The Queen of Tears (6 page)

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I
T was a small, tourist wedding; the kind of wedding that comes bundled in a package deal with airfare, hotel, rental car, and two anemic steaks and shrimp-sized lobsters. It was held outdoors, in the garden of the Hawaiian Regent Hotel in Waikiki. White wooden lattices, with plastic plants in front of them, served as the backdrop as Donny and Crystal took their vows. Before Donny said, “I do,” he looked down at his family behind the security of his two-hundred-dollar, blue-tinted Jean-Paul Gaultier sunglasses. Won Ju, despite the outdoor heat, wore a matching blazer and skirt. Pantyhose, too. She was looking up and smiling. Her husband Kenny, dressed in khaki pants and a dark blue aloha shirt, was looking at Crystal’s cleavage. Their son, Brandon, who’d just turned fifteen, was also wearing khaki pants and an aloha shirt. He was also looking at Crystal’s cleavage. Soong, who was wearing a white silk blouse and brown skirt, was holding an open umbrella. Donny almost laughed when he saw her look at Crystal’s cleavage and shake her head. Donny’s half-sister, Darian, who was wearing a short but classy brown dress, winked at him. She had the same bird-face and pale skin as her mother. When she had flown in the day before from Berkeley, she seemed to like Crystal. She didn’t regard her with that air of superiority that came so easy to her.

Donny knew that Crystal’s family was not going to show. His family members were the only people in attendance. She had long before been disowned because of her career choice, or so she’d told him, and Donny didn’t really know how he felt about this, nor had he even met Crystal’s parents. It was funny with that Hawaiian family, jail was fine for her brother, but stripping was a huge sin. There was dignity in prison, none in peddling flesh. Sometimes he sympathized with her because he often thought he was a mere step away from being disowned. But sometimes he envied her because she didn’t have to deal with family. But on this day he was glad they didn’t show. He reveled in the support of his sisters, the envy of his brother-in-law and nephew, and the disapproval of his mother. More people would have ruined the closeness of it all. Crystal had mentioned that her brother might stop by at the reception, but he wasn’t worried about that now. Instead he felt good, like he accomplished something. It took a man to do what he was doing. Originally he wanted to do it in Vegas and have an Elvis impersonator marry them. But Won Ju would have none of it. So for her, he’d decided on the Hawaii tourist wedding. He knew he owed his older sister a lot, so he was more than happy to adjust his plans for her. But he couldn’t resist. After he politely kissed his bride, Donny looked out at his family, bent down on one knee, and said in his best Southern drawl, “Thank you, thank you very much.”

It was a good thing he’d had a couple of martinis at the Hawaiian Regent bar before he got hitched.

The reception was at the Hawaiian Canoe Club. Kenny, who’d been a member since childhood, set it up. The private club, which charged thirty thousand dollars for new membership, sat in front of Waikiki Beach. When the super-stretch Lincoln limousine pulled up at dusk, Donny watched as an older, dark-skinned Filipino employee, dressed in dark brown slacks and a beige button-up collared shirt, lit the gas-powered torches at the entrance. The torches, each an iron pole about six feet high with an iron cone at the top, were almost too high for the Filipino to reach. The employee, after he turned the gas on with a wrench, stepped in the bushes of ti leaves and extended his arm with a lit match. Donny rolled down the window and heard the flame appear with a low, soft, popping sound. He smiled, feeling important, like the torches were lit for him on this special day.

The limo stopped, and Donny let everyone out. His mother stepped out first, followed by his sister’s family, his half-sister, then finally his bride. Crystal waited for him to exit, then smiled and grabbed his hand. He glanced at the bust of her wedding dress and suddenly wished it were not cut so low. Though he enjoyed the cut at the ceremony, he knew this was an exclusive club populated by a lot of rich and important people. He didn’t want people to think, like his mother, that he had married trash. Though he liked his mother thinking it, he didn’t want anyone else to. His head began to pound from the afternoon martinis, and he desperately needed another drink.

The family walked to the registration desk where an older Caucasian woman greeted Kenny with a smile. She was wearing a brightly colored muumuu and thick brown-rimmed glasses. “Hi Margie,” Kenny said as he signed the registration book. Donny looked around the lobby while he waited. There were wicker chairs surrounding small, wooden coffee tables. There was a magazine rack with issues of
Time, Newsweek, Honolulu Magazine,
and
Women’s Health.
The room was lightly decorated with plants. It was like a picture in a magazine. When Kenny finished signing in, Donny walked past with his head down. The woman smiled and said, “Congratulations.”

