Honolulu (6 page)

“You’d best hope,” Wise Pearl said impishly, “that such a man does not find you too common.”

With a look of great forbearance, jade Moon excused herself and retired for the evening.

Two days later, Sunny and I tested negative for parasites and were cleared to leave on the next ship bound for Honolulu: the Nippon Maru, a 6,000-ton steamship that at 440 feet was longer than Pojogae’s entire main street. The first of Japan’s great ocean liners, it had two big smokestacks like a steamer, but also three tall masts and an elaborately carved bowsprit like a sailing ship. As we walked up the gangway I was pleased to spy Wise Pearl among the crowd, as well as Beauty, who looked excited enough to levitate to Hawai’i.

The Nippon Maru was well past its glory days-its once-glamorous luster dulled by years of service as a military troop ship in the Russo-Japanese War-but it was still a queenly and impressive sight to a pair of young girls from the provinces. Our quarters, however, were considerably less impressive. We were situated belowdecks in third-class steerage, so called due to its proximity to the ship’s steering system. It was a huge, cavernous compartment-I had never seen an enclosed space so large-broken up into tiers of wooden bunks covered with straw mats, or “silkworm shelves” as they were sometimes called. Passengers were segregated by sex, except for families traveling together, and by race-Chinese, Japanese, and “Other.” Koreans fell into the latter category, along with a smattering of Okinawans, Filipinos, Indians, and Siamese-lumped together in what often was referred to as “Asiatic steerage.”

When the Nippon Maru finally set sail, we did not do so alone. This was February of 1915, the earliest days of the First World War, and just weeks earlier two Japanese passenger liners-Tokomaru and Ikaria-had been torpedoed and sunk by German U-boats. So the Nippon Maru was to be escorted across the now-perilous waters of the Pacific by two Japanese warships that were always visible off our bow. At night we also had to observe a blackout, which made for plenty of stubbed toes and short tempers in the overcrowded steerage compartment.

Thankfully, we never encountered any U-boats in our journey across the ocean, but that is not to say the voyage was a pleasant one. The first few hours we enjoyed calm seas, and then for nearly the remainder of the trip the ship rocked up and down like a seesaw. It was bad enough on deck, but down in steamy, poorly ventilated steerage the motion seemed even more violent, and it moved many a traveler, myself included, to nausea. Soon the hold smelled not merely of sweat and urine (from the too-few lavatories) but of vomit as well. If that wasn’t sufficient to kill one’s appetite, the dinner menu was: stewards brought in big pots of rice, vegetables, and overcooked meat, shoveling the food willy-nilly into bowls. We ate on our bunks, and afterward had to rinse our dishes under the lukewarm tap water in the lavatories.

The atmosphere in the hold became suffocating and drove most of us above decks (not strictly allowed for us bottom-dwellers) in search of fresh air. One chilly night, Sunny and I hid inside a lifeboat, huddling together against the cold but unwilling to exchange it for the stifling humidity below. Nothing could be done, though, about the pitch and roll of the ship itself, which often sent us sliding from one side of the lifeboat to the other like marbles in a game ofyut. The next morning, after we had crawled out from under the lifeboat’s canvas top, we passed the first-class dining room-out of which emerged a happy and well-fed jade Moon. “You’re traveling steerage?” she said, wide-eyed. “My fiance arranged for a first-class cabin.” Were we not so exhausted and seasick, we might well have thrown her over the side.

Another time, as I settled in for the night on a spot of open deck in the lee of a smokestack, I heard someone say something in Japanese. I didn’t realize I was being addressed until I heard, in English: “Excuse me, is this taken?”

I looked up. Standing above me was a young Japanese woman in a patterned kimono, her hair done up in a high pompadour, holding one of the cheap cotton blankets we had been issued in steerage. “May I sleep here?” she asked.

I shrugged, and gratefully she settled in beside me.

“Thank you,” she said. She smiled in a friendly, open way I had never associated with the Japanese. “Are you traveling to Honolulu or San Francisco?”

I hesitated a moment, then said, “Honolulu.”

“I, too. I’m to meet my new husband there.” She drew the thin blanket up to her chin and shivered in the chill damp air. “They say it is paradise,” she said, smiling, “but this trip is the opposite, is it not?”

She was a mere girl, barely older than I, but in her face I saw only the face of those who had abducted my teacher and taken Blossom’s home away from her.

“Excuse me,” I said, and abruptly got to my feet.

