Honolulu (29 page)
“Of course I remember!” We met on the sidewalk in front of the shop and embraced. “But you are a barber now?”
It was not unusual-actually quite commonplace-to find a Japanese girl working as a men’s barber in Honolulu. In fact, by the 1920s, it had come to be regarded as primarily a woman’s profession. But I was surprised to find Shizu engaged as one, considering her last profession.
“Oh, well, after Mrs. Miyake get deported”she lowered her voice discreetly“I decide, eh, maybe time change career. I knew the owner here, Mrs. Origawa-she trained me as apprentice. Someday, who knows, maybe I open my own shop.” Her eyes twinkled with mischief. “And what of you, Jin-san? Did you not become a kisaeng?”
I blushed and nervously glanced at my husband to see his reaction. It was only then I noticed how coldly he was staring at Shizu. When I introduced them he nodded politely at her, but the chill did not leave his eyes. Shizu asked whether I had heard from May, and I told her that she had returned to San Francisco; we parted with promises to stay in touch, and Shizu returned to the barbershop.
Once we had traveled out of earshot Jae-sun said bluntly, “I do not approve of your choice in friends.”
Stung, I pointed out, “You like Beauty and Jade Moon and Wise Pearl well enough. And the Anitos.”
“They are not part of a race who oppress our people.”
“Shizu oppresses no one. She is a barber.” I did not mention that she was also a former prostitute since this was unlikely to raise his estimation of her. “And if you are reluctant to have dealings with Japanese people, you are in the wrong city and the wrong line of work.” I was too angry to hold my tongue and barely realized what I had said until after I had blurted it out.
Jae-sun considered this, then made a little grunt of acknowledgment.
“I will serve them and take their money,” he said, “but I will not socialize with them. You are free to do whatever you wish on your own.”
I was extremely glad I had not told him about Tamiko and her family.
The following week we introduced a number of new items, attractively priced we hoped, to our menu. In addition to my “plantation-style” dishes, we added a twenty-five-cent hamburger; a ham and egg sandwich for a nickel less than that; a sirloin steak for eighty cents; and various salads, which I prepared owing to my husband’s distaste for the entire concept, at fifteen cents apiece.
And in an effort to make a fresh start, we rechristened ourselves the Liliha Cafe.
Slowly, business began to improve. Our Korean customers continued to patronize us, but now their ranks were joined by Chinese families ordering gon to mein, Hawaiians sampling our haupia, and-though Jae-sun loathed cooking it-Japanese feasting on saimin and fried tofu. The hamburger sandwiches proved especially popular with keiki of all races. Within six months we were pleasantly surprised to find ourselves breaking even, and in less than a year we had even begun to turn a small profit.
This was provident, as that summer of 1921 I gave birth to our second son and third child, Charles Eun. Children born in the Year of the Dog are known for their good humor, and Charlie was a prankster from the start: he arrived a month early, the first of many surprises that he would present to us.
Grace, now three years old, seemed to find the appearance of this tiny infant in our home somewhat unsettling. “Why is he so small?” she wanted to know.
“He hasn’t had time to grow, like you have,” I told her.
She looked at him suspiciously and asked, “When will he be finished?”
I laughed. “Not for a while. You’re a long way from finished yourself.”
But Grace continued to regard him with uncertainty and anxiety, as indeed she did most things, despite all the love and attention I gave her.
It was not long after Charlie’s birth-on a busy Saturday evening with the restaurant almost as full as my hands as I waited on tables-that I noticed someone standing outside on the street, peering through the window into the cafe. Thinking it might be a prospective customer I turned and looked-just in time to see a man turn and hurry away down the street. I caught only the briefest glimpse of his face, but the cut of his hair, the line of his jaw, the way he held himself, was enough to send a moment’s shudder through me.
But then he was gone, and I told myself no, it could not be Mr. Noh, and did my best to banish the disturbing notion from my thoughts.
