Honolulu (28 page)

“Oh,yobo, please. Let’s go back to Honolulu.”

“Never! I will be damned if I will run away with my tail between my legs, like the dog they say I am.”

“Then report them to the manager, at least.”

But to my surprise, he shook his head at this, too.

“They were angry, and thinking of their families’ welfare,” he said. “I will not report a man for that-not even a Japanese.”

He stood, thanked me for my attentions, and staggered into bed, bruised and exhausted. And the next morning went back to work in the fields.

We did not leave Waipahu.

Much of that year’s sugar crop withered on the stalk for lack of sufficient manpower to harvest it, but by summer it was clear that the strike had taken a greater toll on the laborers than the planters. And by mid-year the influenza epidemic had claimed more than twelve hundred deaths in Hawai’i, a hundred and fifty of them displaced plantation workers.

Against all common sense I made occasional trips into Honolulu to aid Tamiko and her family, and thankfully I did not become sick, even though we often sat side by side and discussed our lives. Tamiko was also a picture bride, but in Japan such brides were actually married beforehand, in ceremonies in their home villages, to their absent grooms. She, too, had been disappointed at first by her husband’s age and poverty, though she said she had come to care for him very much. I never dreamed that I would find I had so much in common with a Japanese person, even if my honesty with her could only go so far-a fact that weighed heavily on me as time went by.

In July the Japanese strikers’ union sadly capitulated without receiving any concessions from the planters’ association. The laborers went back to work, to all appearances defeated. But within four months the planters quietly raised the workers’ basic wages from seventy-seven cents a day to a dollar fifteen, and revised the inequitable bonus system as well.

That system, however, had been good to our family: In four months at Waipahu we had managed to save over three hundred dollars-a small fortune by the standards of the time and the place. But I took no joy in it, only shame.

The day we returned to Honolulu was also the day Tamiko and her family left for ‘Aiea. While Jae-sun haggled over new lodgings, I took Grace Eun to Liliha Street, where the vacant lot was beginning to look vacant again-half of the squatting families having already left for their old homes at Kahuku, Waialua, Waimanalo, and other plantations. Tamiko and her two sons were gathering up their belongings as her husband was off buying tickets for the 4 P.M. train. She was happy to see me, but I was dreading this meeting.

“Tamiko-san,” I said, “I’ve come to tell you something.”

She didn’t seem to be listening. “Oh, you,” she scolded little Sugi, who had just soiled her diaper, “as though I didn’t have enough to do.”

“Tamiko-san, I must tell you-”

She turned and silenced me with a glance.

“There is nothing you need to tell me, Jin-san. I am not naive.”

The knowing look in her eyes shamed me, as if she were staring through me, straight down to the bone.

Flustered, I said, “You don’t understand.” But somehow I knew she did. “I … I have not been honest with you.”

“No, perhaps not,” Tamiko said gently. “But you have been kind, and generous, and a good friend. It matters little to me what you did, or where you were, when you were not being my friend.”

I was shocked and embarrassed-had she known all along?

“Not from the first,” she admitted, “but things add up. Even in Japan, two plus two is still four.” She smiled. “Honesty did not fill my children’s stomachs, Jin-san-your kampana did. That is all that concerns me.”

“But it was not true kampana,” I protested. “It was tainted by guilt.”

She laughed away my protestation.

“Not everyone who feels guilt does the kind or honorable thing. That is kampana. Now, that’s enough said of the matter, but for this: Thank you.”

And we spoke not another word about it, even to this day.

After they left for the train station, I visited the Yi store to purchase some household goods for our new rooms: laundry detergent, Borax cleanser, linoleum oil, among other items. I could not at first identify it, but it felt as though something was missing from the store. Beauty was there, folding a pile of work shirts, but she seemed distracted, even melancholy, and uncharacteristically disinterested in chatting. I went about my shopping, and Mr. Yi’s son Jung-su had to go into the stockroom to get me a bolt of cloth for my sewing. When he returned, I realized what was missing and asked him where Frank Ahn, the stock clerk, was. “He didn’t come down with influenza, did he?”

“No. He’s gone,” Jung-su said coldly. “His parents sent him to school in California. That will be five dollars and twenty-three cents.”

