Honolulu (37 page)

I put a hand on his. “Oh, Joe.”

“He says he didn’t believe Bill and Sam were cops, ‘cause he never heard of anything like a `colored policeman.’ Except somebody who saw the whole thing says what Nagle really said was, `Hell, we don’t care if you’re policemen or not’-and …” Joe mimed a trigger being pulled. “Just like that. ‘Cause they were only `colored’ Hawaiians. We don’t get murdered-we just get manslaughtered.”

I winced. “Has he been sentenced?”

Joe nodded. “Ten years.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose.”

There was a tension in Joe that I thought for a moment might bring tears to his eyes-but instead it erupted into a fist slamming on the table. I flinched.

“Something? It’s nothing,” he said bitterly. “After Nagle was arrested, you know what the Army provost marshal told him? `If you confess, we’ll have the case taken over by the Army. A soldier never hangs.’ ”

The words sent a chill through me. And now tears did spring to Joe’s eyes, and he wept unashamedly, as for a lost brother. I went to him and held him, told him Bill was looking down on him now-that he knew Joe loved him and would see him again someday. After a few minutes Joe’s sobs went dry and he just sat there, hunched over, breathing in the grief, breathing out more grief.

Joe was usually soft-spoken, but now his voice was almost like a rush of air beside me. “Ten years. He won’t serve even that.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“I don’t seem to know much,” he said disgustedly.

“That’s not true. Bill believed in you. Ibelieve in you.”

Joe smiled faintly. “Yeah, he gave me hell when I quit school. Told me, `Look, if school isn’t for you, figure out what is. Start doing something with your life.”’

“That’s good advice, Joe. You can’t do anything about Bill’s murder, but you can try to live in a way that would make Bill proud.”

“I guess. But how the hell do I do that?” he said.

“Well, what do you like to do?”

He shrugged.

“I like sports. I liked being part of a team.” He hesitated in the manner of someone who’d been told too often he was “dumb,” and was reluctant to share his thoughts. “I helped out with the National Guard when they were looking for Fukunaga. That felt pretty good. I’ve been thinking, maybe I could join up.”

“That’s a fine idea, Joe. And I think Bill would agree.”

I freshened his coffee, and after another five minutes he had sobered up sufficiently to go home and face his mother. When he stood, he was steadier on his feet. “Thanks, Aunt Jin. Sorry to keep you up past closing.”

“You know you can always come here, Joe. For anything.”

He smiled, hugged me, and I saw him to the door. I watched him head up the street with less liquor in his step. Esther would no doubt smell the beer on his breath and wouldn’t be happy. But I hoped she’d make allowances.

Shortly afterward, Joe did join the Hawai’i National Guard. It seemed to agree with him. He took well to military discipline and began competing on the Guard’s boxing team, under the nickname given him by his teammates on the St. Louis College football squad: “Joe Kalani.” I was hopeful this might be the first step in turning his life around.

Chester Nagle was sent to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco to begin his ten-year prison term, but observers at his trial seemed to think that the military board of review in Washington would reduce his sentence.

Joe was right. A soldier never hangs.

Myles Fukunaga, on the other hand, would die on the gallows a year later. I think all of us in Hawai’i hoped that his death would somehow cleanse us of what we had just been through-that his brutal actions were, in the words of one newspaper editorial, merely an “aberration” in the life of Honoluluand that nothing so terrible could ever happen here again.

Jade Moon and I hardly spoke to each other anymore except at meetings of the kye, and then only on matters of business. These were painful occasions for me, as I was also forced to listen to Beauty’s excited accounts of her wedding preparations and jade Moon’s inquiries about its profligate expense. Or at least it seemed profligate to me. Beauty appeared confused and distressed by the hostility between us, and in those moments she seemed the sweet young girl I had always known. Then in the next moment she would eagerly display the large diamond ring her fiance had given her, or I would hear her eagerly confide in jade Moon, “I bought Mr. Ko’s son a new kite. I think he’s starting to like me,” and once again I would feel angry and heartsick.

