ISSUE 06 || FALL / WINTER 2009
Years
of the Ox
J.D. Ho
When my
grandfather died in the spring of 1997,
I found three freezersful of meat in our garage, individual packages
labelled
with descriptions such as: “1984 Alaska Moose Hunt w/ Dink.” (Dink was
a guy my
grandfather had met while schmoozing at one of his NRA conventions.)
The
freezers stank like a crime scene, and with some chunks old enough to
vote,
much of the meat was no good. I quintuple-bagged it all and put it in
the
trash, but you could smell it all the way down to Papakolea, as
if
the gods were angry.
On July 1,
1913, sixty years before I fell onto
the earth, my grandfather was born. By the time I knew him, his pomaded
hair
had turned gray, but he always wore an expression of anticipation, his
head
pitched slightly forward, as if it wanted to arrive at every
destination first.
He had perfected his uniform, which consisted of aloha shirts from
Sears,
polyester slacks (usually gray or brown), and black, leather shoes from
B.A.
Mason. When he took his teeth out, my imagination leapt to cemeteries
with
silent gravediggers, or to the shadowy figures inhabiting the pages of
my
favorite mysteries. But with his teeth in, he was something closer to
the
earliest picture I have of him. In the photograph, he is perhaps
twenty, tall and
skinny, grinning at the camera, posed with his feet apart, bare torso
rippling
with muscle, arms flexed like a bodybuilder. He once claimed that when
he was
growing up, so many girls came to the house to see him that he had to
make his
brothers answer the door to turn them away. The story seemed made up,
but was
probably true. Much of my grandfather’s life had that quality.
My
grandfather’s father came from Quandong
Province in the 1890s, and worked in other parts of Hawai`i before
settling in
Pahoa, marrying, and having ten children. I never met my grandfather’s
mother,
but I imagine her squatting in the smoky fields with flecks of cane
dust flying
around her, clenching her gold-capped teeth, cursing in Chinese as the
eighth
little devil clawed his way out of her womb.[1]
Pahoa, a town
on the east side of The Big
Island, was a plantation village during my grandfather’s childhood.
Until 1940,
a heiau (Hawaiian temple) stood on its outskirts. Long before humans
arrived,
lichens, plants and insects colonized the lava, breaking it down until
a dense
forest grew, thick with ferns and `ōhi`a trees. Much of this was axed
to
make room for railroads, citrus trees, and sugar cane. It rains over
one
hundred inches per year in Pahoa.[2]
If you had stood there before the speculators arrived, the clouds would
have
hovered puffy and white above you. The uluhe ferns would have been so
dense
that you could barely walk without a machete, and it would have been
quiet.
Steam rising slowly from the sun-heated wet earth, everything green.
Insects
rustling around in the undergrowth. And in the `ōhi`a trees above you,
native birds having intimate conversations.
1913 was a
Year of the Ox. According to the
Chinese zodiac, oxen are loyal, patient, and dependable. My grandfather
was about
as patient as a dynamite fuse. He liked to cuss. His method was
postmodern,
perhaps initially invented to spare the ears of delicate ladies, but
easily
adapted to txting. “T.S., that’s all,”[3]
he’d always tell me when I wanted to go out with some boy. “I guess
you’re
S.O.L.,”[4]
he’d say when I asked for an allowance increase. “Shee,”[5]
he’d murmur while watching the Wahines get hammered by Stanford in the
volleyball championships. My grandfather spoke a mild pidgin (as
opposed to the
near Greek spoken by a Hawaiian pig hunter I once worked with), which
was
understandable to most people in Honolulu. He was partially deaf later
in life
(from gunfire), which forced me to become a master enunciator. That
combined
with my inheritance of his potty-mouth has caused me to cuss as if
speaking to
a spelling bee judge. Mo-ther-fuck-er. Noun. A person who disagrees
with you.
Sentence: That motherfucker doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
Pidgin
originated when sugar cane plantations
began their takeover of Hawai`i in the 1850s, attracting Chinese
coolies (the
“yellow peril,” or my grandfather’s parents, depending on whom you ask)
and
workers from Portugal. The next wave of plantation workers came from
Japan and,
after that, from the Philippines. It was a regular Tower of Babel
construction
site out in that sea of cane. The grammar of pidgin was influenced by
Hawaiian
constructions. In the same way that in Spanish, one says, “I like the
house
red,” but in English, it’s “I like the red house,” Hawaiian prioritizes
the adjective.