I glanced over at Beauty, quietly folding shirts, and realized that she was doing her level best not to cry.

On October I gave birth to a fine baby boy we named Harold Eun Choi-“Eun” now becoming a “generational” name, shared by brothers and sisters alike-and not long afterward, my husband and I birthed a different sort of joint enterprise. With our savings from Waipahu we were able to lease a small storefront on Buckle Lane in Liliha District, a neighborhood in which many Korean families and businesses were settling. It was a dusty little shop half a block from a stable-at quiet moments you could almost hear the flick of the horses’ tails as they swatted away flies, and when the wind was right you could definitely sniff their neighborly presence. The crime rate here was high but the rent was low, and there was a large kitchen on the ground floor; and so we set about transforming this nondescript space into a restaurant. I scrubbed the grimy front windows and mopped the knotty pine floor. We purchased cookware, silverware, dishes, utensils, and a dozen sets of tables and chairs, as I fashioned tablecloths and napkins from inexpensive linen purchased at Yi’s store. We spent more time debating what to christen this new offspring than we had choosing our children’s names-finally deciding on Cafe Korea, which I carefully stenciled onto the front window, and below that: J. S.
CHOI
,
PROPRIETOR
. I have never seen my husband’s face glow quite so brightly as when he first gazed upon that sign.

Like most businesses in the neighborhood, ours also served as a family home. The kitchen on the ground floor accommodated not only the restaurant but our own daily use as well. A stairway in the rear ascended to personal quarters above the cafe, a single large room with windows overlooking the busy street. Here was the bed Jae-sun and I shared, another for Grace, and a crib that used to be hers, now occupied by little Harry. In this one room we slept, dressed, played games, read newspapers, cut the children’s hair, ironed sheets and clothes-in sum, lived our lives. There was a bathroom near the stairs and a long lanai off the main living area, where we often slept on hot summer nights. Sleeping was not easy even in cool weather, as throughout the night we could hear the rattle of streetcars and the blare of phonograph music from nearby saloons, though in time we grew used to the noise. Meals were taken downstairs at a little table in the kitchen alongside the chopping blocks and cutlery, the five-gallon stockpots and twelve-quart boilers of our new trade.

Here we would also celebrate the lunar new year, the Year of the Rooster, as we would other Korean holidays. Though our children were American by birth, we wanted them to have at least a foot in the land of their ancestors, and so they would learn to speak both Korean and English in our household.

Because there were no other Korean eateries in Honolulu at the time, we set our cafe’s prices comparable to similar items at Chinese restaurants: a large bowl of rice sold for a dime, a small bowl for a nickel; noodle dishes were twenty cents a plate; fire beef, pork, or chicken was available at upwards of forty cents per serving; and desserts like pastry, honey rice, and candied date balls sold for a quarter apiece. We thought it a reasonably priced menu.

But as restaurateurs we were babes in the woods. Uncertain how many customers we might expect at first, our first grocery order took home enough rice, noodles, red beans, soybean paste, eggs, and meat to feed a small army. When a small army failed to show up on our doorstep, we scaled back our expectations and our purchases-and though much of our initial order could keep till the following week, many other items were perishables that we were forced to hastily cook and consume ourselves.

Jae-sun was, of course, chef, and I served as hostess, waitress, and supplementary chef when required. Because my husband was not as fluent in English as I was-he once admitted to me that he understood at best half of any English conversation-I also handled most of our business dealings with non-Korean suppliers. That first week saw many of our friends from church come for dinner, as well as the newly married Esther and Pascual Anito (Esther had moved into Pascual’s house on Kamakela Lane, not far from us). We averaged three or four customers each evening for dinner, most of them Korean, all fulsome in their praise for the food. A typical meal-a bowl of rice, a noodle or meat dish, dessert-averaged around fifty cents a person. A dollar and a half to two dollars a night barely covered our rent, let alone the cost of food and preparation. But many of our patrons returned on subsequent evenings, and so, confident in the quality of our product, we waited patiently for our business to burgeon in the coming weeks.

Alas, this burgeoning never came. After six weeks of operating at a loss we tried opening for lunch as well; this brought in perhaps another dollar a day, barely worth the extra time and expense, and we abandoned it soon after.

