Hawaii - James Michener [345]
"You can always feed children," Kimo assured her. "Sometimes I worked. Sometimes the Pakes gave us a little money."
"Do they have the other child?" Nyuk Tsin asked.
"They never spoke," Apikela replied. Then the big woman noticed how frightened the boys were of their mother, and with a gigantic, embracing sweep of her huge arms she gathered them up as she had often done before. When they were huddled against her warm and ample body, she gave her belly a sudden flick, opened her arms and ejected a tangle of arms and legs at Nyuk Tsin. The scrawny little Chinese woman was engulfed, and then a strange thing happened. It was she who feared the leprosy, and instead of embracing her sons, she withdrew as if she were unclean, and the boys stared silently at their mother while she drew her hands behind her, lest she touch one of them.
"I am afraid," she said humbly, and Apikela withdrew the children.
After a noisy meal during which the boys chattered with Kimo, and Apikela asked a dozen aimless questions about Kalawao, Nyuk Tsin said, "I must go down to look at my land," and she set off for the four-mile jog back down the valley to where the boggy land lay, but again she passed it without stopping, for she was on her way to see the Punti and Hakka families, but none of them knew of her son. Because they were Carthaginian families, they felt obligated to help Mun Ki's widow, so they scraped together a set of garden tools, some seeds, a bag of taro corms and a bamboo carrying-pole with two baskets attached. With these Nyuk Tsin returned to her land, and there she worked till nearly midnight.
The low and boggy section she enclosed in dikes, for there taro would prosper. Furthermore, building the taro bed also drained the intermediate land, uncovering good alluvial soil, which she tilled for Chinese vegetables. This left a smaller, but still adequate high area where vegetables for the haoles could be grown. Thus, from the first night, Nyuk Tsin stumbled upon the system she was to follow for many years: taro for the Hawaiians, Chinese cabbage and peas for the Orientals, lima beans, string beans and Irish potatoes for the haoles. For she knew they all had to eat.
At dawn each day she slung her bamboo pole across her shoulder, hooked on the two baskets, jammed her conical basket hat upon her head, and set out barefooted for her garden. As her vegetables ripened, she loaded her baskets and began her long treks through Honolulu, and no matter how much business she produced at any one house, she was never as concerned with the money as she was to see whether this family happened to have a Chinese boy about four years old. She didn't find her son, but she developed a vegetable business that was becoming profitable.
When night fell, Nyuk Tsin continued working, putting her field in order, and after the stars had come out she would carefully place in her baskets those vegetables which she had not sold. Swinging them onto her shoulder, she would begin her four-mile trek back up the valley to the clearing where her sons were already asleep. There were many days when she never saw them, but as she sat in the night darkness with Kimo and Apikela she talked mostly of their future, and one night, when she had trudged up the valley in a heavy rain, she arrived home cold and wet and she was driven to recall the days in the lazaretto when the leper Palani told them of the world. So she woke her sons and stood before them, muddy and wet, and they rubbed their heavy eyes, trying to understand what she was saying. They could hardly speak Chinese and she was not adept in Hawaiian, but she explained: "Somewhere in Honolulu you have a brother, and his name . . ." The boys began to fidget, and she commanded them to stand still, but they could not understand.
"Eh, you kanaka!" Apikela shouted. "Shush! Your auntie speak you! Damned Pakes!" And the boys stood silent.
Slowly Wu Chow's Auntie spoke: "Your father wanted you to share the entire world. He wanted you to study ... to be bright