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By Root 4633 0

dictated to her family was the matter of houses; she considered it a waste of money to build pretentious homes, especially since reliable people spent their time working outside. Therefore she kept as many of her sons jammed into the bleak clapboard house and its sprawling sheds as possible. Obviously, not all forty-nine Kees could crowd into even that commodious shack, but an astonishing number did. Asia and his family were excused to live in back of the restaurant; Europe and his brood were permitted to live over the vegetable store, but all the others crowded somehow into the Nuuanu residence. There the Hawaiian wives cooked fairly regular meals and the grandchildren learned to talk pidgin and eat poi. By 1899 Africa could well have afforded a home of his own, but even though Nyuk Tsin allowed him to juggle every cent the hui commanded, she did not consider him capable of deciding where he wanted to live, so at thirty-one with a wife and five children, he stayed on at the old house. "It saves money," she said. The bulging house now owned four ukuleles, and fat Apikela, white-haired and benevolent, taught all her grandchildren how to strum the little instrument. It was a noisy house, with a Hawaiian mother and a hard-working, silent Chinese auntie.

The third particular in which Nyuk Tsin dominated her family was in the purchase of land. Her Hakka hunger for this greatest of the world's commodities would never be satiated, and she was haunted by a recurring nightmare: she saw her constantly increasing brood and there was never enough land for each Kee to stand upon and to raise his arms and move about. So whenever the Kee hui had a few dollars left over after paying education bills, she insisted that they acquire more land. To do so in Honolulu was not easy, for generally speaking, land, Hawaii's most precious resource, was not sold; it was leased. Nor was it parceled into acres or lots; it was leased by the square foot. The Hoxworths owned tremendous areas of land, inherited from the Alii Nui Noelani, and so did the Hewletts, inherited through the old missionary's second wife. The Kanakoa family had huge estates; and the Janderses and the Whipples, although they owned little, controlled enormous areas through leases. Whoever owned land grew wealthy, and it was the ironclad law of the great haole families never to sell. Hawaiians were willing to sell, but their land was usually in the country. Therefore, when the bent little Chinese woman Nyuk Tsin decided to get enough Honolulu land for her multiplying family her interests threw her directly athwart the established wealth of the island.

I remarked some time back that if the haoles in Hawaii had wanted to protect themselves from the Chinese they should have shot Uliassutai Karakoram Blake. That chance passed, and the Chinese got their education. In 1900, if the haoles had still wanted to maintain their prerogatives, and apparently they did, they should have shot Nyuk Tsin; but none had ever heard of her. They thought that the guiding force behind the Kee family was the lawyer, Africa, and they kept a close watch on him.

In late 1899 Africa found himself hemmed in, unable to make a move, and he had to report to his auntie: "It's getting almost impossible to buy land. The haoles simply won't sell."

"How much money does the hui have?" Nyuk Tsin asked.

"Four thousand dollars in cash, and we could convert more."

"Have you tried to buy business land toward Queen Street?"

"No luck."

"Leases?"

"No luck."

The Kee empire, almost before it got started, was stalemated, and it might have remained so had it not received dramatic assistance from a rat.

On Thanksgiving day in 1899 the blue-funneled H & H steamer Maui put into harbor after an uneventful trip from Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong and Yokohama. As its seamen curled their landing lines artfully through the air and then sent heavy hawsers after them, this brown rat that was to salvage the fortunes of the Kee hui scuttled down from ship to shore, carrying a hideful of fleas. It ran through some alleys and wound up in