Carrying my blanket, I moved to the other side of the deck. The woman looked after me with what might have been hurt-but I did not wish to consider, at that point, the notion that Japanese could feel hurt.

After nine days we finally sailed into Honolulu, past the headless sphinx of an old volcano crater unlike anything I had ever seen before, and into the crowded boat harbor. We were all surprised at the size of the city-indeed it was hardly even a city by Korean standards, just a collection of low buildings gathered between green mountains and blue sea. We had imagined that we were moving to a great metropolis, but on first sight it looked more like some tropic backwater. This was to be our first disappointment.

The Nippon Mara slipped into its berth and its passengers began to disembark. The many hundreds of us who were emigrating were taken to an imposing stone immigration building that stood on some mud flats offshore; we crossed over to it on a long wooden causeway known as “the China walk.” I was dismayed to note that there were steel bars in the building’s windows, hardly a welcoming sign. Inside, we queued up and prepared for a long wait, but the immigration staff moved at a fairly brisk clip, clearing almost a hundred applicants in the first hour. Finally Sunny and I were “processed.” This consisted of a literacy test in Korean-we had been warned of this by Mrs. Kim and so I had coached Sunny in the rudiments of hangul-and then once again we were subjected to physical examinations for diseases like “pink eye,” trachoma, and asked for the inevitable stool samples.

This latter alarmed me, as I recalled how long it had taken for our results to come back in Yokohama, and indeed we were informed that we would have to remain here on Quarantine island until we were cleared to leave. We spent the next two days in cramped quarters, eating mostly Japanese foods, until finally our tests returned negative, our passports were stamped, and we were told by the officials that our husbands-to-be were waiting for us outside.

Sunny, Beauty, Wise Pearl, Jade Moon, and I crowded at the window to catch a glimpse of them-but none of us was prepared for what we saw. Standing in the yard of the immigration station was a ragtag group of men in worn, threadbare suits and straw hats. All were deeply tanned, nearly as dark as the Hawaiians we had seen strolling along the docks. In Korea, the fairer a man’s complexion, the more refined and desirable he was perceived to be. These men had the dark weathered skin of manual laborers-like fruit left out in the sun too long to shrivel and discolor.

But the tropic sun alone could not account for the wrinkled faces now turning hopefully in our direction. They were all at least twenty years older than we, much older than their pictures had represented them. Wise Pearl’s fiance looked to be about forty years old, his eyes obscured behind thick glasses, with thinning hair visible beneath his straw “boater.” Sunny’s intended appeared even older, perhaps fifty, with graying hair and deep smallpox scars on his face that hadn’t shown up on his photograph. Even Jade Moon’s husband-to-be, who had looked so rakish posed against his shiny automobile, was considerably darker and older than his portrait.

`Aigo, “Wise Pearl said softly.

Jade Moon expressed a somewhat stronger, and more colorful, sentiment than oh my, which caused me to blush.

But the cruelest joke had been played on the loveliest of us all. Beauty’s fiance-barely but sadly identifiable from his photograph-was a wizened old man who appeared to be at least seventy years old. He grinned happily when he saw her at the window, a smile that did not, alas, hold a full comple ment of teeth. Beauty gasped when she recognized him, then clapped her hands to her mouth. “No!” she cried. “There must be some mistake!”

“Oh Heaven, what have we done?” Sunny moaned.

Only I was not completely dismayed at the sight of my future husband. True, he was older than the photograph he had sent, but he still appeared no more than thirty-five years old-and though as tanned as the others, he was still a handsome, strapping man. I was relieved, but embarrassed that I alone should have escaped this awful trick that had been played on my friends.

“What shall we do?” Beauty asked, pale with shock.

“We all need to stay calm,” I suggested.

“You can stay calm,” Sunny said, “your husband isn’t a hundred years old!”

“Mine is two hundred,” Beauty said miserably.

We turned away from the window so that these men, over whose portraits we had once swooned, could not see the unseemly panic in our faces.

“I can’t marry that ugly old man.” Sunny’s vehemence was startling in someone so usually the optimist.

“What other choice do we have?” Wise Pearl asked. “The authorities here won’t let us into the country unless we marry them. We cannot go back to Korea without return steamer fare, and I gave all my spending money to my family.”

Jade Moon’s tone was one of dread. “I could not return to my parents’ house after failing as a picture bride. The loss of face would be too great. I think I would rather die.”

