Hawaii - James Michener [611]
But these fine words did not erase from Hong Kong's memory the anxiety he had suffered when in the examination room his auntie had sat in stolid silence like a Chinese peasant and now when he looked down at her citizenship paper, his former irritation returned and he protested with some petulance: "Oh, Wu Chow's Auntie! You didn't even pick up the right paper." He took the document from her and showed her where the strange name was written: Char Nyuk Tsin. But when he had read this name aloud to her, she said quietly and yet with great stubbornness, "I told the helpful man, 'Now that I am an American you must write on this paper my real name.'" And she climbed purposefully into the car, a small old woman who had made a great journey.
That night, terribly tired from the ordeal of citizenship, she lit her oil lamp, undressed, and inspected herself for leprosy. There were no lumps on her arms; her fingers were still good; her face was not deformed; and her legs were clean. Greatly relieved, she put the lamp on the floor so that she could examine her big feet, and in the morning Hong Kong found her there, a frail, naked, old dead body of bones, beside a sputtering lamp.
As THOUSANDS of once-proscribed Orientals gained citizenship and the vote, and as labor attained fresh power, haoles gloomily predicted that their day in Hawaii was ended, and no one felt this more strongly than Hoxworth Hale, for he was passing through a period of mist and fog, and his bearings were insecure: he was unable to understand his mercurial daughter or to communicate with his elfin-minded wife, who flitted from one inconsequential subject to the next. He tried diligently to maintain control of both H & H and of Hawaii, but he suspected that each was slipping away from him. Finally, the great pineapple crisis of 1953 struck and it looked as if Hawaii itself were crumbling.
The disaster first became known when a luna on Kauai inspected one of the far fields and discovered that all the plants which should have been a rich bluish green were now a sickly yellow. He immediately thought: "Some damn fool forgot to spray for nematodes." But when he consulted the records, he found that the field had been sprayed to control the tiny worms, so one of the pineapple botanists employed by The Fort flew over to inspect the dying plants and said, "This isn't nematodes. As a matter of fact, I don't know what it is."
In the second week of the blight, the once-sturdy plants fell over on their sides, as if some interior enemy had sapped their vitality, but there were no scars, no boring insects, nothing. The botanist became frightened and phoned Honolulu to discover that plants on scattered fields throughout the islands were beginning to show similar symptoms.
It would be an understatement to say that panic struck the pineapple industry. A raging fear swept the red fields and echoed in the Fort Street offices. Hoxworth Hale bore the brunt of the anxiety, because H & H had a good deal of its wealth in pineapples, while outfits like Hewlett's and J & W, who looked to him for leadership, were even more vulnerable. The loss in one year alone threatened to exceed $150,000,000, and still the botanists had no due as to what was happening to their precious charges.
The famous Englishman, Schilling, who had licked mealy-bugs and nematodes, was now dead, but research scholars went through his papers to see if he had left any clues as to further apprehensions. But that was only a figure of speech, for the drunken expert had left no orderly papers and no suggestions. He had died one night in a fit of delirium tremens in a poverty ward on the island of Kauai, the nurses not recognizing who he was