Hawaii - James Michener [294]
"There may be some who decry this development, but I for one applaud it. Hawaii will be a stronger community when we use our Chinese to their fullest advantage, and just as I would never have been content to be merely a field hand, doing the same chore over and over again, so I am gratified when I see another man who, like me, is determined to better himself. At one point, when I was engaged in the business of bringing Chinese to these islands, I believed that when their indentures were discharged they would return to China. Now I am convinced that they will not do so. They have become part of Hawaii and we should encourage them to follow in our footsteps. Let them become educated. Let them initiate new industries. Let them become fellow citizens. For through them the dying Hawaiian race will be regenerated."
Honolulu's reaction was simple and dramatic: "The sonofabitch ought to be horsewhipped!"
Captain Rafer Hoxworth stormed: "We brought those damned Chinamen here under the specific understanding that after five or ten years in the sugar fields they'd go home. Good God! Whipple wants them to stay! It's by God downright indecent."
Captain Janders' son, and now Dr. Whipple's partner in J & W, said, "The old man must be out of his mind! Why, one of our biggest problems in running the plantations is that as soon as the Chinese get a chance they leave us and open a store in Honolulu. I .can take you to Nuuanu Street and show you half a dozen shops started by men who ought to be working for me right now, growing cane."
But what infuriated Hawaii most was the sly manner in which the Chinese, who had no women of their own, had been stealing Hawaiian women, and marrying them, and having babies by them. In spite of the fact that the babies were some of the most handsome ever bred in the islands, extraordinarily intelligent and healthy, the white community was outraged and passed laws to stop these criminal marriages. One edict forbade any Chinese from marrying a Hawaiian girl unless he became a member of the Christian church. The speed with which Chinese men learned the catechism was staggering, and one Chinese passed along to another the correct answers to the critical questions, so that it was not uncommon for a Chinese to utter, as his first words in broken English, the complete Nicene Creed plus explanations of the Trinity, the Virgin birth and Calvin's doctrine of predestination. One minister, after examining several such impromptu scholars, told a fellow Calvinist, "With my own ears I heard these men answer every important question correctly, and at the end I was tempted to ask one more, 'What does it all mean?' but I have never dared to ask even my Boston friends that fearful question, and I eschewed doing so here."
Actually, the Chinese made good Christians and did so without reservation. They were determined to have women, and conversion seemed a cheap price to pay. Those lucky ones who married Hawaiian girls with land and who grew to great wealth from manipulating that land, founded substantial Christian families and supported the large churches that were built by other Chinese; but when a male grandson was born, these prudent men went quietly to the Punti store and worked out a proper Chinese name for the boy, and sent that name back to the village hall, where it was written in the clan book.
As for the Hawaiian women, they preferred Chinese husbands to any other, for there were no men in the islands who loved women and children more than the pigtailed Chinese, and it was not uncommon to see a thin, bedraggled Chinese man, who had slaved all day on the docks for H & H, come home to where a hugely fat Hawaiian wife watched in idleness as he did the