The Chock Family
A Stranger in Paradise
Grandmother Chock lived in a spacious three-bedroom wooden house on a one-acre lot just off the main road in Hanalei behind the large old derelict building that once used to be the Chock Chin Store. There was a wire fence around the house with a wide double gate that opened out in front that kept in the chickens, which were always running around in the yard. These weren’t friendly chickens, I soon found out when I reached out to pet one and it violently pecked at my hand, drawing blood. They also had a tendency to crap all over the place, so one had to be very careful where one stepped. Since coming to Hawaii I had, like all the other local kids, taken to going barefoot. There was nothing more icky than experiencing soft chicken shit oozing between your toes. But this was only one of the new dangers I had to be aware of; another thing was not to step on a freshly run-over frog while walking along the main road.
There were frogs in abundance all around the area, and they loved to enjoy the warmth of the asphalt. They were also too dumb to get out of the way speeding cars. The squashed frogs turned out to be soft and icky as well. After they dried out in the sun for a few days, however, they became hard and mummified and you could kick them around, sort of like flattened tin cans.
The first thing that I noticed when I walked into Grandmother Chock’s house, aside from the pleasant smell of freshly polished wood and the loud ticking of the wooden regulator wall clock pendulum, was a large old dining table sturdily constructed of black lacquered wood. On the wall behind and above this table was a large, imposing old framed portrait of my grandfather, Chock Chin. There were two smaller portraits to each side of him. One depicted a hauntingly beautiful young lady with a somewhat sad and solemn expression. This was his daughter Katherine, who had contracted tuberculosis and passed away at a very early age. The other photograph depicted a very young man who I later learned was Chock Chin’s son Benjamin. He too had died at a very early age after suffering a burst appendix.
My grandfather Chock Chin was a true renaissance man. The early ancestors of the Chock family originally came from Hupeh province in Northern China. During the Sung dynasty in 1160 AD, possibly as the result of trouble arising from the loss of a Sung dynasty princess, one branch of the family migrated southward through the Mei Ling Pass to eventually settle in Kwangtung province. Chock Chin was descended from this branch of the clan that settled in Koon Tong in the Goong Sheong Doo area of the district of Chungshan.
To say that Chock Chin was an astute businessman is almost an understatement. One day he noticed that the hillsides of the land he had leased were covered with guava and hau trees. He used the fruit to make jelly, which he sold in his store.
Nothing was wasted. The guava wood was made into a charcoal similar to the hard and slow-burning anthracite coal, which he also sold in the store. The bark of the hau tree was utilized to bind the sheaves of rice into a bundle. Grass from the overgrown fields was used to feed the horses. The cracked rice left over in the rice mill was boiled with chopped up papaya and added to kitchen leftovers to feed the pigs.
Those areas of flatland and the hillsides unsuitable for the cultivation of rice were used to raise cattle. He could butcher his own cattle and cure their hides. He made his own bridles and saddles and shoed the horses himself. He built a milking shed covered with a concrete floor, which was washed down every day, and the milk was bottled at the plantation kitchen to be sold. There was one small area of land on a hillside overgrown with hau trees and ti plants that Chock Chin had no use for, so he subleased it to a group of Koreans who built a still on it where they made okolehau, a powerful liquor distilled from the root of the ti plant.
The entire Hanalei region prospered from the 1890s on through to 1925 because of the rice industry. Chock Chin’s rice plantation was one of the largest. In addition to his own rice, he would mill and store the rice produced by the smaller growers.
In 1905, Chock Chin, now officially a resident of the United States of America, returned to his ancestral village in China once again, this time bringing the three children of his second wife, Hsu Shee—George, Katherine, and Dorothy—to stay with his first wife Lady Chou.
While he was there this time he married a third wife, a young girl named Chun Shee, the woman who was to become my grandmother. According to Chock Chin, he chose Chun Shee, who was a servant in the Chock household, because she was young and healthy and did not have bound feet—a social custom which resulted in dainty but deformed feet, rendering a lady virtually helpless. While prized in China, women with bound feet were totally useless in Hawaii. Chock Chin was forty years old. Chun Shee was seventeen.
Upon their arrival in Hanalei, they were greeted by Uncle Lum Tat, who had prepared a traditional Chinese New Year’s feast to welcome them.