Instead of saying, “That house is scary,” in pidgin one would say,
“Scary, dat
house.” Verb tenses were simplified, shedding some peculiar English
constructions for the simple: “I going fix da motorcycle.” To indicate
the
past: “I went fix da motorcycle.” Japanese immigrants were later
arrivals in
the state, and pidgin was fairly developed by the time they arrived.
From the
Japanese language, though, pidgin picked up words of verification
placed at the
ends of sentences: “She get one Mercedes, yeah?” which, in standard
English
would be “She has a Mercedes, doesn’t she?” During the first evolutions
of the
language, Hawaiian was the base language, or lexifier, but later, after
the
1875 Reciprocity Treaty with the U.S. was signed, the lexifier became
English.
Pidgin is elegant in its own way, but fading from usage. But the speech
patterns, constructions, and cadences are hard to eliminate completely,
even
for those (like me) who barely speak pidgin at all.
My
grandfather’s first language was Chinese, but
the kindergarten teachers at Pahoa Grammar School smacked it out of him
with
their rulers. My grandpa often used the old Chinese pronunciations --
flied
lice (fried rice), stlongbelly (strawberry) -- along with a healthy
serving of
vocabulary incomprehensible to someone from outside the state. Pidgin
displays
a wonderful range of sounds that seem to suit the place they’re from.[6]
The words my grandfather most frequently used are:
•
bumbye:
later. I going fix em bumbye.
•
pake:
Chinese (implies that you also mean the person is a tightwad). That
pake like
me pay high interest.
•
etty-etty:
gunk. You get some etty-etty on your face. Go get one napkin.
•
tita:
tomboy/tough girl. That tita pushing you around, you tell da principal.
•
blala:
lazy guy. Look that blala standing around on the street corner!
•
mahu:
effeminate man. Look the mahu wearing one skirt.
•
bolohead:
bald. I going get bolohead when I stay old.
•
ono:
yummy. Where’s that ono sushi you went buy?
•
hanabata:
boogers. Eh! No pick your hanabatas in public!
•
shee-shee:
pee. You better go shee-shee. Long drive North Shore.
·
holoholo:
gallivanting.
You like go holoholo with your friends, you better finish your
homework.
•
puka:
hole. My sock get one puka in the toe.
•
haole:
caucasian. All those haoles look alike.
The whole
state is an archipelago of words, with
a population wandering around seemingly speaking in tongues. What a
strange
place it must have been, this new land poured from lava, thick with
trees and
ferns and vines none of the settlers had ever seen. New immigrants were
arriving every day from every part of the earth. My grandfather’s
parents had
always lived among people of their culture, their language, and their
race. But
my grandfather was born in this new world. It belonged to him in a way
it could
never belong to his parents. He spoke pidgin with the other plantation
kids,
picking up the language that allowed him to communicate with anyone.
When I
complained, my grandfather would try to
get me to count my blessings by relating how he’d had to get up at four
in the
morning and pack a bowl of rice before going to work in the cane
fields. By the
time he got to school, his hands were all cut up from the stalks, and
it was
hard to hold the pencil. How much of the story is true, I don’t know. I
do know
that the workers usually assembled at 5:30 in the morning, and began
work at
six. The lunch break was at 10:30, a schedule the schools might have
accomodated (though I can find no evidence of that). The labor was
hard, and
involved using a cane knife, a kind of machete, that sliced through the
stalks
near their bases. The cane grew taller than the workers who carried the
stalks
to the mule or the train. It was harvested by hand until 1955.[7]
Long before
he was my grandfather, he was a
skinny little boy lying in his bedroom with his brothers crowded around
him, in
bundles that barely qualified as beds, dreaming of escaping the
agricultural
life. As a teenager, my grandfather rode a Harley and belonged to a
gang. He
wore pants with legs wide enough to go around a woman’s waist. His was
a family
of daredevils. His brother, the locally famous volcano photographer,
relished
standing at precipices of fire, rapt as a moth, with his lenses aglow.
After working
and saving money for two years, my
grandfather still didn’t have enough to go to the mainland for college,
but he
received his degree in Civil Engineering from the University of
Hawai`i. His
first job was Assistant Surveyor for the County of Hawai`i (The Big
Island).
