Part 3 (2/2)
Who, then, does the work of the island? It is obvious that it is being done. There isn't another island in the whole Pacific so modernized, so thoroughly equipped, so American in every detail, so progressive and well-to-do. It is the most sublimated of the sublime South Seas. One wonders how white men could have remained so energetic in the tropics, but one is not long left uninformed. Honolulu is an example of a most ideal combination of peoples, the inventive, progressive, constructive white man with the energetic, persistent, plodding Oriental. Without the one or the other, Honolulu would not be what it is; both have contributed to the welfare of the islands in ways immeasurable.
It is not surprising, therefore, to find the Oriental elements as much in evidence as the Occidental. One hardly knows where one begins and the other ends. As s.p.a.cious and individualized as are the European sections, so the Asiatic are a perfect jumble of details. The buildings are drab, the streets are littered, the smells are insinuating, the sounds excruciating.
A most painful noise upon an upper balcony of an overhanging Chinese building made me come to with a sudden clapping of my hands against my ears. As noise goes, it was perfect,--without theme or harmony. It could not have been more uncontrolled. What consolation was it that in China there was more of it! Grat.i.tude awakened in me for the limitations a wise joss had placed upon the capacities of the individual. Yet men are never satisfied. These Chinese weren't, and combined their energies.
What one man couldn't accomplish, several could at least approach. So we had a band. I should certainly never have thought it possible, myself.
However, they were trying to achieve something. It was neither gay nor mournful; nor was it sentimental. What purpose could it possibly have served? Surely they had no racial regrets or aspirations, they who played it! The bird sings to his mate, but what mate would listen to such tin-canning and howling, and not die?
To me there was something charming in this shamelessness of the Chinese, something childlike and nave. I had never realized the meaning of that little rhyme,
I would not give the weakest of my song For all the boasted strength of all the strong If but the million weak ones of the world Would realize their number and their wrong.
The thought is almost terrifying when applied to the teeming hordes of the world, whether of Asia, Europe, or the South Seas. If sheer numbers are any justification of supremacy, G.o.d had better take His old world back and reshape it nearer something rational. One becomes conscious of this welling up of the world in Hawaii. Not that the Chinese and the j.a.panese haven't the same right to life and to its fulfilment in accordance with latent instinct and ability, with all its special racial traits and customs, but one doesn't just exactly see how numbers have anything to do with it. Yet here are the Chinese and j.a.panese slowly, quietly, persistently out-distancing the white by a process of doubling in numbers, where mentality and ingenuity would doubtless fail.
One hears much about the progress of the Orient. That is, white folk talk much about the way in which the East is taking to Western ways, and call that progress. One would not expect that sort of progress to proceed with any great velocity in the East itself, but it is only necessary to observe the ingrowing tendencies of life in Hawaii, however superficially, to see how foolishly optimistic is the expectation of such progress. For even in Hawaii, where everything has had to be built afresh, where everybody is an alien--with very few exceptions--and where the dominant element is European, the East is still the East, and the West the West. There is a slight overlapping, but not enough to make one lose one's way,--to make a white man walk into a Chinese restaurant and not know it. The fastidious white man whose curiosity gets the better of him, moves about the Chinese and j.a.panese districts fully conscious of his own shortcomings. He is less able to feel at home there than the Oriental on the main street; but why doesn't the Oriental build for himself a main street?
I was abroad early one Sunday morning, headed for the Chinese section.
Lost in thought, I went along, gazing on the ground. Had Charlie Chaplin's feet suddenly come into my range of vision I should not have been more surprised than I was when two tiny shoes, hardly bigger than those of a large-sized doll, and with some of that stiff, automatic movement of the _species mechanicus_, dissipated my reflections. I raised my eyes slowly, as when waking, up, up, up,--hem of skirt, knees, waist-line, flat bosom, narrow shoulders, sallow face, and slit eyes! A Chinese woman! She was as big as a fourteen-year-old girl, but her feet were a third of their due proportion. How many thousands of years of natural selection went into the making of those little feet?
Yet she was a rare enough exception to astound my abstracted mind. About her strolled hundreds of others of her race, who would have given much of life to possess those two little feet.