But life was not all wine and roses for Chock Chin’s newly arrived seventeen-year-old bride. It’s never easy for a stranger to adjust to living in a strange land, and it is especially difficult if that stranger is unable to understand or speak the main languages; on Kauai, these were English and Hawaiian.
Whenever the Hawaiian children saw her, they would throw dirt and leaves at her, jeer at her, and taunt her by yelling, “Pake wahine lolo, no sabe talk!”
She memorized the sounds of these spiteful words phonetically and asked her husband to explain what they meant. He told her that they meant “Chinese woman stupid, no understand talk.”
From that moment on, my grandmother began to painstakingly learn not only English but Hawaiian as well so that nobody would ever have cause to shout that insulting phrase at her again.
For me, life in Hanalei was pretty idyllic (aside from the ever-present threat of the psychotic chickens in the yard). Each day was a new adventure and I went around exploring the surroundings of my new home without a care in the world.
Kauai, I soon found, was a very wet place. It rained just about every day, mostly a light rain that softly descended to the earth while the sun was still shining. Most people went without a raincoat because it was so unobtrusive and usually never lasted for very long. It was like an aggressive perpetual mist that settled over the land. Perhaps this is why Kauai was so lush and green.
Being back in Hanalei reawakened my mother’s memories of her happy childhood. She showed me the lily pond that Chock Chin had built that now graced the side of the Tasakas’ store. That store had once been Chock Chin’s restaurant and bakery, where he had cooked up all kinds of Chinese feasts, breads, and pastries for his numerous customers.
Adjoining the building was a large field where Chock Chin’s cattle would graze. My mother recalled that when my grandfather would slaughter one, he would walk across the field carrying a sledgehammer behind his back, pick out the cow that he was going to kill, then slam the hammer down onto the poor cow’s head to stun it. He would slit the cow’s throat and butcher it. Nothing from the cow went to waste. The meat and offal went to the restaurant where my grandfather turned it into delectable dishes, and the bulk of it went to the stores where it was sold to the public.
Chock Chin would tan and fashion the hide into leather goods. My grandmother told me that Chock Chin used to have a long, braided queue, which most of the Chinese men wore at that time to show their loyalty to the emperor of China. When roundup time came around she said that he would roll it around the top of his head before putting on his cowboy hat. Then he would mount his horse and he and his employed paniolos would drive his cattle down to the Hanalei wharf, where they would be loaded onto ships. After the Chinese Revolution led by the revolutionary factions of Sun Yat-sen, who became known as the Father of Modern China, deposed the emperor in 1912, Chock Chin cut off his queue.
I was very aware of the fact that I didn’t have a father, like most of the other kids that I knew did. Still, I couldn’t help but be curious, so one day, when we were sitting on the porch watching the rain come down and enjoying the day, I asked my mother to tell me about my father.
Her eyes lit up with a mixture of both happiness and sadness. “He was a wonderful man,” she finally said. “He was very handsome and he was the love of my life.”
“He was a soldier in the war?” I asked, knowing the answer but wanting to hear it again.
“He was very brave. They awarded him a medal. He was killed in action in Sicily.”
“Killed in action,” I repeated, “in Sicily.”
It wasn’t long before I found a friend around the same age as me. He was a wild child, a typical Island mixture of Hawaiian and Portuguese and perhaps some Asian and who knows what else thrown in. In other words, he was what some people might refer to as a true mongrel. Like me, he didn’t have a father and he lived with his mother, a Hawaiian woman that had a house down the road. Everyone called him Eddie Boy. The first thing my new friend Eddie Boy said to me was, “You talk like one haole but you not one haole. How come?”
Somewhat puzzled, I scratched my head and asked, “What’s a haole?”
Eddie Boy changed the subject. Later, when I asked my mother what a haole was, she told me it referred to a Caucasian person. I was now even more puzzled. “Well then, what is a Caucasian person?”
“A Caucasian person is someone—someone, you know, like the doctor that you go to—like Dr. Toney.”
“Oh,” I responded. It was all suddenly very clear to me now. A haole was a doctor. Eddie Boy thought that I talked like a doctor.
I was at the age where I liked to run around and play a lot—and, of course, somewhat innocently get into whatever kind of trouble I could. One day Eddie Boy and I were playing in the backyard of my grandma’s house and we decided to explore the large old wooden shed. The shed had a rusty corrugated iron roof, a solid wooden back wall, and half-open side and front walls. Inside there was a kind of damp and musty odor and the not unpleasant smell of machine oil.
