corporation or labour union. One junk in five that was dragged up
through the rapids or lowered down was wrecked. One junk in every
ten was a total loss. The coolies of the towing guild knew the
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84
freaks and whims of the currents, and grappled, and raked, and
netted a wet harvest from the river. They of the guild were looked
up to by lesser coolies, for they could afford to drink brick tea
and eat number four rice every day.
And Ah Kim had been contented and proud, until, one bitter spring
day of driving sleet and hail, he dragged ashore a drowning
Cantonese sailor. It was this wanderer, thawing out by his fire,
who first named the magic name Hawaii to him. He had himself never
been to that labourer’s paradise, said the sailor; but many Chinese
had gone there from Canton, and he had heard the talk of their
letters written back. In Hawaii was never frost nor famine. The
very pigs, never fed, were ever fat of the generous offal disdained
by man. A Cantonese or Yangtse family could live on the waste of
an Hawaii coolie. And wages! In gold dollars, ten a month, or, in
trade dollars, two a month, was what the contract Chinese coolie
received from the white-devil sugar kings. In a year the coolie
received the prodigious sum of two hundred and forty trade dollars-
-more than a hundred times what a coolie, toiling ten times as
hard, received on the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse. In short,
all things considered, an Hawaii coolie was one hundred times
better off, and, when the amount of labour was estimated, a
thousand times better off. In addition was the wonderful climate.
When Ah Kim was twenty-four, despite his mother’s pleadings and
beatings, he resigned from the ancient and honourable guild of the
eleventh cataract towing coolies, left his mother to go into a boss
coolie’s household as a servant for a dollar a year, and an annual
dress to cost not less than thirty cents, and himself departed down
the Yangtse to the great sea. Many were his adventures and severe
his toils and hardships ere, as a salt-sea junk-sailor, he won to
Canton. When he was twenty-six he signed five years of his life
and labour away to the Hawaii sugar kings and departed, one of
eight hundred contract coolies, for that far island land, on a
festering steamer run by a crazy captain and drunken officers and
rejected of Lloyds.
Honourable, among labourers, had Ah Kim’s rating been as a towing
coolie. In Hawaii, receiving a hundred times more pay, he found
himself looked down upon as the lowest of the low–a plantation
coolie, than which could be nothing lower. But a coolie whose
ancestors had towed junks up the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse
since before the birth of Christ inevitably inherits one character
in large degree, namely, the character of patience. This patience
was Ah Kim’s. At the end of five years, his compulsory servitude
over, thin as ever in body, in bank account he lacked just ten
trade dollars of possessing a thousand trade dollars.
On this sum he could have gone back to the Yangtse and retired for
life a really wealthy man. He would have possessed a larger sum,
had he not, on occasion, conservatively played che fa and fan tan,
and had he not, for a twelve-month, toiled among the centipedes and
scorpions of the stifling cane-fields in the semi-dream of a
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
85
continuous opium debauch. Why he had not toiled the whole five
years under the spell of opium was the expensiveness of the habit.
He had had no moral scruples. The drug had cost too much.
But Ah Kim did not return to China. He had observed the business
life of Hawaii and developed a vaulting ambition. For six months,
in order to learn business and English at the bottom, he clerked in
the plantation store. At the end of this time he knew more about
that particular store than did ever plantation manager know about
any plantation store. When he resigned his position he was
receiving forty gold a month, or eighty trade, and he was beginning
to put on flesh. Also, his attitude toward mere contract coolies
had become distinctively aristocratic. The manager offered to
raise him to sixty fold, which, by the year, would constitute a
fabulous fourteen hundred and forty trade, or seven hundred times
his annual earning on the Yangtse as a two-legged horse at one-
fourteenth of a gold cent per junk.
Instead of accepting, Ah Kim departed to Honolulu, and in the big
general merchandise store of Fong & Chow Fong began at the bottom
for fifteen gold per month. He worked a year and a half, and
resigned when he was thirty-three, despite the seventy-five gold
per month his Chinese employers were paying him. Then it was that
he put up his own sign: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL MERCHANDISE.
Also, better fed, there was about his less meagre figure a
foreshadowing of the melon-seed rotundity that was to attach to him
in future years.
With the years he prospered increasingly, so that, when he was
thirty-six, the promise of his figure was fulfilling rapidly, and,
himself a member of the exclusive and powerful Hai Gum Tong, and of
the Chinese Merchants’ Association, he was accustomed to sitting as
host at dinners that cost him as much as thirty years of towing on
the eleventh cataract would have earned him. Two things he missed:
a wife, and his mother to lay the stick on him as of yore.
When he was thirty-seven he consulted his bank balance. It stood
him three thousand gold. For twenty-five hundred down and an easy
mortgage he could buy the three-story shack-building, and the
ground in fee simple on which it stood. But to do this, left only
five hundred for a wife. Fu Yee Po had a marriageable, properly
small-footed daughter whom he was willing to import from China, and
sell to him for eight hundred gold, plus the costs of importation.
Further, Fu Yee Po was even willing to take five hundred down and
the remainder on note at 6 per cent.
Ah Kim, thirty-seven years of age, fat and a bachelor, really did
want a wife, especially a small-footed wife; for, China born and
reared, the immemorial small-footed female had been deeply
impressed into his fantasy of woman. But more, even more and far
more than a small-footed wife, did he want his mother and his
mother’s delectable beatings. So he declined Fu Yee Po’s easy
terms, and at much less cost imported his own mother from servant
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86
in a boss coolie’s house at a yearly wage of a dollar and a thirty-
cent dress to be mistress of his Honolulu three-story shack
building with two household servants, three clerks, and a porter of
all work under her, to say nothing of ten thousand dollars’ worth
of dress goods on the shelves that ranged from the cheapest cotton
crepes to the most expensive hand-embroidered silks. For be it
known that even in that early day Ah Kim’s emporium was beginning
to cater to the tourist trade from the States.
For thirteen years Ah Kim had lived tolerably happily with his
mother, and by her been methodically beaten for causes just or
unjust, real or fancied; and at the end of it all he knew as
strongly as ever the ache of his heart and head for a wife, and of
his loins for sons to live after him, and carry on the dynasty of
Ah Kim Company. Such the dream that has ever vexed men, from those
early ones who first usurped a hunting right, monopolized a sandbar
for a fish-trap, or stormed a village and put the males thereof to
the sword. Kings, millionaires, and Chinese merchants of Honolulu
have this in common, despite that they may praise God for having
made them differently and in self-likable images.
And the ideal of woman that Ah Kim at fifty ached for had changed
from his ideal at thirty-seven. No small-footed wife did he want
now, but a free, natural, out-stepping normal-footed woman that,
somehow, appeared to him in his day dreams and haunted his night
visions in the form of Li Faa, the Silvery Moon Blossom. What if
she were twice widowed, the daughter of a kanaka mother, the wearer
of white-devil skirts and corsets and high-heeled slippers! He
wanted her. It seemed it was written that she should be joint
ancestor with him of the line that would continue the ownership and
management through the generations, of Ah Kim Company, General
Merchandise.
“I will have no half-pake daughter-in-law,” his mother often
reiterated to Ah Kim, pake being the Hawaiian word for Chinese.
“All pake must my daughter-in-law be, even as you, my son, and as