Of her fiance Wise Pearl said thoughtfully, “He may not be young or handsome, but I didn’t come here just for that. If he can help my family, all well and good. But I’m in America. That is enough. I will marry him.”

Jade Moon stole another look at her intended, then nodded slowly. “Yes,” she agreed, “much is forgivable if they are truly as wealthy as we were told.”

Sunny was unconvinced. “Mine looks like he’s wearing the same suit he wore when he arrived here, who knows how many years ago,” she said with agitation. “Do these look like prosperous men to you?”

Beauty began to weep. I took her hand in mine consolingly.

“Consider this,” Jade Moon said soberly, in what seemed a sincere attempt to comfort Beauty. “Your groom has one foot in the grave; maybe two. It will, at least, be a short marriage.”

Beauty stared at her, aghast.

Sunny looked again at her betrothed-at his leathery, pockmarked face so clearly seen in the bright Hawaiian sun-then snapped open her change purse and rummaged around inside it. “How much is steamer fare?”

“A hundred yen, ” Wise Pearl told her.

Sunny quickly counted up her cash. Her eyes brightened.

“I almost have enough!” she said joyously. “I need only twenty more yen.” She turned to me, imploringly. “Regret … do you have the money? Oh please, I promise, I’ll repay it somehow, can you lend it to me?”

The thought of entering this strange country without my old friend at my side frightened me, but there was even greater fear in Sunny’s eyes.

“I can’t go through with it,” she said softly. “Forgive me. I just can’t.”

I opened my purse. I had already converted my yen to dollars; I handed ten of them to Sunny, the equivalent of twenty yen. She took it and clasped my hand gratefully. “Thank you, dear friend. I will miss you. I wish you only happiness.” She embraced me, then turned and hurried back to the immigration authorities who had just cleared us for entry into Hawai’i, and was soon lost from my sight.

Beauty eventually resigned herself to her fate and we all went out to meet our new husbands. I felt sorry for Sunny’s fiance, Mr. Lim, who only slowly came to realize that his bride would not be forthcoming and eventually drifted away like a breeze. But I admit, I only gave him a passing thought; I was too nervous about meeting my own fiance, Mr. Noh. I could not keep my eyes off him as we left the immigration building and entered the yard where the men were waiting. I waited expectantly for him to recognize me, but his gaze just swept past me as he searched the crowd emerging from the station. Finally I approached him, bowed, and identified myself in the proper “high” speech a wife uses to address her husband: “Good day. I am Regret, of the Pak clan of Pojogae.”

He turned and looked at me.

Because Koreans try not to openly display our feelings, we have developed ways of seeing past the inexpressive facades we present to the world. Using something called nunch’i we interpret nonverbal clues to read a person’s inner state. A Westerner studying my fiance’s expression would have seen only a look of vague dispassion. But I could detect subtle yet unmistakable signs of surprise and disappointment-the same kind of disappointment my fellow brides felt when they first laid eyes on their men.

If he knew that I saw this, he did not betray it. He bowed in greeting, and in Korean introduced himself: “I am Righteous Son, of the Noh clan of Pyflngyang. Welcome to Hawai’i.” Around us I could hear similar introductions being made between Wise Pearl, Jade Moon, and Beauty and their fiances.

“Are you hungry?” Mr. Noh asked me.

Even though I was, I said no, to spare him the trouble. This social ritual obliged him to ask me again, to make sure I wasn’t declining out of humility, but before he could we were interrupted by one of two immigration officials who politely inquired whether we brides still wished to marry our husbandsto-be. When we each responded yes-Beauty’s voice catching like that of a little girl who could not yet convincingly lie-he announced that the man beside him was a “justice of the peace.” He called out the name of Wise Pearl’s fiance, Mr. Kam.

On the spot they were married in a brief civil ceremony. Wise Pearl and her new husband looked traditionally solemn (even when bride and groom were genuinely happy, there were no smiles at Korean weddings). Now the official called out the name of jade Moon’s betrothed, Mr. Ha, and they, too, were joined in marriage. Beauty was next, and if I could see the pain in her face, surely her elderly fiance Mr. Yi could, but he showed no indication of it. Finally Mr. Noh’s name was called. We stepped forward and were told to join hands. The calloused flesh of my fiance’s hand closed around mine, my skin crawling at the hardness of his touch. Then like those before us, he and I were quickly and efficiently wed.