Hawaii - James Michener [268]
From two of the ceremonial pigs the bride's family cut off the heads and tails, wrapped them in silk and returned them to the Kees, indicating that the largesse had been both humbly and impressively received by the bride's family. But on her own account she sent three gifts to the groom: an embroidered red cloth which he would use as a belt, a wallet for the worldly wealth which she would help him earn, and two pairs of pants.
It was obviously going to be a tremendous wedding, and it dwarfed the thirty-one others that were proceeding at the same time. Two weeks before the Kees were scheduled to depart for the ship waiting at Hong Kong, the ceremony took place amid all the grandeur the two Lowland villages could provide, and when the days of celebration ended, young Kee Mun Ki brought his bride home and tried mightily to impregnate her before the time for sailing, but he failed.
On the morning when Uncle Chun Fat assembled his hundred and fifty Punti for the three-day hike to Canton, where they would board a river steamer for Hong Kong and the American ship, he saw before him a rather bleary-eyed, sexually exhausted group of men. "A good march along the river will toughen them up," he reassured himself, because he realized that if he could deliver his volunteers in good condition, he had a right to expect that subsequently Dr. Whipple would commission him to conscript many more, all at two dollars a head. He therefore moved among his troops encouraging them to spruce up, but when he came to his nephew Kee Mun Ki, he scarcely recognized him. The young gambler had been drunk for two weeks, hardly out of bed for ten days, and looked as if he might collapse during the first hundred yards of the march to Canton. Realizing that he had to depend upon this youth for transmitting orders to the Hakka, Uncle Chun Fat started slapping him back and forth across the cheeks, and slowly the young man's eyes began to focus. "I'll be all right," the gambler mumbled. "In Macao once I was drunk for three weeks. But not with a fine wife like the Kung girl." And Chun Fat saw with pleasure that when his nephew's services were really required, the brash young gambler would be ready. "You'll do well in the Fragrant Tree Country," Chun Fat reassured the young man. "I expect to," the young husband replied. It was just a little insulting, the way in which he spoke to his uncle on a man-to-man basis, as if they were equals.
Now came a moment of intense excitement, for down from the hills marched the contingent of Hakka, thin men, dressed in rude, tough clothing, their pigtails long and their faces tanned. Two months before, the arrival of such a group would have signified war; now it occasioned only mutual disgust. Defiantly, the Hakka marched up to where the Punti stood, and against his own prejudices Uncle Chun Fat thought: "They'll do well in the new country." Because he was making two dollars a head on the Hakka, and hoped to make more in the future, he wanted to go up to them and bow in greeting, but he realized that this might be interpreted as Punti subservience and would never be forgiven by his family, so he glared at them as custom required. For a long moment the two groups stood staring insolently at each other. During nearly a thousand years they had lived side by side without ever speaking; they had met only in death and violence; there had been only one marriage. Now, with their inherited hatreds, they were going to travel in a small ship to a small island.
Mun Ki broke the spell. Pulling himself together, he stepped forward and said to a man named Char, leader of the Hakka, "We will start to Canton now. Some of your men look tired already."
Char studied the young Punti to see if this was intended as an