Work was a welcome distraction from such matters, and around this time a new “wrinkle” in fashion appeared on the local scene. Some of my customers-students at secondary schools like Punahou-had begun bringing in bolts of yukata cloth they had purchased from C. K. Chow’s next door. But rather than asking for it to be made into kimonos, they desired that shirts be fashioned from the fabrics. These were printed in bold Japanese motifs-birds, mountains, streams, pagodas-and often riotous in their colors. Men in America, even in Hawai’i, did not normally wear such bright garb, but I was happy to make whatever kind of shirt my customers requested. I cut my own shirt patterns out of old newspapers, creating front pieces, backs, yokes, sleeves, collars, and pockets. I knew I was not alone in receiving such requests: Musa-Shiya the Shirtmaker had produced shirts with equally striking designs, made from tapa cloth imported from Samoa, for students at a local dance studio. Clearly something new was in the air, and when my beachboy friends saw what I was working on, they quickly ordered similar shirts for themselves and even began recommending them to the tourists they served at Waikiki.

Meanwhile, I had begun dreading kye meetings, and even considered not attending one to be held in the dining room of Wise Pearl’s home in Kaimuki, but in the end I did. Beauty arrived late and seemed more subdued than usual. Jade Moon immediately saw that something was awry. “Where is your ring?” she asked, and only then did I notice that Beauty’s hand was bare of jewelry.

She replied quietly, “The marriage has been called off.”

“What!” Jade Moon was beside herself, even as I felt a surge of relief. “Why would he do such a thing!”

“He did not call it off,” Beauty said. “I did.”

“Are you insane?” Jade Moon cried. “Why would you do such a thing?”

“It is a personal matter. I don’t wish to speak of it.”

“Did you share a bed with him? I told you to wait until-”

Angrily, Beauty stood, strode over to where jade Moon was sitting, and slapped her hard across the face.

Jade Moon jerked back, as much from surprise as from pain.

“I said it is a personal matter!” Beauty shouted, then stormed out.

After a moment I got up and followed her outside, where I found her leaning up against the clapboard walls of the plantation-style cottage, weeping. I went to her and she collapsed into my arms, once again the vulnerable little girl I had comforted after her disinheritance by Mr. Yi. Gently I asked what happened.

“I could not go through with it,” she said.

“So I see, but why?”

She sniffed back tears and stood up a little straighter. “You know the custom here in America,” she said, “of the wife taking the husband’s name? Well, it may sound odd to you, but-when I first became engaged, I would try speaking my new name aloud: `Mrs. Ko.”Hello, I am Mrs. Ko.’ `Mrs. Ko, you have a lovely home.’ `That is a lovely ring, Mrs. Ko.’

“Soon, this was how I began to think of myself-as Mrs. Ko. Mrs. Ko would not have to struggle to pay her bills. Mrs. Ko would live in a nice house and not a tiny one-room walk-up on River Street. Mrs. Ko’s daughter would want for nothing. Mrs. Ko would not be taken advantage of as Mrs. Yi had been. And then … Do you remember the Hai Dong Hotel?”

“Of course. How could either of us forget it?”

“As Mr. Ko and I began planning our honeymoon, I could suddenly think of nothing else,” she said. “I had been such a fool back then-a girl of sixteen who’d fallen in love with the photograph of a virile young man. Instead I met one old enough to be my grandfather and searched his face for some ghost of the man I had fallen in love with. I can never forget the feel of his body-like the wrinkled skin of a fig-as he lay atop me. Afterward, as he slept, I lay there and wept. I have never felt as lonely before or since.

“It was a terrible thing, a wedding night spent with a man I did not love. Yet here was Mrs. Ko, planning to do just that. In that moment I saw her as you might see someone whose face has been turned away from you, but now turns smiling to face you. I saw the cold appraisal in her eyes, the cunning in her smile, and decided I did not wish to be Mrs. Ko.”

I clasped her hand and told her she had done the right thing.

I wish I could tell you that she never regretted this choice-but I cannot.

On October 29, 1929, the American stock market-inflated to unnatural proportions by years of speculation-burst like a tire pumped full of too much air, ultimately deflating in value by some twenty-six billion dollars. Figures like these were impossible to comprehend for a family that subsisted on perhaps thirty dollars a month, and at first we took as much notice of the event as we might of an airplane experiencing engine trouble high above our heads. This was only a problem for rich people, we thought, and so went about the business of our lives.

