I, your mother. And she must wear trousers, my son, as all the
women of our family before her. No woman, in she-devil skirts and
corsets, can pay due reverence to our ancestors. Corsets and
reverence do not go together. Such a one is this shameless Li Faa.
She is impudent and independent, and will be neither obedient to
her husband nor her husband’s mother. This brazen-faced Li Faa
would believe herself the source of life and the first ancestor,
recognizing no ancestors before her. She laughs at our joss-
sticks, and paper prayers, and family gods, as I have been well
told–”
“Mrs. Chang Lucy,” Ah Kim groaned.
“Not alone Mrs. Chang Lucy, O son. I have inquired. At least a
dozen have heard her say of our joss house that it is all monkey
foolishness. The words are hers–she, who eats raw fish, raw
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
87
squid, and baked dog. Ours is the foolishness of monkeys. Yet
would she marry you, a monkey, because of your store that is a
palace and of the wealth that makes you a great man. And she would
put shame on me, and on your father before you long honourably
dead.”
And there was no discussing the matter. As things were, Ah Kim
knew his mother was right. Not for nothing had Li Faa been born
forty years before of a Chinese father, renegade to all tradition,
and of a kanaka mother whose immediate forebears had broken the
taboos, cast down their own Polynesian gods, and weak-heartedly
listened to the preaching about the remote and unimageable god of
the Christian missionaries. Li Faa, educated, who could read and
write English and Hawaiian and a fair measure of Chinese, claimed
to believe in nothing, although in her secret heart she feared the
kahunas (Hawaiian witch-doctors), who she was certain could charm
away ill luck or pray one to death. Li Faa would never come into
Ah Kim’s house, as he thoroughly knew, and kow-tow to his mother
and be slave to her in the immemorial Chinese way. Li Faa, from
the Chinese angle, was a new woman, a feminist, who rode horseback
astride, disported immodestly garbed at Waikiki on the surf-boards,
and at more than one luau (feast) had been known to dance the hula
with the worst and in excess of the worst, to the scandalous
delight of all.
Ah Kim himself, a generation younger than his mother, had been
bitten by the acid of modernity. The old order held, in so far as
he still felt in his subtlest crypts of being the dusty hand of the
past resting on him, residing in him; yet he subscribed to heavy
policies of fire and life insurance, acted as treasurer for the
local Chinese revolutionises that were for turning the Celestial
Empire into a republic, contributed to the funds of the Hawaii-born
Chinese baseball nine that excelled the Yankee nines at their own
game, talked theosophy with Katso Suguri, the Japanese Buddhist and
silk importer, fell for police graft, played and paid his insidious
share in the democratic politics of annexed Hawaii, and was
thinking of buying an automobile. Ah Kim never dared bare himself
to himself and thrash out and winnow out how much of the old he had
ceased to believe in. His mother was of the old, yet he revered
her and was happy under her bamboo stick. Li Faa, the Silvery Moon
Blossom, was of the new, yet he could never be quite completely
happy without her.
For he loved Li Faa. Moon-faced, rotund as a water-melon seed,
canny business man, wise with half a century of living–
nevertheless Ah Kim became an artist when he thought of her. He
thought of her in poems of names, as woman transmuted into flower-
terms of beauty and philosophic abstractions of achievement and
easement. She was, to him, and alone to him of all men in the
world, his Plum Blossom, his Tranquillity of Woman, his Flower of
Serenity, his Moon Lily, and his Perfect Rest. And as he murmured
these love endearments of namings, it seemed to him that in them
were the ripplings of running waters, the tinklings of silver wind-
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
88
bells, and the scents of the oleander and the jasmine. She was his
poem of woman, a lyric delight, a three-dimensions of flesh and
spirit delicious, a fate and a good fortune written, ere the first
man and woman were, by the gods whose whim had been to make all men
and women for sorrow and for joy.
But his mother put into his hand the ink-brush and placed under it,
on the table, the writing tablet.
“Paint,” said she, “the ideograph of TO MARRY.”
He obeyed, scarcely wondering, with the deft artistry of his race
and training painting the symbolic hieroglyphic.
“Resolve it,” commanded his mother.
Ah Kim looked at her, curious, willing to please, unaware of the
drift of her intent.
“Of what is it composed?” she persisted. “What are the three
originals, the sum of which is it: to marry, marriage, the coming
together and wedding of a man and a woman? Paint them, paint them
apart, the three originals, unrelated, so that we may know how the
wise men of old wisely built up the ideograph of to marry.”
And Ah Kim, obeying and painting, saw that what he had painted were
three picture-signs–the picture-signs of a hand, an ear, and a
woman.
“Name them,” said his mother; and he named them.
“It is true,” said she. “It is a great tale. It is the stuff of
the painted pictures of marriage. Such marriage was in the
beginning; such shall it always be in my house. The hand of the
man takes the woman’s ear, and by it leads her away to his house,
where she is to be obedient to him and to his mother. I was taken
by the ear, so, by your long honourably dead father. I have looked
at your hand. It is not like his hand. Also have I looked at the
ear of Li Faa. Never will you lead her by the ear. She has not
that kind of an ear. I shall live a long time yet, and I will be
mistress in my son’s house, after our ancient way, until I die.”
“But she is my revered ancestress,” Ah Kim explained to Li Faa.
He was timidly unhappy; for Li Faa, having ascertained that Mrs.
Tai Fu was at the temple of the Chinese AEsculapius making a food
offering of dried duck and prayers for her declining health, had
taken advantage of the opportunity to call upon him in his store.
Li Faa pursed her insolent, unpainted lips into the form of a half-
opened rosebud, and replied:
On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales
89
“That will do for China. I do not know China. This is Hawaii, and
in Hawaii the customs of all foreigners change.”
“She is nevertheless my ancestress,” Ah Kim protested, “the mother
who gave me birth, whether I am in China or Hawaii, O Silvery Moon
Blossom that I want for wife.”
“I have had two husbands,” Li Faa stated placidly. “One was a
pake, one was a Portuguese. I learned much from both. Also am I
educated. I have been to High School, and I have played the piano
in public. And I learned from my two husbands much. The pake
makes the best husband. Never again will I marry anything but a
pake. But he must not take me by the ear–”
“How do you know of that?” he broke in suspiciously.
“Mrs. Chang Lucy,” was the reply. “Mrs. Chang Lucy tells me
everything that your mother tells her, and your mother tells her
much. So let me tell you that mine is not that kind of an ear.”
“Which is what my honoured mother has told me,” Ah Kim groaned.
“Which is what your honoured mother told Mrs. Chang Lucy, which is
what Mrs. Chang Lucy told me,” Li Faa completed equably. “And I
now tell you, O Third Husband To Be, that the man is not born who
will lead me by the ear. It is not the way in Hawaii. I will go
only hand in hand with my man, side by side, fifty-fifty as is the
haole slang just now. My Portuguese husband thought different. He
tried to beat me. I landed him three times in the police court and
each time he worked out his sentence on the reef. After that he
got drowned.”
“My mother has been my mother for fifty years,” Ah Kim declared
stoutly.
“And for fifty years has she beaten you,” Li Faa giggled. “How my
father used to laugh at Yap Ten Shin! Like you, Yap Ten Shin had
been born in China, and had brought the China customs with him.
His old father was for ever beating him with a stick. He loved his