As they made their way from the lobby to the dining room, two Caucasian boys, both blond, tall, shirtless, and skinny, were running out past the no smoking sign. Weird dress code, Donny thought. Then he looked up. The dining room seemed to be the only way to get from the beach to the lobby. Donny took off his sunglasses and looked out to the beach just as the sun was setting. The clouds were lit with splashes of orange and red, while the sky above them was blue and indigo. Red grating against blue. A perfect ending of a day, Donny thought, as the entire family stopped at the hostess podium. Crystal squeezed his arm. It was the first time he’d realized she was even there since they’d gotten out of the car.

The clanging of dishes and the enthusiastic chatter of club members Donny had never met surrounded their table. Every table was filled. Filipino bus boys walked to and fro pouring water and removing dishes. They wore bright purple aloha shirts with black slacks. The waiters, dressed in tuxedo shirts and black vests, were busy taking orders and serving food. Just about every other table was filled with Caucasian club members. Donny was sitting with his wife on one side and his mother on the other when a cocktail waitress came and asked everyone if they wanted anything to drink. Crystal ordered two bottles of champagne. She and Donny were on the same page. There was only one empty seat at the table, just in case Crystal’s brother showed.

Amidst the loud voices in the room Brandon turned to his grandmother. “Grandma, why did you hold an umbrella over you at the wedding? There wasn’t any rain.”

Donny laughed, then spoke with his accent, which even after twenty years, he was painfully aware that he would never shake. “Your grandma is afraid of the sun.”

It was the most he’d said to his nephew in the last month. They’d never really talked. Brandon turned to his mother and asked, “What does he mean?”

“She doesn’t want her skin to get dark,” Won Ju said.

Brandon frowned and looked at his dark-skinned father. Kenny straightened his blue collar, then shrugged at his dark-skinned son and looked at his well-tanned wife. Won Ju, who glanced at her new, well-tanned sister-in-law, said, “In the old days in Korea dark skin was regarded as, well, peasant-like.”

Donny looked at his mother. He was enjoying this. Because her English was so bad, she was almost like a nonentity at this table. He knew his mother was smart, maybe smarter than anyone else in the family, but he kind of liked that most of them didn’t think so, especially her precious grandson. He smiled just as his mother spoke up. “No, not true. I not think bad because rich, no rich. Look all round. All people here,” she pointed to the other tables, “have tan. Rich people. But sun bad for skin. Especially old woman. Wrinkles.”

Brandon nodded.

Then she said in Korean, “You do not have to speak for me, children.”

Kenny, who sipped on his sweating glass of water, reached over and lightly touched Crystal’s arm. He held his fingers there while he talked. “You better get used to this Korean language thing. They could be talking about you, and you wouldn’t even know it.”

Crystal laughed. Soong spoke in rapid Korean, pretending to say it under her voice. “Learn the language, like we learned yours.” She looked at Donny and Won Ju. “Look now, Darian is my only hope. Darian, are you going to make your mother happy and find a nice Korean boy?”

Darian, who was quiet until now, spoke in perfect English. “Please don’t suck me into this. Let me just get drunk in peace.”

Donny believed he loved Darian, but sometimes she irritated him. To him, Darian always had this pretentiousness about her, like she was the only American out of the children, and that this meant something. Her English was pure, while Won Ju’s and Donny’s were accented. The fact that she was working on her MA in English at U.C. Berkeley didn’t help either. “Besides, Mother,” Darian said in Korean, “I’m never getting married. As a great American actress once said, ‘Marriage is a great institution, but I’m not ready for an institution yet.’”

It translated badly. Donny expected his mother to come back with a Korean quote qualifying the virtues of marriage, but she didn’t. She just shook her head and said in English, “Hard-head girl.”

Darian turned to Kenny and Crystal, and said in her weather-girl voice, “I’m sorry. We were just having a discussion on the institution of marriage. It might be a bad choice of topic considering we should be celebrating it, not debating it.” Donny hated that voice. She could’ve said, “It will be sunny tomorrow with a chance of rain,” and he would’ve hated it even more. Not only did its perfect enunciation irritate him, but the voice also suggested that it was saying something important to a lot of people, while most of the time, it was saying something meaningless, either trying to guess at something that couldn’t be predicted or stating the obvious.

