Honolulu (49 page)
Hwan’gap: 1957
I was born in the Year of the Rooster-1897-and now, sixty years later, that old bird crows again. Today is my sixtieth birthday and the Zodiac has come full circle, signifying that one cycle of life has ended and another begun. On this, my hwan’gap, my children honored me and my husband with a fine celebration, renting a banquet room at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel that looked out onto the beach where our family spent so many festive Sundays. A band played a mix of traditional Korean music and favorite Hawaiian melodies, with invited guests like Steamboat and Tarball occasionally sitting in for a song. Sadly, some of the beachboys we knew-Dude Miller, Tough Bill Keaweamahi, Hiram Anahu-are now gone. I attended Hiram’s funeral here on the beach eight years ago, watching as his ashes were taken out to sea in an outrigger canoe and scattered across the reef-into the surf he had loved and sung of all his life-by his fellow watermen. Happily, despite a crown of snow-white hair, Duke Kahanamoku-who now holds the mostly honorary title of Honolulu sheriff-is still among us, as are his brothers Sam, Louis, Sarge, David, and Bill (aka Tarball). Even Panama Dave was here, clowning as usual: at the age of forty-five Panama had married for the first time and Beauty finally forgave him for the end of their romance.
I was fortunate, too, that neither time nor space had separated me from my Sisters of Kyongsang, all of whom celebrated this day alongside me. Beauty, Poi Dog, and their two children, aged seventeen and nineteen, were there, as was Mary and her young daughter. Beauty still lives up to her name, though like all of us her hair is more gray than black. Her barbershop evolved over time into a hair salon for women, one of the city’s most successful. Jade Moon-wearing an elegant blue silk dress of the sort she used to launder for others-managed to consume a glass of rice wine and a shot of vermouth even before she had finished wheeling her invalid husband to the banquet table. They have done very well in real estate and own some thirty properties across O’ahu. Wise Pearl’s first husband, alas, succumbed to heart failure during the war. She remarried a few years ago to a big sentimental Hawaiian named Lono whose affections for her were never in doubt, and she sold her part-ownership in Gem’s in order to convert her little Korean inn into a budget hotel catering to tourists, which she and Lono now run.
As for Gem’s of Honolulu-it has grown from a four-woman shop to a manufacturer of both ladies’ and men’s wear that employs a staff of seventyfive and has an annual revenue in six figures.
Also among our guests this day was my old friend Ellery Chun, who had closed King-Smith Clothiers in 1945 to become vice president of American Security Bank. There was no question but that he had finally succeeded in becoming a respected member of Honolulu’s business establishment. At the same table sat Pascual Anito, a widower since Esther’s death five years ago, as well as Tamiko, Taizo, and their very large clan, including those grandchildren we shared.
Most important, Jae-sun-frail but in good health and spirits at the age of seventy-eight-sat with me at the head of a low table overflowing with food and lavish gifts (“too expensive,” my frugal husband would later sigh). One by one our children and their children approached us. Each was obliged to perform an elaborate, stylized bow-a se-bae-before offering us a glass of wine from a bottle of homemade rice wine sent all the way from Korea by my sister, Blossom. With three children and ten grandchildren, that made for a great deal of wine, and by the end of this ritual I was aglow with more than just happiness and parental pride.
But I was proud, very proud, of what our children had so far accomplished in their young lives. Grace graduated from the University of Hawai’i with a degree in business administration, which she puts to good use managing the day-to-day operations of Gem’s. Harry is an engineer with his own consulting firm-which he likes to say he operates to subsidize his surfingand Charlie is a high school principal in windward Kailua, pursuing his master’s degree in education. Had I only been fortunate enough to take vicarious satisfaction in their achievements, I would have been a happy woman. But just after the close of the Second World War, I was given an opportunity to realize a dream I had long since given up on.
In 1946 the Territory of Hawai’i introduced the first academic adult education program since 1827, when the Christian missionaries had schooled nearly the entire native population in reading and writing. I was already proficient in English and quickly earned a grammar school diploma. This was followed, in a year, by my high school diploma. It was a moment I had not dared to dream of in more than twenty years, and my children were as proud to attend my graduation ceremony as I had been at theirs.
But in addition to the courses I have since taken in English, history, and literature, I also take pride in another class I recently graduated. Five years ago the United States Congress passed the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, which for the first time allowed men and women of Asian birth living in the United States to become American citizens. I enrolled at once in the Adult Education Citizenship course and, along with hundreds of others of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean heritage, took the oath of allegiance the following year.