Often, when we were driving around, he’d say, “I built that bridge” or
“I built
that road.” He literally made Hawai`i what it is today.[8]
My
grandfather was in ROTC, and was called to
join the Army (the 299th) in Februrary 1942, two months
after
witnessing the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He spent four years in the
service,
trying to make order out of chaos while my grandmother rationed food
and built
a shelter in the yard for herself and the first of four screaming
babies.
Two days
after my grandfather was called to
active duty, he married my grandmother. Of course, my grandmother got
pregnant
and had to have the baby all alone (on June 29, 1943) while my
grandfather
served his country, a fate she probably hadn’t considered in the
whirlwind
romance of having a soldier propose.
We were at
war with the Japanese, but the Texans
who came to Hawai`i to lead the troops didn’t know Chinese from
Japanese from
Korean. They told my grandfather he’d be shot for looking like a Jap.
They
didn’t want to send him out, but they needed engineers. My grandfather
spent
the war in Saipan, Guam, and Okinawa setting up temporary hospitals.
In Saipan, he
befriended a local Japanese guy
from Hawai`i, an interpreter. During a stop in Hong Kong, they went
out,
probably breaking a few marriage vows, or at least getting really
drunk. They
barely made it back to the ship by five p.m., their Asian curfew. The
Marines
showed my grandfather a bullet and said, “After dark, this is for you.”
My
grandfather said he was lucky he made it
back.
He never told
me his Pearl Harbor story -- what
he was doing that morning, and what happened in the aftermath. (Most
people
were used to military exercises in the islands, and thought the bombing
was
more of the same.) He also never told me about the days following the
bombing,
how everyone on Oahu had to register, like Joseph and Mary in
Bethlehem,
putting their names and fingerprints on record. Everyone was given
immunizations and gas masks. Martial law and curfew were instituted on
December
8, 1941. The FBI rounded up hundreds of Japanese residents, some of
them
citizens, whom they had listed as potentially dangerous.[9]
In a place that was more than a third Japanese, racism could have
paralyzed the
city. There was certainly suspicion and fear. It must have been strange
to look
out on a sea of Japanese faces you knew (or even loved) and think that
maybe a
relative of your classmate had tried to kill you, had forced your
country into
war. In the end, the sheer economic impossibility of shipping 160,000
people to
the mainland allowed nearly all of the Japanese people in Hawai`i to
remain.
My
grandfather missed the rationing and the air
raid sirens and the disappearance of some of his Japanese friends. He
missed
the streets being overrun with mainland soldiers and prostitutes. He
missed the
first year of his first child’s life. And in his letters home, I did
not yet
exist. You couldn’t have cobbled me together, even with the most
far-flung
existing DNA.
After the
war, my grandfather worked as a civil
engineer. In New Jersey, the equivalent might be to say that he worked
in
cement or waste management, if you get my drift.[10]
It’s impossible to unearth exactly how far my grandfather’s connections
reached
and what he did with them beyond what I knew. My friends called him the
Corner
Mafia, and there’s abundant evidence that they were right.
He hid it
well. There were no mysterious thugs
showing up at the house in the middle of the night, nor did police or
FBI
agents pound on the door. Of course, this is why my grandfather had his
office.
Despite the fact that he was retired, he went there every day. A visit
revealed
that the office was decorated with leather couches and paintings of
naked women
(beyond my limited writerly capabilities to describe, but he likely
purchased
them at the annual art fair held at the Neil Blaisdell Arena, a venue
specializing in dramatic ocean scenes and faux pointillist attempts to
get
Hawai`i down on canvas), which may be an indicator of the type of
person
accustomed to paying a call. While emptying the place after he died, I
also
found a stash of porn.
But if you
doubt the mafia connection, consider
the following:
•
Fact:
At one point in time, we had four Mercedes in the driveway, one of
which had
the uncharacteristic license plate, “B JAMN.” My grandfather first
asked me
what this meant, and then bragged that he had gotten the car from a
drug
dealer.
•
Fact:
Often, my grandfather would come home bearing brand new stereos or
other
electronics (my grandfather’s idea of brokering a television peace
treaty
between me and my grandmother was simply to bring me my own
television),
claiming that his friend Irwin had given them to him. I had a sweet
turntable
with a dual tape deck and radio, which I think of the way some boys
think about
their first car.
•
Fact:
Bringing home a case of Dom Perignon one day, my grandfather explained
that
some guy at a bar had given it to him.