Just then the cocktail waitress appeared and poured everyone a glass of champagne. Donny caught Kenny looking at her ass as she walked away. He smiled and raised his glass. “Am I going to have to toast myself?”

Kenny laughed. “Sorry. To Donny and Crystal. All the happiness in the world.”

Donny quickly emptied his glass, then refilled it. He enjoyed getting drunk. It took the edge off. Everything looked more round. There weren’t sharp edges, nothing around that could cut him. The world felt safer when he was drunk. Even his mother’s sharp eyes, nose, elbows, and tongue seemed less likely to cut him. He emptied his second glass and poured himself another. He really wanted to smoke a cigarette.

After Donny finished his fifth glass of champagne, the blue and red of dusk blended into a hazy purple, and the clanging dishes and chattering voices faded into a dull hum, a mountain began to slide into the dining room. Donny thought he was seeing things, so he looked around the dining room, but saw that even all of the tanned, white faces were seeing the mountain, too. Maybe it wasn’t a mountain; mountains don’t move, instead it was a glacier slowly and deliberately moving towards them. Suddenly Donny waited for a male member of the dinner crowd to yell, “To the lifeboats! Women and children first!” The voice never came, but Donny could tell that he wasn’t the only one thinking it.

The glacier was a man who was a combination of professional wrestler, prison movie hammer, and geology on the Discovery Channel. He was tanned and had short, curly clown-red hair. His worn aloha shirt, which had faded pictures of Hawaiian hieroglyphs, men with spears, failed to completely cover his stomach. Below his faded black shorts, Donny saw calves the size of his thighs, and slippers the size of canoes. But the most impressive thing about this man was his neck. Donny could easily imagine a guillotine shattering like glass on this man’s neck. This was not a Hawaiian Canoe Club member. And despite his roundness, he looked very sharp and dangerous to Donny. Donny put on his sunglasses when the glacier reached the table. The man rubbed his red goatee that turned into a light blond as it crept up his upper lip. Donny thought the contrast of the red hair with the blond looked ridiculous, but he wasn’t about to mention it. “Hi Sis,” the man said.

Crystal jumped from her chair and hugged her brother Kaipo, whose look pulled more Caucasian than his sister. He lifted her off the ground and she let out a girlish squeal. He put her down and smiled. “So dis mus’ be da new family.”

Donny shook Kaipo’s hand, or it may have been just one of his enormous fingers, like how babies shake an adult hand, then he watched him go around the table and shake everyone else’s. Donny noticed his flawless use of the old plantation pidgin English. And when Kaipo got to Kenny, and Kenny stood up, shook his hand, and said, “Eh, wassup bradah,” Kenny’s pidgin lacked the same fluency. It was like he was forcing the old language. Donny had heard the phrase “coconut” once to describe Hawaiians like Kenny. Brown on the outside, white on the inside.

Kaipo smiled and sat in the empty chair next to Darian. When he put his forearms on the table, it looked like he was about to have make-believe tea with a group of little girls. He looked around. “Ho, dis place is like haole central, ah?”

Won Ju laughed and said sarcastically, “Hey, this is the Hawaiian Canoe Club, we’re all Hawaiians here.”

Kaipo smiled. “Yeah, whatevas. Jus’ because dese white guys paddle Hawaiian canoe, no mean dey Hawaiian. Hawaiian is one race, an I no mean one canoe race, not one club.”

Crystal reached over to Kaipo. “Now relax. Besides, look at you. The red head. You’re half haole.”

“Not my fault.”

Everyone was watching Kaipo except for Soong. She was staring at her grandson. Always the actress. Donny turned to Kaipo. “So I guess you’re my new brother.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Crystal ordered another bottle of champagne. Won Ju looked at Kaipo with an almost smile. She liked him. Donny felt that only he could decipher the emotions that his older sister subtly displayed. His half-sister Darian, who had the bad habit of not leaving anything to decipher, spoke. “You know, I’ve been reading some stuff up at Berkeley about the effects of Western imperialization on the indigenous people of the Pacific. How even today the disenfranchised, like the Hawaiians, are still like second class citizens. First in heart disease, first in felony convictions. Some are becoming diasporatic and moving to the continent. Kaipo, how does it feel to be sitting in this dining room with these people?”