• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4147 0

She led her four bright-faced boys back up Nuuanu Valley, taking them off into a smaller valley where in a field a large building stood. It belonged to the Church of England, for as soon as the Hawaiian alii discovered the gentle and pliant religion of Episcopalianism with its lovely ceremonies, they contrasted it to the bleak, un-Hawaiian Calvinism of the Congregationalists, and before long most of the alii were Church of England converts. They loved the rich singing, the incense and the robes. One of the first things the English missionaries did was to open the school which Nyuk Tsin now approached, and to the surprise of the islands the Englishmen announced: "In our school we will welcome Chinese boys." The idea of having Orientals in any large numbers in the big, important school at Punahou would in 1875 have been repugnant, and also prohibitively expensive to the Chinese, so the ablest flocked to Iolani, where Nyuk Tsin now brought her sons.

She was met by one of the most unlikely men ever to inhabit Hawaii, Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, a tall, reedy Englishman with fierce mustaches and a completely bald head, even though he was only twenty-eight. His adventurous Shropshire parents had been with a camel caravan heading across Outer Mongolia from the town of his first name to the town of his second when he was prematurely born, "jolted loose ere my time," he liked to explain, "by the rumbling motion of a camel which practically destroyed my sainted mother's pelvic structure." He had grown up speaking Chinese, Russian, Mongolian, French, German and English. He was now also a master of pidgin, a terrifying disciplinarian and a man who loved children. He had long ago learned not to try his Chinese on the Orientals living in Hawaii, for they spoke only Cantonese and Punti, and to him these were alien languages, but when Nyuk Tsin spoke to him in Hakka, it sounded enough like Mandarin for him to respond, and he immediately took a liking to her.

"So you want to enroll these four budding Lao-tses in our school?" he remarked in expansive Mandarin.

"They are not Lao-tses," she corrected. "They're Mun Ki's."

Uliassutai Karakoram Blake, and he demanded of his acquaintances his full name, looked down severely at Nyuk Tsin and asked, "Is there any money at all in the coffers of Mun Ki, y-clept Kee?"

"He's dead," she replied.

Blake swallowed. He liked this practical woman, but nevertheless he tried to smother her with yet a third barrage of words: "Have you any reason to believe that these four orphaned sons of Mun Ki have even the remotest capacity to learn?"

Nyuk Tsin thought a moment and replied, "America can learn. The others aren't too bright."

"Madam," Uliassutai Karakoram cried with a low bow that brought his mustaches almost to the floor, "in my three years at Iolani you are the first mother who has even come close to assessing her children as I do. Frankly, your sons don't look too bright, but with humble heart I welcome Asia, Europe, Africa and America into our school." Very formally he shook the hand of each child, then roared in pidgin, "Mo bettah you lissen me, I knock you plenty, b'lee me." And the boys did believe.

In later years, when Hawaii was civilized and lived by formal accreditations, no teacher who drifted off a whaling boat one afternoon, his head shaved bald, no credentials, with mustaches that reached out four inches, and with a name like Uliassutai Karakoram Blake could have been accepted in the schools. But in 1872, when this outlandish man did just that, Iolani needed teachers, and in Blake they found a man who was to leave on the islands an indelible imprint. When the bishop first stared at the frightening-looking young man and asked, "What are your credentials for teaching?" Blake replied, "Sir, I was bred on camel's milk," and the answer was so ridiculous that he was employed. If Blake had been employed in a first-rate school like Punahou, then one of the finest west of Illinois, it wouldn't have mattered whether he was capable or not, for after Punahou his scholars would go on to Yale, and