Differences abound in Hawaii. The Chinese is no twin brother of the j.a.panese. In fact, there is probably as much relations.h.i.+p between the Hawaiian and the j.a.panese as there is between these two ”Oriental”
races. The major part of the j.a.panese being Malay and the Polynesian Hawaiians having at least lived with the Malays some hundreds of years ago and infused some of their Caucasic ingredients into them, there is more of ”home-coming” when ”j.a.p” meets ”Poly,” than when he meets ”c.h.i.n.k.” But notwithstanding proximity and propinquity, over which diplomatic letter-writers labor hard, when the Chinese and the j.a.panese and the Hawaiian come together, the Hawaiian ”vanishes like dewdrops by the roadside,” the Chinese jogs along, and the j.a.panese runs motor-cars and raises children. The j.a.panese obtrudes himself much more upon the life of the community than the other two races, but with no more relinquishment of his own ways. He drives the cars and he drives white men to more activity than they really enjoy. And the Hawaiian sells necklaces of luscious flowers under the shaded porticoes of the buildings along the waterfront.
[Ill.u.s.tration: MILES AWAY ROSE THE FUMES OF KILAUEA During the day they were ashen and at night like rose dawn]
[Ill.u.s.tration: THE LARGEST CAULDRON OF MOLTEN ROCK ON EARTH Eight hundred feet below it seethed]
[Ill.u.s.tration: A RIVER OF ROCK POURING OUT INTO THE SEA Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
[Ill.u.s.tration: WHIRLING EDDIES OF LAVA UNDERMINING FROZEN LAVA PROJECTIONS Photo, Otto C. Gilmore]
Aside from the adoption of our trousers and coat and hat, and a few other unimportant aspects of our civilization, the observer on the streets of Honolulu sees no mingling of races. The only outward sign of this mixing is the Salvation Army. There, large as life, with the usual circular crowd about them, stood these soldiers of misfortune, praising the Lord in English. A row of unlimited Oriental offspring upon the curb; a few grown-ups on the walk; a converted j.a.panese who looked as though his s.h.i.+nto father had disowned him; a self-conscious white boy who confessed to having been converted just recently; two indifferent-looking soldiers; a distrustful-looking leader and a hopeless-visaged white woman. Twenty feet away, a saloon. I wonder what the Salvation Army is going to do now that that object of attraction is no more.
As far as Honolulu was concerned, it seemed to me that barter and trade were more intoxicating to the majority than was drink. The world everywhere about seemed a-litter with boxes and bales and shops and indulgences. How much of all the things exchanged, how many of the things for which these people toil endlessly, are worth while or essential, or even truly satisfying? The dingy stores, their only worth their damp coolness; the huddling and the innocent dirt; the inextricable mesh of little things to be done,--only the Chinese sage who posed for my camera in front of his wee stock of yarns was able to tell their value to life. His long, thin, pointed beard, his lack of vanity in accepting my interest in him, his genial smile and fatherly disinterestedness symbolized more than anything I saw in Honolulu the virtue and endurance of race. Beside the eager, grasping j.a.panese and the rolling, expanding white men, he looked like the overtowering palm-tree that seems to grow out of the monkey-pod in the park.
6
To a creature from another world, hovering over us in the unseen ether, watching us move about beneath the sea of air which is life to us, Honolulu would seem like a little gla.s.s aquarium. The human beings move about as though on the best of terms with one another. Some look more gorgeous than others, but from outward appearances they are as innocent of ill intentions against one another as the aquatic creatures for which Hawaii is famous, out in the cool, moist aquarium at Waikiki.
Kihikihi, the Hawaiians call one of them, and his friends the white folk have christened him Moorish Idol. I don't know what Kihikihi means, but as to his being an idol, I can't accept that for a moment, except in so far as he deserves to be idolized. For about him there is no more of that static, woodeny thing which idols generally are than there is about Pavlowa. Yet he is only a fish, and not so very large at that. He is moon-shaped, but rainbow-hued. He is perhaps three-quarters of an inch across the shoulders, but six inches up and down, and perhaps eight from nose to the ends of his two tails. And so he looks like a three-quarter moon. Soft, vertical bands of black, white, and egg-yellow run into one another on both sides, and a long white plume trails downward in a semicircle. He is the last word in form, translucent harmony of color and of motion. He moves about with rhythmic dignity and grace. At times his eyes bulge with an eagerness and self-importance as though the world depended on him for its security. Though he is constantly searching for food, he does not seem avaricious; and while he admits his importance, he is not proud.
Kihikihi has a rival in Nainai, who has been given an alias,--Surgeon Fish, light brown with an orange band on his sides. Nainai is heavier than Kihikihi, more plump. His color, too, is heavier and therefore seems more restrained. It is richer and hence stimulates envy and desire.
Lauwiliwili Unkunukuoeoe has no aliases, thank you, but he has a snout on which his Hawaiian name could be stamped in fourteen-point type and still leave room for half a dozen aliases. Only a water-creature could possess such a t.i.tle as this and keep from dragging it in the mud.
Knowing that he would be called by that appellation in life, his Creator must have compensated him with plenty of snout.
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