•
Fact:
Instead of getting the car inspected, my grandfather would dispatch me
to the
inspection station with cash in an envelope. I would give the envelope
to a guy
named Ray (who wouldn’t even ask me about the car) and return home with
the
inspection sticker.
•
Fact:
My grandfather made a lot of money in the 70s when his decrepit office
building
mysteriously burned down and he received a truckload of insurance money
because
the property had skyrocketed in value since the time when he had
purchased it.
•
Fact:
Hawai`i politics has long been dominated by the Democrats in Tammany
Hall
fashion, and my grandfather was always invited to political fundraisers
for
candidates of both parties. Since he didn’t hold any sort of elected or
appointed office, I can only imagine what this meant. He called our
Senator
“Brother Dan,” and didn’t hesitate to ask him for favors, such as
getting me a
job.
One of the
jobs the Senator got me was at the
Nature Conservancy. I was like a CIA agent for nature. We were sent to
remote
outposts to wipe out the enemy—invasive species, such as guava, lantana
(which
I hate to this day), and passiflora. We met with informants, one of
whom showed
us a lobelia species with only one individual remaining in the wild.
Period.
Unassuming in appearance, resembling a little palm tree, Cyanea
shipmanii
was considered extinct until one of our contacts discovered the last
plant and
built a fence to protect it from a looming, rotting `ōhi`a tree. Other
species had a few individuals in the wild and seedlings being
propagated in
greenhouses. Like some TV character with inexplicable multiplicities of
abilities, I also worked in a lab propagating rare native plants in
test tubes
under a sterile glass hood while I wore goggles and regularly doused my
arms
with alcohol so I wouldn’t contaminate the plants, which grew not in
soil, but
in agar gel. My supervisor was a Robert Redford-esque plant lab
handler, who
was the only person I could trust with the plants’ lives. Sometimes he
had only
a piece of leaf with which to clone a hundred baby plants. With such a
small
sample of genetic material, the chances of mutation increase, but that
is the
story of most native Hawaiian plants, which arrived in the islands
lonely,
often in the digestive tracts of birds.
Hawai`i is
the most isolated land mass on earth,
and possesses a level of biological diversity surpassing the Galapagos.
We
often picture tropical flowers as enormous, but the flowers that made
their way
to Hawai`i had a longer journey than most, and it was often the
smaller, more
modest flowers that colonized the islands. Imagine floating in the
ocean or
blowing on a current of wind for 2,500 miles. Imagine arriving on a
rock, a
barren void of lava, hard and crusty and inhospitable, but with a thin
layer of
soil created by wind and rain. That was all there was, a long time ago.
It was
probably very quiet.
Hawai`i was
for a long time a land without
predators and without mosquitoes. For the native birds, life was like
several
years spent in the womb, chirping away in the `ōhi`a trees, free of
disease and free of giants trying to make capes out of you. This is why
whenever a snake rears its ugly head in the islands, it makes the
evening news
the way a bomb threat would in New York City. (Snakes decimated the
native birds
of Guam. And I mean decimated.)
In the
Hawai`i before it was Hawai`i, before the
Polynesians arrived with their boats and their pigs and their rats and
their
coconuts and their sugar cane, there were far more species than we
would ever
suspect if we go walking in the forest today. Because there were no
land
mammals (that’s right, no land mammals)
in Hawai`i before the Polynesians arrived, the native birds had no
experience
with predators except for avian ones, such as the pueo, a native owl.
They were
therefore both diverse and relatively defenseless. There were birds
whose beaks
seem like something improbable, unlikely, and downright strange. Gone
is the
wonderfully named King Kong finch (Chloridops regiskongi), who
had a
beak like a muscle car. The tortoise-jawed moa nalo (Chelychelynechen
quassus) was a monster of a bird that could swallow Jonah if Jonah
had come
to Hawai`i instead of being thrown into the ocean. There was an ibis (Apteribis
glenos), a flightless one, with a beak delicate and long. The `o`o (Moho
nobilis) was a honeycreeper with a characteristic long, curved bill
that
could reach deep into the tubular flowers of the native lobelias. The
whole
thing seems prehistoric and dinosauresque, a primitive swamp, acrid
with smoke
from the volcanoes, steaming with ocean spray and towering with giant
leaves.
