Hawaii - James Michener [351]
In April and October, Nyuk Tsin faithfully trekked down to the Punti store with an appropriate number of dollars and sent them off to Kee Mun Ki's family in the Low Village. Always she took her four sons with her, even though it meant keeping them out of school, for she impressed them with this: "Even more important than education is filial duty, and you are four brothers who must work extra hard to pay the respect due your father and his family." She made each of the boys actually finger the money as it was turned over, and each of them touched the resulting letter. "Now you can go back to school," she said. Sometimes she thought it strange that she should be inculcating these ancient Chinese virtues not in the powerful Hakka language but in a broken Hawaiian pidgin. However, the virtues were self-evident and the boys understood.
Such was the year of Nyuk Tsin, the Pake Kokua, the Auntie. For herself she had one blouse, one pair of trousers, no shoes and one basket hat. She had a bamboo carrying-pole, two baskets, a poi factory that made no money, and two parcels of land that would one day be worth more than a million dollars. But the revolution in which this slim-hipped Chinese woman was involved stemmed mainly from the fact that she had four bright boys in Iolani, and when they were ready to move into Honolulu's economic life, fortified by Uliassutai Blake's inspired learning and their Auntie's frugal common sense, there would be little that could stop them.
And then one day in 1879, as Nyuk Tsin was leading her sons to the Episcopal church, she saw a Hawaiian family entering with seven children, and one of the boys looked Chinese. She began studying this child and concluded that he must be about eight years old, which would be the age of her missing son. She was not sure that he was Chinese, for he blended perfectly with his Hawaiian brothers and sisters, but when service ended she sent her sons home with thirteen-year-old Asia and quietly followed the Hawaiian family to their residence. She found it to be a large, rambling house on Beretania Street far out Diamond Head way, and the eight-year-old boy seemed fully at home there. She tried to ask a passer-by what the family's name was but could not make the man understand.
She now revised her peddling routes and walked miles out of her way to keep check on the big Hawaiian house, and in time she found that the Chinese boy went to school, seemed normally bright, and was known only by a Hawaiian name. Once she lugged her pineapples onto the veranda of the house itself and tried to engage the mother of the household in conversation, but the latter wanted no pineapples. When she had exhausted all her own ingenuity, she decided to discuss the matter frankly with Apikela, but as she was about to do so, her intuition warned her that the big Hawaiian woman would sympathize with her fellow Hawaiian who now had the child, rather than with its rightful mother Nyuk Tsin; furthermore, she concluded that this was the kind of adventure that would appeal to Kimo, who considered himself not exactly fitted for other kinds of work. Accordingly, she took the big, shirtless man aside and said, "Find out who those people are."
"I don't have to find out," he replied simply. "That's Governor Kelolo Kanakoa's house."
"Find out where they got the Pake child."
"Good," Kimo grunted, and he set off to the poolroom and in a short time reported: "The governor was on the docks one day when a ship came in with a little baby boy, and no one knew what to