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By Root 4588 0

realities: Mun Ki was a leper and the law said sternly that he must give himself up, and be exiled for the rest of his life to a dismal lepers' island. He was different from all men, for he was irretrievably doomed to die of the most horrible disease known to man: His toes would fall away and his fingers. His body would grow foul, and from long distances it would be possible to smell him, as if he were an animal. His face would grow big and thick and scaly and hairy, like a lion's; and his eyes would glass over like an owl's in daylight; and then his nose would waste away, and his lips fall off, and the suppurating sores would creep across his cheeks and eat away his chin until at last, faceless, formless, without hands or feet, he would die in agony. He was a leper. Those were the thoughts of pigtailed Mun Ki on the hot July day in 1870 when he walked bedazed and in mental anguish back from Iwilei.

His wife, walking boldly beside him and keeping his doomed fingers in her protecting hand, had a much simpler thought: "I will stay with him, and if he must hide in the hills, I will hide with him, and if he is caught and sent to the leper island, I will go with him." In these simple thoughts she found solace, and never once in the months that followed did she deviate from them.

When she led her stupefied husband back to the kitchen at Dr. Whipple's she did exactly as the quack doctor had ordered: she brewed the ugly-smelling herbs and made her husband drink the broth. Where the doctor had pierced the finger with his dirty needle, she cleaned the wound, sucking it with her lips. Then she put Mun Ki to bed and cooked the evening meal, serving it by herself.

"Mun Ki not well," she explained in the spacious dining room.

"Shall I look at him?" Dr. Whipple asked.

"No," she said. "He be good quick."

Nyuk Tsin had to keep her diseased husband--for the quack's medication did no good whatever--away from public view, for that year there had been a general roundup of lepers, and some one hundred and sixty had been shipped off to the leper island to perpetual banishment and slow death; suspicious watchers had perfected tricks whereby to trap unsuspected lepers. One man boasted: "I can look at the eye of a leper and spot the disease every time. There's a certain glassiness you just can't miss."

Another argued: "What you say's true, but that comes late in the disease. The trick is to spot it early, before others can be contaminated. The way to do this is to look for thickening of the facial skin. That's the sure sign."

"No," the first man countered. "There's only one sure sign. When you shake a man's hand, dig your fingernail into his flesh, and if he doesn't wince, you've got a leper every time."

Nyuk Tsin, watching her husband carefully, felt relieved that neither his eyes nor his facial skin yet betrayed the secret ravages of the disease, but she also noticed that he shivered more noticeably than before and that the sores on his feet were growing. "Somebody will see them, and they will tell the police," she thought. To prevent this she went to the Chinese temple, and ignoring Lu Tsu, who had betrayed her, she knelt before the statue of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and prayed: "Help me, gentle Kwan Yin, to keep Wu Chow's Father free. Help me to hide him."

These were evil years, indeed, in Hawaii. Before the coming of the white man, leprosy had been unknown. Then, in some unfathomable way, the alii contracted it, possibly from a passing sailor who had become infected in the Philippines, and from 1835 on, the great ravager had swept through the nobles of the island, so that the disease was secretly known as the mai alii, the sickness of the nobles, but coincident with the arrival of the Chinese, the virulent killer attacked the common people, who therefore gave it a permanent name: the mai Pake. In the areas from which the Hakka and Punti had come, leprosy was rarely known and it had never been a conspicuously Chinese disease, but the unfortunate name was assigned, and it stuck, so that in 1870 if a Chinese was caught with it,