Hawai`i is a
place where someone like my
grandfather could call himself a conservationist because he tramped
around in
the forest and killed feral ungulates, pheasants, and quail, which were
all introduced
species. The house was decorated with taxidermied boar heads, deer
heads, mouflon sheep heads, and entire
birds in
action poses. We had more guns than dinner plates. These ran the gamut
from an
ancient Colt .45 to hunting rifles to sleeker handguns. I thought
nothing of
finding them in strange places, like behind Shakespeare’s plays, or
under the
bed.
My
grandfather bred hunting dogs, Brittany
Spaniels.[11]
Out back, behind our patio, at the edge of a forest draping over the
mountain,
were eight kennels. (After my grandfather died, I discovered that the
kennels
were illegal, on state land, not our property.) We often had four or
six dogs,
and an annual litter of puppies. There was nothing like sitting in the
warm
whelping shed on a small wooden stool while the puppies crawled blindly
over
the straw. When I first came to live at the house, my grandfather had
an old
dog named Charlie, who became my dog. Charlie never made a sound until
my
grandfather took the other dogs hunting, and left Charlie behind. Then
he bayed
like Cerberus trapped at the edge of the underworld, all day and all
night,
while the other dogs loped along the slopes of Mauna Kea, their paws
barely
making noise in the mist and the cold.
I never went
hunting with my grandfather, a fact
I regret even now. By the time I decided I wanted him to teach me how
to shoot,
the doctors were trying to find the cause of the strange pain in his
side. He
went quickly from scaling mountains and bringing down bucks to lying in
his bed
talking to the dead. It’s a strange thing to sit with someone who’s
dying.
They’re like a bridge to the other world. Even after he died, I felt
his
presence in the rooms. I remembered vividly my first magical night in
the
house. The wind and the trees. The antique lamp in the corner. The
Chinese
horses on the shelves. The dogs talking amongst themselves somewhere I
couldn’t
see. The scent of jasmine drifting up to me.
The house was
a behemoth, built for a family
with four children and six dogs and some stray cats. It had four
bedrooms, a
library, a sewing room, a TV room, a dining room, a living room, a
kitchen, a
lanai, and an extensive garage.[12]
My grandfather had built it to withstand games of tag and homework and
loads of
books and heirlooms from dead ancestors. He built it so the windows
would never
have to be closed; the weather rushed through rain or shine. It housed
the junk
of generations. Rooms that once held children later held antiques and
boxes
full of doll clothes, scarves from Japan, dishes, figurines,
photographs,
outdated dresses, fabric, lampshades, and other items that could be
neither
classified nor parted with.
It was like
nothing I had ever seen. (My mother
was a minimalist, who moved us around with only a duffel bag each, and
who shed
possessions like skin cells she never wanted to see again. We were
always on
welfare and lived in apartments until we were evicted.) I spent many
rainy days
looking through the boxes. A whole summer tackling the patio, which
contained
everything my mother had left behind.
Unlike my
mother, my grandfather enjoyed excess.
Holiday dinners were multicultural feasts with sushi and venison and
olives and
pickles and turkeys and Chinese jello (kanten), and my grandfather
presided
over the cornucopia like a king. My grandmother, the miserable cook,
once a
year redeemed herself by making a stew none outside the family would
eat. It
was too weird for my haole friends, only one of whom even accepted it
politely
in her bowl. It had ten kinds of mushrooms and fungus and
unidentifiable
ingredients. Things called “little ears,” and red dates and vermicelli
noodles
made of mung beans. My grandmother called it monk’s food because the
monks in
China used to eat it, and maybe still do.[13]
She made gau, a brick-like dessert, a mixture of mochi rice and sugar,
steamed
within an inch of its life. These and other things filled our table
along with
champagne and apple cider and pots of jasmine tea. Pies and cakes and
cookies
and candies were crammed on the buffet beside the dining table. Always,
the
special tablecloth was brought out from the buffet drawers, then the
special-occasion plastic sheet was laid on top.
The food
didn’t stop after the holidays. We
visited relatives who had entire truck beds heaped with papayas, or
relatives
who owned macadamia nut chocolate factories, and piled our arms with
candies.
Boxes often arrived from my grandfather’s friend Masa, who was a farmer
on
Maui. He sent soybeans, jars of pickled Maui onions, pickled Japanese
vegetables, and takuan (pickled Japanese radish). From fundraisers, my
grandfather brought home plates of kulolo (taro pudding), haupia
(coconut
pudding), mochi (rice dessert), poke (squid salad), sushi, and cookies.
