Memoir: Tales of Desperation and Ingenuity

Blood and bloodlines

When I was nine my father pooled his and my mother’s savings from their overseas jobs to move us from Okinawa to Southern California, which he’d chosen for the density of golf courses. He’d also considered South Carolina, but after a lifetime in the tropics he was done with humidity, so San Diego it was.

It was the early 70’s. My father bought two Lincoln Continentals – a Town Car for himself and a Coupe for my mother. Having spent his life on islands, he got a kick out of navigating the massive steel beast down six-lane highways, driving state to state for fun, playing Mantovani on the eight track, and flicking cigarette ashes into a vinyl bag he dangled from the dash lighter. I’d slide down the bench seat as far away as possible from the smoke while keeping an eye on the bag for when it ignited, which, because my father chain smoked, it invariably did.

As my father drove, he would tell me stories.

There was the story of his father, who was part of the first wave of Korean immigrants that came to Hawaii in search of work in the sugarcane fields and pineapple plantations. After he’d found a job moving lava rocks to build the jetty in Nawiliwili Harbor, he wrote to his fiancée in Korea inviting her to take a steamer across the Pacific. She wrote him back that she’d changed her mind about leaving Korea but knew a classmate living in a Christian orphanage who might be interested. Her friend had been sent to the orphanage as a child by her father, a scribe for the Korean court who didn’t have the time nor patience to raise her, and she had become too old for adoption. My grandfather then wrote to this young woman, and after exchanging letters, she agreed to come to Hawaii to marry him. My sister later told me a different story: our grandmother, desperate to escape the orphanage or forced marriage to an undesirable man, had intercepted her friend’s letters from my father and, seeing his picture, surreptitiously wrote back to him pretending to be her friend, telling him that she had lost interest in him. She then took up corresponding with him herself. My sister said that it explained how our homely grandmother tricked our handsome grandfather into marrying her.

The theme of our family stories was about desperation forcing ingenuity.

My grandparents had seven children, my father being the youngest. He told me stories of his childhood on the sugarcane fields of Kekaha and Wailua, working six ten-hour days a week irrigating, weeding and harvesting crops from the red sunbaked dirt. I learned how family matters were settled through violence: the older kids beat on the younger, their mother kept order with a stripped pine branch, and my grandfather, often drunk and angry from his latest gambling loss, vented his frustration on the boys by whipping them with his belt for the slightest infraction, like the pathetic man in the Joyce story who caned his son for allowing the coals in the woodstove to extinguish.

My father told me how David, the eldest son, was revered by all the siblings and feared by the other kids on the plantation and at Wailua High School, where he was the captain of the basketball team. After school and work, David took my uncle Stanley and my father diving in the open ocean to catch fish for the family dinner. My father would swim out with his brothers over jagged coral beds and beyond annihilating waves, through schools of barracuda and lurking sharks, then descend below the surface, pulling themselves deeper along the reef’s mottled wall, wielding pronged spears in search of Ula, Ahi, octopus and crab. They swam back to shore only when David decided they’d caught enough to feed the family, sometimes returning after dark. If the day’s catch was few or the fish small, my grandmother would heavily season the meat with chili pepper to keep the kids from eating more than a few bites at time.

Steering his luxury car with one hand, cigarette in the other, my father adjusted his tinted gold-rimmed glasses, turned up the air conditioning and turned down the instrumental banality of the car stereo as he told me how his mother saved canvas rice sacks to be sewn into pairs of underwear and how on the rare days when he and his brothers had free time they’d spend the afternoon in the lee of the shade trees along Barking Sands beach, and as night fell they’d dig a firepit in sand fine as sugar, later lying on the warmth of the buried embers to sleep under starlight.

He told me about how he and Uncle Stanley hunted wild boar in Koa wood forests with their Japanese friend Stanley Tanaka, who they nicknamed Savage because he liked to strip off all his clothes to stalk the pigs, then sneak up and kill one with a knife.

He told me how his brothers fought Filipino boys for sport and reputation after first negotiating the prohibition of machetes. Years later when I’d visit Uncle Stanley, we’d sit in the stovetop humidity of his kitchen, he in frayed shorts and a stained tank top, marinating kalbi meat, sipping Suntory whiskey and snacking on homemade kimchi while recounting the violent history behind every scar on his leathery skin.

My father told me stories of my grandfather’s weakness for alcohol and gambling, and how he’d try to sneak home late at night but was unable to escape the beatings given to him by my grandmother who waited up in ambush, pulling him by his suspenders as he tried to get away, his bare feet slipping along the floor as he ran in place like a cartoon character. Fed up, she took a bus to the far end of the island and met with a kahuna who gave her a poultice to smear on our grandfather’s face as he slept, which, after she’d done so, permanently stifled his compulsion for gambling and drinking.

My father told me about how as a young man Uncle David died of an asthma attack because there was no money for a doctor or medicine, and how his mother would clear the weeds from David’s grave every week, the tiny pendant picture of him affixed to the tombstone fading to blankness, until she was laid to rest next to him.

 My father told the story of witnessing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, driving his police car down Kalakala Avenue past the fresh shrapnel damage against the walls of the Buddhist temple, and seeing the smoke billowing from the hangars at Hickam Field.

He told me how after the war the only way he could feed his family was by getting a government job, so he saved his money for a suit and tie and taught himself to speak proper English so he could get work overseas building military bases, absorbing the condescension of his white bosses and ridicule of friends accusing him of forsaking his pride by trying to blend. He told the story of meeting my mother on Okinawa, and how on the weekends they’d mimic high society by dressing up in formal wear to go dancing at the Harborview Club, where they’d snack on Vienna sausage and spam canapes. He told me how when they finally achieved the dream of having money to spare – a phenomenon - he’d fly to Hong Kong to buy teakwood furniture for the house, jade jewelry for my mother, and treated himself to a Rolex perpetual movement watch, which I still have today, but never dare to wear.

Watching him contentedly behind the wheel of his gas-guzzling luxury sedan in his double-knit polyester slacks and yellow Jack Nicklaus golf shirt, smoking his filtered Benson and Hedges, everything about him so bourgeois and westernized, I could not imagine him poor, hungry, and desperate, just as I couldn’t picture him swimming in the ocean or hunting wild pigs. I heard these stories so often they ceased to evoke any kind of wonder, but wonder was not the desired outcome: they were told to me to drive home the point that a lot of people had come very far and struggled a great deal to give me the opportunity to live in The Greatest Country in the World, and I was not allowed to squander it, and must make good by escaping my class as they had done, and become very wealthy. But what I really got from those stories was that storytellers are in my family, and stories are in my blood. Depending on how I later looked at it, they either saved my life or were the worst things to have ever happened to me.