackle tenements in Kauluwela, but even so Mr. Ha appeared appalled at the living conditions. When he started to object, jade Moon threw him a look that cowed him into silence. She negotiated the price with the landlord and paid the first month’s rent in advance. After the landlord had left, she told her husband, more gently, “We won’t be here long,yobo. We have to start somewhere.”

He nodded, clearly hoping she was right.

Though the tourist trade had slowed to a trickle due to the war, the military presence, as I’ve noted, created many new jobs. Mr. Ha found work in a rice mill and jade Moon was soon employed as a laundress in a hotel (one that also housed one of the city’s ubiquitous billiards parlors). Like me she brought her young keiki with her to work, finding ways of keeping him occupied as she soaked and wrung dirty laundry. On one of my visits to her workplace I was struck by how different she seemed from the woman I had met at the inn in Yokohama-her fair complexion darkened by a pitiless sun, her hands rough and chapped from field labor. Yet she still held herself like a proud yangban, even when stringing sopping wet shirts on a clothesline. “Have you been able to send any money home to your mother?” I asked her.

“A little. But my father, the worthless layabout, opened the letter first and used the money to buy more of the Chinese classics. After that I began mailing the cash to a neighbor, who gives it to my mother.”

Little Woodrow, his head barely poking out of a large cardboard box, began crying, perhaps out of boredom. Casting about for something to occupy him, jade Moon left the laundry room, only to come back a minute later carrying a red billiard ball with the number 3 on it, which she deposited in Woodrow’s playpen. When I appeared dubious, she told me, “It will help him learn arithmetic,” and indeed he took to it immediately, happily rolling, dropping, and sucking on it.

“Look at the clothes these rich haoles wear,” Jade Moon said, admiring a woman’s floral cotton dress. “Someday I will wear clothes like this and pay other people to wash them! We’ll start a business, set aside enough money to send to my family in Korea, and buy a little house here. My husband may be old, but he has a strong back and is a hard worker. We will do it.”

“And are you happier now with Mr. Ha?” I asked.

She looked at me as if I were the most pitifully credulous creature that ever walked the earth. “What does happiness have to do with anything? There are diapers to be changed and suppers to be cooked, and one leads inevitably to the other. Areyou happy?”

“Yes,” I said, “I think so.”

She stared at me, then fairly snorted in disbelief. I changed the subject.

The more time I spent with Beauty and Jade Moon, the more I realized how fortunate I was-and how unusual among Asian women-to have a husband of my own choosing. We were bound together not by parental fiat or a matchmaker’s deceit, but by common feeling for one another. I had a beautiful daughter, a roof over our heads, and I had even been able to put away some thirty-nine dollars toward Blossom’s eventual steamer fare.

When my eldest brother wrote and told me that he was betrothed to marry a youngyangban girl from a neighboring village, I sensed an opportunity. With a full-grown daughter-in-law shortly to enter the household, perhaps this was the time to broach the subject of Blossom. So I took up my pen and revealed to Joyful Day for the first time my interest in bringing her to Hawai’i. I hoped to receive some words of encouragement, perhaps even an offer to broker terms with my father (I knew I would have to compensate my clan for the loss of a daughter-in-law and was prepared to pay them considerably more than they had paid Blossom’s clan). But within a month I received this reply:

Little Sister,

You must banish from your thoughts any foolish notions about bringing sister-in-law to live with you. I can tell you without equivocation that Father would not hear of it. Grandmother is in failing health and Mother cannot do all the work of the Inner Room by herself, even with the help of my new bride. And what of your youngest brother? Does he not deserve a wife of his own?

Little sister, I am happy foryour freedom and your new family in America. I understand, truly, that the life of a Korean woman is often, as in the old adage, like that of the frog living at the bottom of a well, who believes the whole world is wet and cold and made of stone. You know better now-but Blossom, I am afraid, is fated to live her life at the bottom of that well. Only one frog in each family may leap to freedom.

These last words were stinging enough to bring tears to my eyes. Was it true? Had I selfishly pursued my own happiness and so condemned Blossom to life as a Daughter-in-Law Flower? I was still weeping when my husband came home from work. “Grace Eun’s mother,” he said, “what is it? What’s wrong?” I showed him the letter and took some solace in his arms, as he reassured me, “She is still but eleven years old. We have time to think of ways to soften your father’s resolve. Don’t cry, yobo.”

I chose to accept his consolation and told myself it was true: There was still time, wasn’t there? Perhaps if we saved even more money, we could offer Father a sum so large-a hundred dollars?-that he could not refuse it. I would just have to work that much harder to bring it about.

Another rude shock came the following Sunday, when Jae-sun and our family attended one of Joey’s softball games on the grounds of Kauluwela Grammar School. Though Joey continued to grow by leaps and bounds and to improve athletically, today he seemed off his game”striking out” at bat, missing an easy catch in left field. He seemed almost disinterested in playing, quite uncharacteristic for him, and his team lost 12-3, also atypical.

Afterward, along with Joey’s teammates and their parents, my family and I enjoyed a picnic supper at’A’ala Park. Notably absent again was Joseph Sr., and Esther seemed as listless as Joey. I asked her whether there was anything wrong and she finally confided that she and Joseph had separated and were filing for divorce. She did not go into the reasons and I discreetly did not inquire, though she did say that Joseph was now living in Kailua, on the windward coast, and today notwithstanding, was still very much a presence in his children’s life.

I did my best to console her, pointing out that divorce, after all, was not just an ending but a beginning as well. “I am certainly proof of that,” I pointed out. “You will find someone, as I found Jae-sun.”

“I don’t worry about that,” she said, “as much as I do about Joey, growing up here in the city. I can’t help wishing we’d never left Maui.”

It was true, Hell’s Half Acre was hardly the best place for boys to grow up: the crowded tenement houses rubbed shoulders with pool halls, gambling houses, speakeasies, and brothels. Neighborhood clubs-like Joey’s “Kauluwela Boys”-evolved all too easily into gangs that drifted into fighting and petty theft.