In the
yard, he grew Okinawa tangerines, regular tangerines, oranges, papayas,
pohas
(like a tomatillo, but sweet), herbs, lichees, pomelos, lemons, and
three kinds
of avocados. He made me ume musubis (rice balls with pickled plums). He
took me
to the Chinese bakery for things I can say but can’t spell -- doughy
sesame
balls filled with beans, ti-leaf-wrapped slabs of sticky rice pierced
with a
red-dyed stick. I have not even mentioned dim sum, char siu bau, arare,
li hing
mui, Portuguese sausage, kim chee, kinpira, malasadas, pork lau lau,
hulihuli
chicken, kalua pig cooked in an imu (a dirt pit filled with hot
stones). These
are all the things that at one time sat on our kitchen table. Our house
was a
land of plenty, like a kipuka in a field of lava, an island of life.[14]
Even if
humans could live without food, my
grandfather would have refused. He demolished a half tin of butter
cookies in a
sitting (he had no real teeth to lose, having rotted them long ago),
devoured
whole steaks, downed two beers at every dinner. He went shopping for my
friends, bringing home chips and cookies and cereal bars and ice cream
and
popsicles and frozen pizzas in case we were hungry. He lamented my
grandmother’s abilities, and cooked most things himself. He thought the
greatest invention was all-you-can-eat buffets.
All that food
powered him. He strode through his
days, and I raced to keep up. He was here and there, meeting one person
or
another, shaking hands, timing his six-mile walk up the mountain,
schmoozing on
different islands and in different towns. He mowed the lawn, trimmed
the trees,
trained the dogs, repaired the kennels, harvested the fruit, tinkered
with the
lawnmower, washed and polished the cars, and wheeled and dealed. He
would
rather have dug a ditch than sit around doing nothing.
He believed
in hard work. When I brought home an
A-minus, he asked why I hadn’t gotten an A. When I watched television,
he asked
if I’d finished my homework. He bought me a coffee maker so that I
could stay
up late. He shouted from the bottom of the stairs so I could get up
early. He
believed you could never do too much, and thought I should “butter up”
my
teachers with gifts, just in case. He believed in being practical and
realistic. When I won $300 in a story contest, he told me that was the
only
money I would ever earn as a writer. He gave me three options: I could
become a
doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. (I chose: None of the Above.) He held
the bar
way above my head and told me to jump higher when I missed. He was
afraid I
would end up like my mother.
He called her
Pee-Wee. He loaded her with leis
and good fortune when she left to attend California College of Arts and
Crafts.
It was a dismal proposition if ever my grandfather saw one, but he gave
her
money, and he let her go because she was his favorite. Of course, being
my
mother, she dropped out to smoke dope with hippies in the Haight. She
took my
grandfather’s money and went to Greece, to England, and to France,
where
somehow I snuck in, forcing her to return to the states in a hurry.
She didn’t
come home to Honolulu until
destitution forced her to. She was the prodigal daughter, the wastrel,
the one
who had used all the money so her little sister had none. I was too
young to
know what happened in that brief period when I was in diapers and liked
to sun
on the lanai, but she and I soon left again, returning to California.
It
probably surprised my grandfather not at all when my mother
disappeared,
leaving me in San Francisco with nothing to my name but my single
duffel bag.
He flew out from Hawai`i to get me, like a knight in the only warm coat
he
owned.[15]
Persephone,
the daughter of Zeus and Demeter,
was one day stolen by Hades from a field of flowers. Hades took her to
the
underworld to be his queen. In the myth, it is Demeter who searches,
heartbroken, for her disappeared daughter. In my story, it was my
grandfather
who searched. The darkness of Hades had stolen over my mother little by
little
until it swallowed her whole. Just as Demeter during her search clung
to the
newborn child of Celeus and Metaneira and held him in the fire to burn
away his
mortality, so my grandfather did with me, dragging me with the force of
his
will out of darkness and into the world where I might function, and
maybe even
prosper. He didn’t roam the earth, or even visit the underworld in the
manner
of Orpheus (I suspect he didn’t want to admit that was where my mother
had
gone), but he took to visiting psychics, especially toward the end of
his life
when he was locked in a battle of wills with cancer.