On a beautiful summer’s afternoon in July, at the well-appointed Yi home on Morris Lane, four expatriate women from Kyongsang Province, far from home, gathered as a group for the first time in six years. Beauty had prepared hot rice water and Korean pastries for the occasion; I brought some homemade chestnut-cinnamon candies; and Wise Pearl came with a bouquet of fresh plumeria to commemorate our reunion, as our children played together in a living room that was larger than the entirety of my family’s apartment above the cafe. Harold and Charlie played with Wise Pearl’s two sons; Grace, for once, seemed relaxed, charmed by Beauty’s daughter, Mary, who offered to share her dolls with her. Soon the house was filled with the laughter of keiki and the chiming musical tones of Kyongsang accents.
Jade Moon was the last to arrive, staggering through the front door under the weight of her third pregnancy, with toddlers Woodrow and Alma in tow. “Forgive this bloated apparition you see before you,” she said, trying to catch her breath as she deposited her children alongside ours. “By God, how can something so small as a baby cause one to swell up to such grotesque proportions?”
“Nonsense, you look beautiful,” I assured her.
She dropped into a chair and sighed in discomfort.
“I am a Zeppelin. A baby factory. No sooner has one rolled out than another is on its way.” She took in the profusion of keiki running, tottering, or crawling around the room, then glanced at Beauty. “And how many of these heaven-sent darlings are yours?”
Beauty said, a little self-consciously, “Just this one.” She gave Mary a gentle squeeze and smiled. “But a dozen more could not be more dear to me.
“Only one? And a lovely house like this, too? I hate you. I always have.” Jade Moon popped a pastry into her mouth, which momentarily silenced her.
“It is good to see us all gathered in one place again,” I said. “Who could have imagined, that night we first met in Yokohama, where we would find ourselves on this day, six years later?”
We caught each other up on our lives, and Wise Pearl proudly announced that she and her husband were leaving Waipahu Plantation. “We’ve purchased a carnation farm just outside Honolulu, in an area called Wilhelmina Rise.”
“That’s wonderful,” Beauty said. “I love carnations.”
“What are they good for?” Jade Moon asked skeptically.
“Oh, many things. They can be used in leis, and they are in great demand as a funeral flower.”
Jade Moon nodded. “Death is always a good investment.”
I told Wise Pearl that I had been under the impression that Asians were prohibited from owning property-as we were prohibited from becoming American citizens.
“Yes, but there are ways around that. The deed was entered into in the name of our eldest son who, having been born here, is a citizen. Even so, no bank would give us a loan; we had to save enough money to buy the land outright. It will be hard work, but no harder than working on the plantation, and at least now we will be laboring for ourselves.”
Jade Moon’s polite smile was more akin to a grimace. I could hardly blame her for being envious, spending her days as she did washing other people’s laundry. I said, “Success will come to each of us, in turn, we sisters of Kyongsang.” Then I added, “Though perhaps we might help one another to achieve this success.”
My friends looked puzzled.
“We could form a kye,” I suggested.
A kye is a kind of rotating credit cooperative, common in Korea. The members each contribute a fixed amount each month to a fund of cash that becomes available to each member in turn. In rural areas the money is often used to pay for things like road repairs, which are beyond the means of any one person, or to aid in marriage or funeral expenses. But many kye are formed purely for purposes of investment.
“Wise Pearl has noted the difficulty of obtaining bank loans without the necessary credit,” I went on. “If we each contributed a certain sum at the outset, then more on a monthly basis, we could create enough capital to use in establishing a business, or expanding an existing business.”
“That is an excellent idea,” Wise Pearl agreed.
“How much would we have to contribute?” Jade Moon inquired warily.
“As much as we could afford, no more. Could you manage, say, ten dollars at the start, then five dollars a month thereafter?” I addressed jade Moon specifically, for she was the one I hoped would benefit first from the fund.
“That sounds reasonable,” she said after a moment’s thought.
Wise Pearl thought so too, but said she would have to consult with her husband-as would I, though I did not imagine he would object. Beauty, however, said that ten dollars was well within her household budget and wrote a check for her share on the spot, which impressed us all.
“So the kye will have an initial balance of forty dollars,” I said. “And after six months, if we are diligent, it will hold four times that much.”
