Hawaii - James Michener [594]
But Hoxworth Hale, seeing the effect of this pathetic marriage on his high-strung daughter Noelani, thought: "Unless I can help her, there's going to be another woman sitting upstairs in the late afternoons." But what help he should offer, he did not know.
IN 1951 Nyuk Tsin engineered her last big coup for the Kee hui, and in many ways it was her most typical accomplishment, for it derived from intelligence and was attained through courage. She was a hundred and four years old, sitting in her ugly house up Nuuanu listening to her grandson Harvey read the paper to her, when, in a shaky old voice, she interrupted: "What's that again?" Since Harvey was reading in English and speaking in Hakka, he could not be certain that he himself understood the confusing story, so phrase by phrase he repeated: "In American business today it is possible for a company which is losing money to be more valuable than it was a few years ago when it was making money."
Impetuously the old matriarch forced her grandson to read the strange concept three times, and when she had comprehended it she said in her piping voice, "That's exactly the kind of trick smart haoles think up for themselves and which we stupid Chinese never catch on to until it's too late." Accordingly, she summoned her great-grandson Eddie, Hong Kong's boy, whom she had sent to Harvard Law School, and told him: "I want a complete report on how this works."
At that time not much was known in Hawaii relating to this marriage of losing companies to those that were prosperous, but Eddie Kee applied himself to the task of assembling opinions from mainland tax courts, and within two months he was an expert in the field. Then, with several tax reports airmailed in from New York he reported back to his great-grandmother in her little house, and when he came upon her she was picking lint from a shawl, and he thought: "How can she be so old and yet so interested?" "Can you explain it now?" she asked in a high, cackling voice. "Fundamentally," Eddie began in his best professional style, "it's an old law and a good one."
"I don't care whether it's good or bad," Nyuk Tsin interrupted, her voice suddenly lower. "What I want to know is how it works."
"Take the Janders Brewery. For years it's been losing money. Now suppose next year it makes money. It won't have to pay any taxes because recent years' losses can be used to offset next year's gains."
"Makes sense," Nyuk Tsin nodded.
"But look at what else we can do," Eddie lectured stolidly, as if addressing a class of legal students. "If the Kee hui buys the brewery, we can then add to its assets all of our old pineapple land. Then if the brewery sells the land, the profits will be offset by the past losses of the brewery. Do you see what that means, Wu Chow's Auntie?"
Little Nyuk Tsin did not reply. She sat in the late afternoon sun like a winsome old lady embroidered on a Chinese silk. She was smiling, and if an outsider had seen her beatific, wrinkled face he might have thought: "She's dreaming of an old love." But he would have been wrong. She was dreaming of the Janders Brewery, and she said, "How heavenly! We can use the Janders' losses to balance the Kee profits!"
"Wu Chow's Auntie!" Eddie cried. "You see exactly what I'm talking about."
"But I'm afraid you don't see what I've been talking about," Nyuk Tsin replied.
"What do you mean?" Eddie asked.
"Suppose that we do buy the Janders Brewery and do hide our pineapple lands inside it . . ." she began.
"That's what I've been explaining," Eddie said gently. It was the first sign that day that Wu Chow's Auntie was losing her acuity.
"But what I'm explaining,"