The search
for my mother went on in the
background, out of my sight, and the lengths to which my grandfather
had gone
only became clear after he died. He hired detectives when the San
Francisco
Department of Social Services didn’t try hard enough. He mailed check
after
check to our old address in the Mission in hopes that one might be
cashed. He
had no pride. He would have done anything to bring her home.[16]
We went on
occasion to see a Vietnamese woman
named Lan Vo, who was eerily omniscient, and had a painting of Christ
on the
wall behind her chair. It was as if my grandfather was already stepping
into
the world of the spirits. Lan Vo told him that his daughter was among
nuns,
somewhere far away. Maybe she purposely lied to him. Maybe she thought
he
needed hope.
Lan Vo wasn’t
the only one. There were two
others, maybe more. My grandfather liked to complete things. He liked
straight
answers. But he was willing to put logic and facts aside. Those things
had
already failed to find my mother.
I sat with my
grandfather as he died. I held his
hand through the night in the dark and ghostly house. If ever there was
a
moment when I saw God, it was then, when he was coming down to take
away the
person I most loved. During those hours, my grandfather’s visions
began. Or
maybe the spirits of his dead mother and sister had always lived
outside our
house among the orchids and empty terracotta pots, invisible unless
death was
near.
In Hawai`i,
we believe in ghosts. The world is
full of legends and spirits. You can’t drive across Old Pali Road if
there is
pork in your car; you’ll anger Pele, the volcano goddess who sometimes
appears
as an old woman and demands kindness from strangers. Menehunes live in
the
forests. Offerings must be made to the gods. Sacred warnings must be
heeded.[17]
The gods are vengeful and mercurial, consuming whole towns in sprays of
fire
and rock, or tidal waves as powerful as desire. In this land of a
panoply of
story, it didn’t seem strange that my grandfather kept walking the
house,
pointing things out to me, like the ten grand in cash he had stashed in
the
back of the linen closet over the years. A folded and refolded sheet of
paper
marked the dates when he’d added each of the 100 hundred dollar bills.
Our house sat
on an old cinder cone called
Tantalus,[18]
which had an eponymous road curving the whole way up the mountain. Much
of the
land is forested, the road roofed with canopies of monkeypod trees and
vines
reaching toward the scattered sun. Groves of bamboo grow thick,
gnarling the
ground with their roots, their darkness rich with mosquitos. The
menehunes
watch from their cover of green, and from the ridge, at an old stone
wall, you
can look down on all of Manoa Valley and the city, spread out and
growing,
trying to block out the ocean. The Tantalus of Greek myth is best known
for
giving us the word “tantalize” because he was cursed to stand in the
water,
unable to drink, unable to eat the fruit hanging just out of his reach.
In
another incarnation of his punishment, a feast is set before Tantalus,
but a
rock is suspended over his head, threatening to drop so that he can
never enjoy
the food before him. That was my grandfather. He’d lived a life of
bounty, but
in the end, he wanted to see my mother, and that was the one thing he
couldn’t
have. She embodied his regrets and his mistakes, and he wanted to fix
them.
Stories and
tales leap from the lava and the
leaves. There are places that feel unreal, like they should be heaven.
Or hell.
There are places barren of life, covered in lava. Places where it rains
400
inches each year. As a little girl, I slid down a snowslope at the top
of Mauna
Kea. As an adult, I hiked up a cold, damp mountain scattered with gorse
from
Scotland, uneven from the hooves and the grazing of cattle. I couldn’t
see more
than ten meters in front of me. I didn’t know where I was, or what time
of day
hung above me in the invisible sky. This is where I picture my
grandfather,
walking forever with the dogs, his rifle at his side. No place. No
time.
Telling one of his hunting buddies a story.
I picture him
as the star of a 70s TV show.
Something like The Rockford Files except in Hawai`i, and
starring my
grandfather instead of James Garner. My grandfather would be more
well-connected with the underworld than Rockford. He’d
consort with gamblers and pimps, Yakuza
and thieves, all the while fighting crime. People would hire him to
find
deadbeats and fugitives. Maybe he’d be a former con who’d done time at
Halawa
Correctional Facility. He would be on the path to redemption, using his
past
experience to rope in the bad guys for the cops. He would drive a 70s
Plymouth.
He’d stay on the right side of the law, but only by putting one foot on
the
wrong side. He’d talk like Jack Webb in Dragnet, if Webb had been
Chinese, and
had spoken pidgin.
