Hawaii - James Michener [302]
Her big venture came when she discovered that two acres of swampland on the Whipple property could be converted into money. This time she went to Dr. Whipple and in the barbarous pidgin that all Honolulu spoke, conveyed to him the following: “Could I use this swampland?"
"What for?" he asked.
"To grow taro."
"Do you Pakes eat taro?"
"No. We will make poi."
"You don't eat poi, do you?"
"No. We will sell it to the natives."
Dr. Whipple made some inquiries and found that Nyuk Tsin had a good idea. The Hawaiians were now working for wages in livery stables and mechanics' shops and no longer wanted to waste their time making poi, so that the profession had fallen into the hands of Pakes. The bizarre idea appealed to Whipple and he told Amanda, "I've owned that swampland for years but it took a Pake to show me what to do with it. The more I see these people, the better I like them."
As the days passed he became increasingly impressed by what Nyuk Tsin could accomplish with land. Whenever she found a few minutes' respite from her long hours as maid, she would hurry down to her taro patch, tie her conical hat under her chin, roll up her blue trousers and plunge barefooted into the soft mud. She built dikes better than most men and constructed ingenious waterways that drained the land so it could be tilled and later flooded for taro. Dr. Whipple, watching her beaver-like industry, thought: "She has a positive affinity for the land." He was not surprised, therefore, when she came up to him one hot day, wiping her muddy hands on a bunch of grass, to ask, "Will you sell me the swamp?"
"Where would you get the money?" he teased.
She astounded him by disclosing how much she had already saved. "The rest I will get from selling poi, and year after year I will pay you the money."
This pleased Whipple, for it was the kind of frugal bargaining his own New England ancestors had probably engaged in when they wanted to send their sons to college; but he had to disappoint her. "This land's too close to our house to sell. But there's some up the valley I might let you have."
"Can we go see it?" Nyuk Tsin asked. "Now?" Her lust for land was such that she would have walked miles to see a field. For nearly fifty generations her Hakka people had yearned for rich valley lands, and here she stood among the choicest, determined to own some. That day it wasn't convenient for Dr. Whipple to take her up the valley to see the useless swampland he had in mind and later he forgot, but Nyuk Tsin never did.
Her progress to ownership was deterred by two setbacks. First her husband vetoed the idea of buying land, explaining: "We won't be here long. It would be foolish to buy land that we would have to abandon when we sailed back to China."
"I want a field," Nyuk Tsin argued in her stubborn Hakka way.
"No," Mun Ki reasoned, "our plan must be to save every dime we can get and take our wealth back to the Low Village. When we reach there, I'll send you on up to the High Village, because you wouldn't feel at ease among the Punti and my wife wouldn't want you around."
"What will happen to the boys?" Nyuk Tsin asked.
"Well, since they're really Punti, with Punti names, they'll stay with their mother." Seeing her shock he added hastily, "Of course, I'll give you a little of the money we've saved and you can buy yourself a piece of land in the Hakka village, and probably we'll see each other from time to time along the road."
"I would rather have land here," Nyuk Tsin pleaded.
"Wu Chow's Auntie!" Mun Ki snapped. We're not staying here."
Her second setback involved poi, for clever as the Chinese were, they could not master the trick of making this island staple. Nyuk Tsin raised the taro beautifully, and Dr. Whipple said he had rarely seen better. She harvested it correctly, removing first the dark green leaves to sell as a spinach-like vegetable. Then she peeled the stalks for cooking like asparagus, the flowers having already been sold to be eaten like cauliflower. This left the big, dark corms for the making of poi. In the raw state they