Hawaii - James Michener [401]
The first blaze in downtown Chinatown occurred at nine-forty, when a sizable ember fell upon a closely packed area of houses and ignited a central one. Gangs of firemen quickly surrounded the house to extinguish the fire, and after considerable effort succeeded in doing so; but while they were at that job, another ember struck a house of somewhat special nature. On the outside it looked like an ordinary home, but when it started to burn, all the Chinese nearby fled, and Hawaiian firemen alone were left to fight its flames.
"Come back!" an old Chinese man kept wailing in a language the firemen could not understand. Grabbing a young Chinese he shouted, "Tell them to come back!"
A group of daring Chinese hurried forward toward the burning house, grabbed the firemen by the hands and pulled them away. "Mo bettah you come back!" they yelled.
The firemen, who were terribly afraid of the Chinese after the troubles of the night before and who had been cautioned that the Orientals might attempt to riot when the burnings started, interpreted this strange behavior as the start of communal rioting, and stopped fighting the fire in order to protect themselves from the Chinese, and it was fortunate that they did so, for as they left, the house exploded. In a golden, smoky gasp of flame, the little house simply disintegrated, and then the firemen understood: it was one of the closed sheds in which some trivial Chinese merchant had kept his kerosene. But what the firemen did not understand was that the explosion, frightful though it had been, was merely the beginning of something worse; for now from the ruins a series of fantastic fiery rockets exploded through the city. Some threw stars into the air. Others pinwheeled through streets, and still others went up with a crazy, violent zigzag through the morning sky, falling at last on the roof of some new house, there to burn with vigor until its shingles too were ablaze; for the shed had harbored not only kerosene but also a store of fireworks for the Chinese New Year.
With the explosion of the shed, any hope of saving downtown Chinatown was lost, and for the next seven hours the anguished Chinese on the Punchbowl hillside, huddling behind the barbed wire of their refugee camp, could spot the progress of the huge blaze from one of these kerosene dumps to the next. All day the little sheds exploded with violence, throwing their flames into new areas, and wherever the fire went, sooner or later it found out a horde of fireworks, and when they soared into the air with their burdens of flame they seemed invariably to fall back onto areas that were not yet ablaze. And to make the destruction of Chinatown certain, the vagrant wind kept blowing from its unusual quarter in the hills. By midafternoon, it was apparent that hardly a Chinese house in mid-city would be spared.
When it became obvious that all was doomed, the Chinese fell into panic. Old men who could barely walk after forty-five years of work in the cane fields began running into burning houses to salvage some item of family life which they prized above any other, and they soon appeared in the crowded streets hauling carts, or running with bamboo carrying-poles, each with some useless treasure. No one thought to bring blankets or food, both needed in the refugee camps, and soon the streets leading out from Chinatown were jammed with a miscellaneous horde: barefoot old women in blue smocks, men in laboring shirts, pretty young girls, their hair in braids, and round-faced babies. From a Japanese tea house two geisha girls, their faces ashen with talcum powder, hurried nervously in pin-toed, mincing steps that kept their brightly colored kimonos swaying in the smoke, while old Punti women hobbled behind on stubby feet.