Hawai`i was
my grandfather’s place in every cell
of his body. He was the child of immigrants, born by the cane fields of
the
past. Throughout his life, he watched the coming of the future. He was
there
when airplanes first brought tourists. He was there when interstate
highways
connected the towns. He was there when computers first became desk
fixtures. He
was there during Pearl Harbor, and when President Eisenhower signed
legislation
making Hawai`i the fiftieth state. He survived hurricanes and tsunamis.
He
watched highrises and hotels take the place of beachside stands.
He was the
house with its ocean views, the
balcony, the lava walls, the pine floors, the fruit trees, the rusting
clothesline, and the illegal dog kennels in the back. He was the roads
winding
up the mountains and into the valleys. He was the downtown streets
where
everyone knew his name. He was the cheap diners run by old Filipinos.
He was
the Kapi`olani Bakery and the malasada store and even the DMV. He was
the
airport where he taught me to drive. He was the forest where I hefted a
weed
wrench on my shoulders and pulled out lantana and guava to save the
native
trees. He was the sun blazing down on the cars. He was the beach where
my
friends and I went to swim. He was the school where 150 of my relatives
had
gone before me. He was the cemetery where he’d attended many funerals
before
his.
Each animal
of the Chinese zodiac is influenced
by one of five elements, depending on the year. The elements are metal,
water,
wood, fire, and earth. There are twelve animals, which means that only
every
sixty years do oxen of the same element occur. Born sixty years apart,
my
grandfather and I were both water oxen, supposedly more intuitive and
flexible
than the other years. A few weeks later, and I could have been a tiger,
but I
was born at the right time. I fell into line behind my grandfather with
the
smell of the dirt and the weeds under my hooves and the feel of the sun
on my
hide, until one day I looked up from leaning my shoulder into the plow
and
found that he was gone. The last time I closed the dog kennel gate, it
was like
pulling a giant tree out of the earth by its roots with a tractor. It
was like
sawing in there to chop at what won’t let go. Even as my childhood
mountain
disappears from the map, eroded by wind and rain, fountains of fire
extend
their fingers and come crashing down into the ocean amid clouds of
smoke and
steam and the smell of burning salt.
After my
grandfather died, the house kept giving
me gifts in his stead. The cavernous closet under the stairs yielded a
pocket
television with a 3-inch screen and an antenna, which my grandfather
had taken
to football games in order to watch replays. (I used it to watch The X-Files when I didn’t have a real
television.) I found an orange hunting jacket whose label was nothing
so
fashionable as Cabela’s, but rather an ammunition company. His old,
glass
compass that opened out with a metal arm, and had a padded case of its
own. His
engineer’s measuring tape. An Army hat stained from wear, with a seam
sewn so
it fit my grandfather’s head. I took his Army portrait and his Shriner
portrait, and an old Army bag with metal plating inside the canvas. I
took his
Captain’s jacket with its patches. I took all of these things, as much
as would
fit in my suitcase, for my journey down the mountain and across the
sea. I never
visit the old house. It’s only a memory, a kipuka in a field of lava.
The ancestors
exist only in the things I carry,
in the things my grandfather gave me. I took those things, and headed
in a
different direction. I use abbreviations to swear, but mine are N.F.W.,
F.A.,
and H.F.C.[19]
My obsession with politics echoes my grandfather’s, except on the other
side of
the aisle.[20]
I never took my pug hunting. I learned to shoot handguns, rifles, and
shotguns,
but I don’t own a firearm of any kind. Instead, everyone in my stories
packs
heat, consorts with crooked politicians, and likes to tell tall tales.
I hear
my grandfather’s voice in my head, his words and deeds coming to life
on my
pages. A river of curses and gibberish flows from my tongue, and a rain
of bullets
explodes from my pen.
Sources:
Allen,
Gwenfread. Hawai`i’s War Years: 1941-1945. Pacific Monograph,
1950.
Barnes, Phil.
A
Concise History of the Hawaiian Islands. Petroglyph Press, 1999.
Sakoda, Kent
and
Jeff Siegel. Pidgin Grammar: An Introduction to the Creole
Language
of Hawai`i. Bess Press,
2003.
“On the
Brink:
Hawai`i’s Vanishing Species” by Elizabeth Royte. National
Geographic,
September 1995. Vol. 188, No. 3.
Sato, Hiroo. Pahoa
Yesterday. Self-published, 2002.
Interview
with
my grandfather, Ah Leong Ho, by historian K. Scott Wong. Conducted
6/30/95.