I am proud to be able to finally call myself an American, as proud as I am of my Korean heritage-and of this special place I call home, Honolulu. The Big Five and the “haole elite” no longer rule Hawai’i; the faces of our mayors, our representatives, our business leaders, are no longer exclusively white but Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Filipino, Korean, and more. Hawai’i has often been called a melting pot, but I think of it more as a “mixed plate”-a scoop of rice with gravy, a scoop of macaroni salad, a piece of mahi-mahi, and a side of kimchi. Many different tastes share the plate, but none of them loses its individual flavor, and together they make up a uniquely “local” cuisine. This is also, I believe, what America is at its best-a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I only wish Joe Kahahawai could have lived to see what Hawai’i has become-what he unknowingly helped it to become.
I stand here on the fifteenth floor of a high-rise apartment building on Ala Moana Boulevard, always in sight of the vast Pacific I first crossed more than four decades ago. The life I have led here in Honolulu is so much richer than I could ever have imagined for myself as a child. I married a man who encouraged me to be myself, who saw me as a partner in life and not a mere vassal toiling in Inner Rooms. I watched my three beautiful children grow and learn and accomplish much in their lives. And as I told our assembled guests at the celebration, I have been privileged to have had three sisters-none of us bound by blood, but no less sisters for that-who have shared this journey with me, each of them, like everyone in the room, a unique and beautiful patch on my chogakpo.
At this, jade Moon rose from her seat-a sight to give anyone pause.
“If so,” she said, holding her glass aloft in a toast, “then you have been the seam that holds us all together.” She drained her glass to loud applause, then added, “And will someone please tell these fool waiters that we are out of wine?”
I replenished her glass myself amid much laughter.
Not long ago a newspaper reporter-interviewing me about the aloha shirt industry and my own small part in it-asked whether there was anything in my life that I would have done differently, or not done at all, had I the chance to do it all over. I did not hesitate for a moment. As I told him then, I tell you now:
“I have no regrets.”
If there is a common theme linking Honolulu with my previous novel, Molokai, it is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives-many quite extraordinarymake up that history. Immigrants have played an enormous role in the life and culture of Hawai’i, but their individual stories have often gone undocumented. Fortunately, this is not the case with the “picture brides” of China, Korea, and Japan, who bravely left their homes for the promise of a new land and a new life (though for some, admittedly, it was an empty promise). The last of these women are gone now, but their voices and stories have been preserved in a number of noteworthy books and articles, which were instrumental in helping me to tell Jin’s story: Korean Picture Brides by Sonia Shinn Sunoo, The Passage of a Picture Bride by Won K. Yoon, The Dreams of Two Yi-min by Margaret K. Pai, Passages to Paradise by Daisy Chun Rhodes, “A Picture Bride from Korea: The Life History of a Korean American Woman in Hawai’i” by Alice Chai, “The Heritage of the First Korean Women Immigrants in the United States” by Harold Hakwon Sunoo and Sonia Shinn Sunoo, and “Contributions of Korean Immigrant Women” by Esther Kwon Arinaga. Also useful were Winds of Change: Korean Women in America by Diana Yu, “The Koreans in Hawaii” (Master’s thesis) by Bernice Kim, The Ilse: First- Generation Korean Immigrants in Hawaii, 1903-1973 by Wayne Patterson, The Koreans in Hawaii: A Pictorial History 1903-2003 by Roberta Chang and Wayne Patterson, and Beyond Ke’eaumoku: Koreans, Nationalism, and Local Culture in Hawaii by Brenda L. Kwon.
Providing insight into Korean culture and the status of women were Things Korean by O. Young-Lee, Women of Korea edited by Yung-Chung Kim, Women of the Yi Dynasty edited by Park Young-hai, “Women and Education in Korea” by Lium Sun-Hee, Korean Women: View from the Inner Room edited by Laurel Kendall and Mark Peterson, Village Life in Korea by J. Robert Moose, “The Tradition: Women During the Yi Dynasty” by Martina Deuchler (in Virtues in Conflict edited by Sandra Mattielli), “Women in a Confucian Society” by Yunshik Chang, and Rapt in Colour: Korean Textiles and Costumes of the Chosun Dynasty edited by Claire Roberts and Huh Dong-hwa.