One morning I took Harold and Grace downtown to watch the show put on by Patrolman Pete Hose, the “Hula Cop,” as he directed traffic at the corner of Merchant and Fort Streets. Pete was one of the few Negro officers on the Honolulu police force and had even performed his “traffic hula” for Charlie Chaplin when he visited the islands in 1917. My children seemed to enjoy it as much as the Little Tramp had, and afterward we took a stroll along the waterfront, where I noticed a food vendor with a pushcart, selling a curious bill of fare.

Onto a paper plate this vendor would ladle two scoops of rice, a slab of meat or fish, and another scoop of some sort of noodle dish called “macaroni salad.” This culinary hodgepodge reminded me of kaukau time on the plantation and it was certainly popular with the stevedores, who lined up to purchase a plate for breakfast-and lunch and dinner, too-all for the price of a dime.

Intrigued, I asked the vendor, “What do you call this?”

He dug an ice-cream scoop into a vat of steamed rice, deposited two scoops onto a paper plate, and said with a shrug, “Kine mixed plate, I guess.”

Later that day, the image of those customers queuing up for their “mixed plate” preoccupied me as I sat at a window table in our own becalmed cafe, with little to do other than watch the pedestrians pass by. I began to suspect that we had made a serious miscalculation. We had counted on the fact that Koreans were moving into this neighborhood, but the people I saw on the street were not just Korean-they were also Chinese, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Filipino. Koreans were still a small minority here, not yet present in sufficient numbers to support a restaurant that served only Korean cuisine. Nor was there one central Korean community in Honolulu; some lived in the upper Nu’uanu Valley, some in outlying Kaimuki, and many, increasingly, in Wahiawa, even farther away-too far to travel for the kind of meal that could as easily be cooked at home.

I told Jae-sun about the vendors at the docks and tactfully suggested that we consider expanding our menu to appeal to more than just Korean tastes. I expected him to be resistant to the idea, but he thought about it a moment and said glumly, “Perhaps you’re right.” I proposed adding a few recipes I had acquired on the plantation: Chinese eggplant in garlic, Hawaiian haupia pudding, Portuguese sweet bread. Jae-sun even grudgingly agreed to saimin noodles and miso soup.

We also sampled more American fare at other cafes around town, such as Harte’s Good Eats, where Jae-sun stared in stupefaction at the salad of lettuce, tomatoes, and carrots the waiter placed before him. “Did they neglect to cook this?” he asked me in a low voice. “Should I send it back?”

“No, I believe it’s customary to eat the vegetables raw.”

He blanched. “Straight out of the ground?” I nodded. “God have mercy on their souls,” he said, refusing to touch the salad.

I ordered a hamburger steak sandwich, something I knew was popular with haoles, and took a bite. I rather enjoyed it, as did my husband, though he found it lacking in sophistication: “This is all? Just a piece of meat between two slices of bread? Where is the poetry in that?”

“Not every dish need be poetic,” I pointed out.

Even more disappointing to him was the “hot dog,” which, alas, contained no dog meat and looked rather obscene in the bargain. We decided to add hamburgers to our menu but no frankfurters.

At an establishment calling itself the Palace of Sweets we tasted a dessert that was currently all the rage on the U.S. mainland-“apple pandowdy” as well as various flavors of ice cream. “Much too sweet,” Jae-sun said after a bite or two of vanilla. “There is enough sugar in this to stop one’s heart.”

“But might it not make a nice complement to mochi?”

He shrugged. “I suppose.” He took a bite of the chocolate ice cream, then allowed, “This is not altogether detestable.” He would later use it in preparing pat bing su, a traditional summertime treat.

It was on our way back from a diner on Hotel Street that I was startled to hear a woman’s voice calling, “Jin-san! Hey! Jin-san!”

I half-expected to see Tamiko when I turned, but it was another young Japanese woman who stood smiling at me from the doorway of a barber shop. “It’s me, Jin-san. Don’t you remember Shizu? From Iwilei?”

By heaven, it was Shizu-but she looked considerably different than she had on that long-ago day when she’d helped me with my kisaeng hair styling. She was wearing a white barber’s frock, with her hair pulled back in a conservative bun and with less makeup on her face, but still looking lovely.