Jade Moon asked, “How would we determine in what order each of us would draw from it?”
“I believe it’s usually done by bidding,” Wise Pearl said. “Each bid represents a sum that will be paid to the other members as interest on the loan. The highest bidder takes home the money.”
What she did not say was that those who need the money most will bid the highest. The only one among us who truly needed the money at the moment was jade Moon, and thus I hoped that she would be the first beneficiary of the kye.
“Speak to Mr. Ha about it,” I told jade Moon, “and if he agrees, we will meet again and open a bank account.”
Jade Moon laughed and opened her purse. “Mr. Ha,” she said, taking out two wrinkled five-dollar bills, “thinks it is a splendid idea.”
She added her cash to the fund, then looked around the table as if daring the rest of us to do the same.
Not to be outdone, Wise Pearl opened her own purse and deposited ten dollars in bills and coins onto the table.
I smiled and “anted up” my ten dollars, then raised my cup of rice water in a toast. “To success.”
“Happiness, at least,” Beauty added.
“Happiness be damned,” Jade Moon said. “I will settle for success.”
We agreed to meet for lunch on the first day of each month to administer the kye, though at first we chose not to bid on it since the fund was still amassing enough capital to be useful. At the end of six months’ time our fund held a hundred and sixty dollars-a considerable amount by the standards of the day. Jade Moon and her husband began to consider the possibility of purchasing a small rooming house, against the day the kye would have enough money in it.
But this was much more than just a business connection: the four of us were bound together not merely by finances but by affection and kinship. Our common roots were in Kyongsang-do, but we had all been transplanted to the strange soil of Hawai’i, where we were growing in ways we could never have dreamed of in Korea.
Wise Pearl’s carnation farm bloomed financially, and soon she and Mr. Kam were considering expanding it. “We have an opportunity to purchase another ten acres,” she told us at a meeting, “but it would mean spending the modest profit we are now making, and then some.”
“Do it!” Jade Moon advised her. “You will never be sorry to own land. How much is `then some’?”
“We need another seventy-five dollars for the purchase.”
“Is there enough in the kye?” Jade Moon asked me.
“Yes, more than double that,” I confirmed.
“Let us bid, then.”
In short order Wise Pearl had her money, and when the transaction was complete we all looked at each other with a kind of giggly wonderment. Four girls who a short time ago could not even leave home without an escort, now were starting businesses and buying property on an almost equal footing with men. It was exhilarating and, at times, a little frightening-nothing our mothers ever taught us could have prepared us for our lives here. We understood this, understood one another, as no one else could. Each meeting was an opportunity to exchange confidences as well as commerce; to seek coun sel, to offer advice, or simply to trade gossip, swap recipes, or assist one another with babysitting.
Yes, Korea seemed very far away-but news from home, disseminated at church services, brought a few encouraging signs. In the wake of the March First Movement, the Japanese authorities had adopted a new approach to governing Korea, one of “cultural accommodation.” They were allowing more freedom of education and expression, and undertaking many public works projects-such as the building of roads, bridges, and damsdesigned to demonstrate that they were the friend of the Korean people and not their enemy.
A letter from my elder brother confirmed this, though he remained profoundly skeptical of the government’s good intentions. He also delivered the dismaying news that Blossom-now fourteen years old, on the brink of marriageable age-had attempted to run away in an effort to find her birth family. Walking for miles on foot, she reached the next village before my father and brothers found her and brought her home. I winced to hear that Father beat her for her presumption. I remembered the frightened little girl who had climbed atop the inner wall, searching for some sign that her father was coming back for her, and I ached to think of her so unhappy. But I was helpless to do anything about it, until I could somehow convince my clan to allow her to emigrate to Hawai’i.
I now had to wonder: If Blossom was so intent on finding her own family, would she even desire to come to Hawai’i any longer? This was hardly a question I could ask my brother to put to her, however, and since Blossom could neither read nor write, she was mute to me, only a haunting silence between us. All I could do was try and put away-in addition to our monthly contributions to the kye and the Korean Independence Fund-an extra dollar or two for Blossom, and hope that when the time came, she would want to make the journey.