Joseph Kahahawai is another ordinary person whose death had a profound impact in shaping Hawai’i in the twentieth century, but whose life and character has until recently been largely ignored, even as it was demonized by the media of his time. It was sociologist Andrew Lind-as quoted in Jonathan Y. Okamura’s article `Aloha Kanaka Me Ke Aloha Aina “-who noted that the word “local” was first used during the Massie case to describe non-whites living in Hawai’i. The idea of the Kahahawai murder as the precipitating event for the birth of “local” culture was then posited by John Patrick Rosa in his dissertation Local Story: The Massie Case and the Politics of Local Identity in Hawai’i. As Rosa writes, “[T]he killing of Joseph Kahahawai came to be seen as more than just an injury against the Native Hawaiian community. Kahahawai’s murder was cast as a story of local oppression, telling Native Hawaiians that they had more in common with working-class peoples of color and that they were part of an emerging local culture.”
This theme was brilliantly expanded upon by David R. Stannard in his book Honor Killing: How the Infamous `Massie Affair” Transformed Hawaii and by PBS’s American Experience documentary, The Massie Affair. Equally fine, and complementary to the above works, is Cobey Black’s Hawaii Scandal, which vividly captures the social milieu in which young Joe Kahahawai grew up. (My thanks to Ms. Black for her aloha and her willingness to answer a fiction writer’s questions.) I owe a considerable debt to all these authors’ seminal research, and have supplemented their accounts of Joe’s life with details derived from my own research. Sometimes these details were as small as the information, gleaned from Honolulu city directories, that Joseph Sr. had been a locomotive driver for the Pioneer Sugar Mill on Maui-an interesting bit of color I encountered nowhere else-or that William Kama worked for Honolulu Rapid Transit & Land Company before becoming a policeman, which accounted for how he came to know the Kahahawai family.
I have also drawn to some extent upon other accounts of the Massie and Fukunaga cases: Something Terrible Has Happened by Peter Van Slingerland, The Navy and the Massie-Kahahawai Case by John Reinecke (writing anonymously), the “Reaping the Whirlwind” chapter of Dennis M. Ogawa’s Jan Ken Po: The World of Hawaii’s Japanese-Americans, Rape in Paradise by Theon Wright, and The Massie Case by Peter Packer and Bob Thomas.
Joseph Kahahawai Jr. was a complex and sometimes contradictory individual: soft-spoken but short-tempered, intelligent and yet academically indifferent, competitive but not ambitious. In real life, of course, we meet people who embody such contradictions, but since we can’t see inside their heads we don’t expect to understand how all the pieces connect. In fiction there is a different expectation, and an author of historical novels, writing about a real person, must try to reconcile some of these contradictions. While I don’t presume to suggest that the dramatic and psychological choices I’ve made necessarily reflect Joe Kahahawai’s true inner self, I do hope my portrayal of him does justice to a young man who saw precious little justice in his short life.
What little we know of May Thompson we owe not merely to Somerset Maugham, who immortalized her as “Sadie” Thompson, but to the diligence of his biographer Wilmon Menard, author of The Two Worlds of Somerset Maugham. In researching his book, Menard did more than just uncover the fact that Maugham’s Sadie had been inspired by a real-life prostitute with the same surname, with whom Maugham shared passage to Pago Pago. Menard actually traveled to Samoa and spoke to people who had met “Sadie” there. (Among these were the parents of future playwright John Kneubuhl, who was also the person, in real life, who brought to Hawai’i the Samoan tapa cloth mentioned in Chapter Sixteen, which Musa-Shiya made into a protoaloha shirt.) Most significant, Menard interviewed Iosef, the Samoan man with whom May had pursued her doomed romance. Menard’s interest in documenting “the real Sadie Thompson” persisted even after publication of his book; in 1992 he published an article in Honolulu magazine, “The Iwilei Floozy,” in which he revealed May’s given name for the first time.
Maugham’s A Writer’s Notebook furnishes details, not found in his short story, of his visit to Iwilei, much of it quite helpful to me in envisioning and describing the stockade. Also helpful was a remarkable, though much more obscure, document: My Life as a Honolulu Prostitute by “Jean O’Hara.” A self-published autobiographical booklet-hand-mimeographed “
BECAUSE
NOBODY
DARED
PRINT
IT!!!”-it is an earnest and entertaining expose of “vice conditions” in the Honolulu of the 1940s, and offers a wealth of information about prostitution in Hawai’i. Sixty years later, what appears to be the last surviving copy is preserved in the library of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
