Hawaii - James Michener [403]
Of the Chinese families that were stricken on that awful day of January 20, 1900, when Chinatown was burned--by the will of God, the haoles said; by plan, the Chinese claimed--none was struck so hard as the Kees. When the first kerosene depot exploded, its flames burned down Africa Kee's office and destroyed his records. A whole barrage of firecrackers ripped through Asia Kee's restaurant and the resulting fires leveled it. Europe's Punti store was completely lost and so was America's dry-goods emporium. Every business building owned by the Kees was burned, including the homes of two of the brothers. Their families escaped with what they wore and little else. Only the cluttered house up Nuuanu was saved, but even its occupants--except Nyuk Tsin, who was working in the forest fields--had been herded into the concentration camps.
When Nyuk Tsin came barefooted out of the hills, with her two swaying baskets filled with pineapples, and found that much of Honolulu had been destroyed, including all the possessions of the Kee hui, and when she found that her family was dispersed--many of them dead, she supposed--she experienced a sullen terror, but she fought against it and said, as she stared at her empty home, "I must find my sons."
Fortunately, by force of habit she kept with her the swaying baskets of pineapples, so that when she had climbed the steep sides of Punchbowl and had come to 'the refugee camp the guards were pleased to see her and shouted, "Thank God, at last a Pake with food!" They let her pass, and after an hour of milling through the crowd she succeeded in collecting four of her five sons. No one had seen Asia leave his restaurant after the firecrackers had ripped it apart and it was reported that he was dead.
On the hillside overlooking Pearl Harbor, where the night lights of distant ships could be seen coming on, Nyuk Tsin convened her dazed family. They sat on rocks and looked down upon the desolate ruins of Chinatown, and in the silence of their crushing defeat Nyuk Tsin's Hakka instinct warned her that now was the time for her clan to pull courage out of its spasmed belly. As a woman she knew that on such nights of despair men were apt to surrender to the fate that had overtaken them, but it was a woman's job to prevent them from doing so. In the fading twilight she could see in the sensitive, shocked faces of Europe and America a willingness to declare the Kee empire ended. Blunt-faced Africa showed some of the fighting spirit to be expected in an educated man, but not much, while young Australia was burning with outrage because a soldier had struck him in the gut with a rifle. It was not much of a family that Nyuk Tsin had that night, nor was she herself in condition to inspirit her sons, for inwardly she was grieving for Asia, lost in the fire.
But she said quietly, so that no one else could hear, "It is unthinkable that the government will ignore what has happened."
"They destroyed all of Chinatown," America said with anguish in his voice. "They burned our stores on purpose because we wouldn't work on their sugar plantations."
"No," Nyuk Tsin reasoned, "the wind came by accident."
"That isn't so, Wu Chow's Auntie!" Europe cried, ugly with despair. "The merchants wanted this done. Last week they threw all the food I had ordered from China into the bay. They were determined to wipe us out."
"No, Europe," Nyuk Tsin calmly argued,