Hawaii - James Michener [437]
Ultimately, of course, the Kees did squeeze a boy into Punahou. It happened in a most peculiar way. In 1910 the Republican Party had difficulty finding the right man to run for the legislature from Chinatown and somebody made the radical proposal, "Why don't we run a Chinaman?"
"Oh, no!" one of the Hewlett boys protested. "I don't want that radical Africa Kee in government."
"I wasn't thinking of him. I was thinking of his brother Australia."
A hush fell over the caucus and smiles began to play upon the faces of the white men who ran the islands, for Australia was a man whom men could like. He wasn't too bright, played a good ukulele, was honest, didn't have too much education but did have a host of friends among both the Chinese and the Hawaiians, with whom he had been reared. Furthermore, he had an appealing nickname, Kangaroo Kee, and without even taking a vote the caucus decided that he was their man.
Kangaroo Kee was elected by a huge majority and kept on getting elected, and in time he became the leading Chinese in the Republican Party, a man everyone loved and trusted. Fortunately, he had a son who like himself was gloriously average, and in 1912 Punahou felt that at last it had found a Kee who could be safely admitted to the school.
On the day this boy enrolled, Nyuk Tsin walked secretly to the entrance of the school and hid behind one of the palms to watch one of her grandsons at last enter the great school. As she saw the bright faces of the haole children gathering for the beginning of the new term, chatting of vacation experiences, she recognized here a Hale and there a Whipple, and thought: "The white people are crazy to allow Chinese in this school. This is the secret of how they rule the islands and they have a right to protect their interests."
Then, coming up the street, she saw her grandson walking with his father, the politician Kangaroo Kee, and she withdrew into the shadows, mumbling to herself, "This boy knows nothing. He is not worthy of this great school. But he is our beginning."
FOR THIRTEEN YEARS Kamejiro Sakagawa rose every morning at three-thirty to cut wild plum, storing it for his hot bath. He then ran to work, labored till sunset, ran home and lighted his fire. He now charged two cents for the first ten men to enjoy the clean hot water, a penny each for all who cared to follow. Over the course of a year he obviously earned quite a few dollars, and like all the Japanese laboring on Hanakai he watched with excitement as his hidden funds reached toward the mystic number: $400.
From the arrival of the first Japanese back in the 1880's, it had been agreed that a man who could return to Hiroshima with $400 in cash could thenceforth live like a samurai. "With four hundred dollars," the workmen assured one another, "a man could buy three good rice fields, build a large house, get all the kimonos you would ever need, and live in splendor." Every plantation laborer was determined that he would be the man to accumulate the $400, and almost none did.
It was appalling how the money slipped through the fingers of a well-intentioned man. In Kamejiro's case his weaknesses were neither gambling nor women nor alcohol; no, his were far more expensive--friendship and patriotism--and they kept depleting his funds. If a workman faced what appeared to be an insoluble crisis, he went at last to Kamejiro and said bluntly, "I have got to have eighty-one cents."
"Why don't you borrow from the Japanese money lender in Kapaa?" Kamejiro asked.
"In Kapaa if you borrow eighty-one cents, next payday you have to pay back the loan and eighty-one cents more," the workman explained, and he was correct. No white man in Hawaii ever abused Oriental labor as viciously as the Orientals themselves did. Men close to the Japanese consulate had organized a racket whereby