Hawaii - James Michener [352]
"But he's a Pake," Nyuk Tsin argued. "He's mine."
"Of course!" Kimo agreed. "He's your boy, but he belongs to the governor."
Patiently, but with swelling emotion, Nyuk Tsin reasoned: "I did not give the child to the governor. I sent him to you, to keep for me till I got home."
"But what did it matter who got the child?" Kimo reasoned back. "The boy has a home and parents who love him. He has others to play with and enough food. What does it matter?"
"I want him to grow up to be a Chinese," Nyuk Tsin argued, growing nervous.
"I don't understand," Kimo said blankly. "When I was young my father always had two or three sailors who had fled their ships, hiding out in our fields up there. Swedish, Americans, Spaniards, it didn't matter. Sometimes they had babies with my sisters, and where are the babies now? I don't know, neither do my sisters. And are they Spanish or Hawaiian? Who cares?"
Nyuk Tsin found herself making no headway with Kimo, so against her better judgment she enlarged the debate to include Apikela, and as she suspected, the big Hawaiian woman instinctively sided with the boy's Hawaiian mother. "You must think of how much the governor's wife has grown to love this boy," Apikela reasoned.
"But she has six children of her own!" Nyuk Tsin replied in growing despair.
"They aren't all her own!" Apikela replied triumphantly. "Some were left in the street and one I know comes from Maui."
"I am going to get my son," Nyuk Tsin said stubbornly.
"Pake!" Apikela warned. "He is no longer your son."
Nyuk Tsin spoke unwisely: "Are the other four boys no longer my sons, either?"
Softly Apikela replied, "No, Pake, they are not yours alone. They are now my sons too." She did not have the words to explain that in the Hawaiian system the filial-parent relationship was completely fluid, and son-ship derived not from blood lines but from love. No child was ever left abandoned, and some of the most touching narratives of Hawaiian history stemmed from the love of some peasant woman who heard the cries of an unwanted girl baby whom the alii had left beside the sea to perish, and the peasant woman had rescued the child and had raised it as her own until war came, or some other great event, and then the child was revealed in full beauty. It had happened again and again. Apikela was unable to explain all these things to her Pake friend, but she did add this: "In all the Hawaiian families you see, there will always be one child that was found somewhere. A friend gave the child to the family, and that was that."
Stubbornly Nyuk Tsin repeated her question: "Then my boys are not my sons?"
"Not yours alone," huge Apikela repeated. The little Chinese woman, steeled in the Hakka tradition of family, stared at her big Hawaiian friend, reared in the softer tradition of love, and each woman typified the wisdom of her race, and neither would surrender, but as always, it was the copious Hawaiian who made the overture of peace: "Surely, Pake, with four boys we have enough for two mothers." And the big woman was so persuasive that even though Nyuk Tsin despised the concept being offered, and saw in it an explanation of why the Hawaiians were dying out and the Chinese were thriving, she could not ignore the testimony of love that she saw in the happy faces of her sons. Even if they did have to live suspended between Hawaiian love and Chinese duty, they were thriving; so at last Nyuk Tsin allowed herself to be drawn into Apikela's great arms and cherished, as if she were a daughter and not an equal. Then the big woman said, "Now that our tempers are at peace, let us go see the governor's wife."
Sedately, she and Kimo and the Pake walked down Nuuanu to Beretania and then out toward Diamond Head, and when they got to the governor's big house, Apikela said softly, "I will speak," and as if