But six months after the crash, there were some twenty-seven hundred unemployed workers in the territory. Soon afterward the pineapple market collapsed, taking with it one of Hawai’i’s largest industries. Tens of thousands of pineapples rotted in the fields; canneries closed their doors. Four thousand plantation laborers flocked to the city, looking for work that wasn’t there. Many of them were Filipinos, who had been among the most recent wave of imported plantation labor; now there was talk not just of limiting Filipino immigration, but actually returning the workers already here to their homeland. We began to wonder when the government might decide that Koreans should be the next to go.

The sugar industry continued strong, but construction work plunged and even tourism began to decline. With dwindling numbers of visitors, hotel workers were laid off. Fewer tourists required fewer flower leis, and demand decreased for Wise Pearl’s carnations. Shrinking jobs in hotel and other service industries meant reduced income for the customers of Beauty’s barbershop, many of whom took to having their wives cut their hair. Meanwhile, every day on her way to work Beauty passed Mr. Ko’s jewelry shop, which seemed to be weathering the depression quite nicely, and had cause to doubt the wisdom of her decision not to marry him.

Smaller incomes also forced families to cook meals at home rather than dine out. By the end of the year, business at our cafe had plummeted by forty percent. We lowered prices, reducing our profit margin, but things only worsened. My tailor shop fared a little better-the tourists who could still afford to come to Hawai’i were also able to afford colorful shirts as souvenirsand I began funneling all my income from tailoring into keeping the restaurant afloat.

Of all my Sisters of Kyongsang, only Jade Moon and her husband could have been said to be doing well. People could cut their own hair and cook their own food, but they still needed a place to live; they could not make their own land or build houses out of air. Despite her frequent complaints about the costs of upkeep, Jade Moon had perhaps made the wisest investment of us all.

Financial problems in Esther’s household were the cause of even worse troubles for her son. Joe had always had a temper-he once hit a man who refused to stop kicking a dog, though I could hardly fault him for this. Now, seeking to recover money owed him by an acquaintance named Hayako Fukinako, Joe got into a fistfight with the “four-flusher” and was arrested and charged with robbery and assault. Joe argued that he was just trying to collect on a debt; the jury agreed up to a point, acquitting him on the robbery charge but convicting him of assault. Joe received a thirty-day suspended sentence, and I hoped that this close brush with prison might shock him into thinking twice before using his fists.

But there was no reprieve from our own woes. By spring of 1931, I was forced to borrow money from the kye just to keep the cafe going for a few more months. When at the end of that time there was no improvement, one evening I gingerly broached the subject of closure to Jae-sun. He took in the suggestion with only a passive nod. We said nothing more about it and went to sleep. I woke around three in the morning to find myself alone in bed. I slipped on a robe and went downstairs, but Jae-sun was not in the kitchen. I entered the main dining room, then stopped at what I saw outside the front window.

In the glow of street lamps, I saw my husband in his pajamas, standing on the sidewalk, gazing up at the stenciled sign on the window that read
LILIHA
CAFE
, J. S.
CHOI
,
PROPRIETOR
. His eyes, usually so bright and cheerful, reflected only disappointment and loss of face. My heart ached to see this, and I considered turning around and returning to bed before he noticed me. But no-I was his wife, and it was my duty to share his pain as I shared his success. I walked out the front door and joined him on the sidewalk, slipping my hand into his like a thread into a needle; and together we looked up at this sign, once the embodiment of a dream, now merely a remembrance of it.

Because our living quarters came with the lease on the restaurant, we now needed to find another place to live. Yet we barely had enough money left for the first month’s rent on an apartment. One morning, as I packed up our belongings, I answered a knock on the back door to find jade Moon standing in the alleyway. She looked awkward and uncomfortablewe had not spoken more than a dozen words to one another since Beauty had called off her wedding-but now she held out some sort of document to me and said, “This is yours if you want it.”

“What is it?”

“A lease,” she said. “There is a two-room flat available in our boardinghouse. On the second floor. It is a poor thing I offer you, I know, but if you need a place to live, it is yours.”