Hawaii - James Michener [299]
It was in 1868 that Nyuk Tsin and the Chinese community throughout Hawaii finally realized how strange and barbarous the white man's society really was, for word came into Honolulu that the ancient father of the Hales had died alone, ignored and untended on the island of Maui. The news was difficult to believe, and Nyuk Tsin gathered her Hakka friends at the Hakka store, while Mun Ki sat on his haunches in the Punti store trying to get the appalling news into focus. In both stores this was the news:
"You say the father of all these famous and rich people was allowed to die in poverty?"
"Yes. I was there, and I saw them find his old worn-out body in the cemetery."
"What was he doing there, this old man?"
"He had gone to care for his wife's grave, and then he was doing the same for the grave of some Hawaiian lady. It looked as if he had died late in the afternoon, falling over the Hawaiian grave, and he was there all night."
"You say he lived in a pitiful little house?"
"So small and dirty you wouldn't believe it."
"And here his children have such big houses. Have you seen the houses of his children?"
"No. Are they good and fine?"
"Li Lum Fong works for his son Micah, and he says Micah's house is one of the best in Honolulu. The old man's first daughter is married to Hewlett, and they have much wealth. His second daughter is wed to one of the Whipples, and they have a big house, and his second son also married a Whipple, so he is very rich."
"Have his children grandchildren among whom the old man could have lived?"
"The families have two grandchildren, and five, and five, and six."
"And he died alone?"
"He died alone, caring for the graves, but no one cared for him."
When this was said, this harsh summary of the white man's fundamental unconcern for human values and respect for one's ancestors, the Chinese in the various stores sat glum, bewildered. Some of them, reminded of their longing to see some ancestral hall in a remote Chinese village, would rock back and forth on their haunches, trying vainly to comprehend a family with four big houses and eighteen grandchildren who had allowed an old man to die alone and untended. How could the families be indifferent to the bad luck attendant upon such an untended death? In such discussions the Chinese often wanted to speak, to say, "How I long to see my father in the High Village!" but no words came, and they returned to their gloomy discussion of Abner Hale's death.
"Wasn't he the old man who knocked down the Chinese temples?"
"Yes. I saw him once running in with a club. He limped, but when he was knocking down temples he was extremely vigorous, and the plantation managers had to put a guard on him, every day, and if the little old man started for a temple the guard would shout, 'Here he comes again!' and white men would run out and capture him and take him home."
"You would think, under those circumstances, that it would be the Chinese who wanted to see him dead, and yet it is we who are mourning him, and his own family cares nothing about his death."
But in the big houses there was profound, silent grief. A Mormon missionary told Micah Hale: "On the last day your father met the ferry and inquired after the girl Iliki. He then picked some flowers and I met him on the road leading to the church graveyard. He shook his stick at me and cried, 'You are an abomination. You should be driven from the islands.' If I had had my thoughts about me, I should have followed him then, for he seemed weak and faltering, but so often we do not do that which we should, and I passed him by, keeping away from his stick. He certainly went on to the church and tried to get the pastor to allow him to preach again on Sunday, but as you know, he wandered so much that preaching was hopeless, and the minister put him off. That was the last anyone saw of him. He was found fallen across the grave of an alii nui of Maui, a woman, I believe, that he himself had brought into the church.