The old shed housed a seemingly endless variety of old tools, from hammers and rusting saws to a collection of well-worn cane knives and scythes hung menacingly high up on the back wall. There were all kinds of discarded furniture upon which had been piled various bric-a-brac and rows upon rows of boxes stacked on old glass-fronted store counters which themselves were filled with dusty old unsold store stock and an assortment of discarded household items. There were also a lot of shoes and things that were considered, for some reason or another, too valuable to throw away.
We had a delightful time going through this stuff. Eddie Boy was especially fascinated by a pair of my grandma’s old shoes. What attracted my attention, though, were two huge stacks of phonograph records.
“Hey, look at all those records,” I exclaimed in wonder. Eddie Boy immediately picked up a dusty record from the top of one of the piles and broke it over his head. “Hey, don’t do that!” I yelled. “I like those records!”
“But feel good,” he said as if to justify his violent action. Dubiously, I picked up the top record from the other pile and hesitantly broke it in half over my own head. He might have a point, I thought as I surveyed the rest of the records.
Suddenly Eddie Boy said, “I need go ku-kai.”
I already knew that ku-kai was the Hawaiian word for having a bowel movement, so I told him, “The toilet’s inside the house.”
But Eddie Boy urgently shouted, “No! I need go ku-kai now!” and with that he pulled down his pants, squatted down toward the ground, and with a mighty grunt let loose a turd that landed right in one of my grandmother’s old shoes.
At that moment my grandmother, attracted by all of the noise, appeared at the door of the shed. When she saw what had just happened she yelled, “Eddie you pilau [filthy] boy, you went go ku-kai all inside my shoe!”
She rushed over with a speed that I thought remarkable for a person of her age, picked up the shoe, shook the turd out of it, and then began chasing Eddie boy around the yard as if she were going to hit him with it. Eddie Boy beat a hasty retreat and didn’t show up again for several days.
Grandma Chock was furious but I knew that she got over her anger quickly and easily. Later, when I thought the time was right, I asked her if I could have the phonograph records in the shed. “For how come you want those,” she answered. “That kind Chinese opera record, used to belong your Ah Goong [Grandfather]. I no think you going like listen that kind music.”
When my mother came home, I asked her to intercede with Grandma for me about the records. My grandmother eventually allowed me to take a few of them for my record collection. She said that later, when I got bigger, I could have all of them if I wanted because she really had no use for them. I suddenly became aware of her reasoning and realized that Eddie Boy and I shouldn’t have broken those two records over our heads.
There was also that ancient phonograph in the shed that my grandma said I could have, one of those real old ones with the detachable horn. It was too heavy for me to lift, so I got my mother to come out and help me. We wiped the dust and chicken feathers off of it and hauled it into the house.
The Chinese opera records were unlike anything that I had ever heard before. The crashing gongs and falsetto singing accompanied by the strange melodies of unfamiliar stringed instruments were startling. I listened to them all with rapt attention, although they all sounded pretty much alike.
Everyone must have been annoyed because I would play them over and over. My grandmother shook her head at my bizarre taste but my mother knew me well enough by now that she didn’t bother to say anything about my latest acquisitions.
It was no secret that my mother was now actively looking for a husband. She had decided that I was not going to grow up without a father figure. The problem was that pickings were slim in this neck of the woods.
Most of the most eligible locals had been conscripted into the service during the war. Many others had long since abandoned rural Kauai for the big city, Honolulu, or a much more promising life on the mainland. There were a couple of Chinese-American men she had known at some time in her past who came all the way from Lihue or Kapaa to court her.
There was one man I remember in particular. He had come to our house from Lihue, or wherever it was, and my grandma had prepared a nice Chinese dinner. It was at once evident was that he liked to talk and hear himself talk, I suppose because he thought that he was very interesting.
However, my mother eventually got tired of trying to suppress her yawns and simply yawned outright. He also had the uncanny ability to talk and eat at the same time, and when he was talking no one could get in a word edgewise.
Early in the meal he had managed to get a single grain of rice stuck on the bottom of his chin. It hung there precariously and moved whenever he talked.
My mother stopped yawning and tried to inform about this with hand gestures but he was too engrossed in what he was saying to notice so she sighed and gave up. I suddenly became aware that all of our attention—my mother’s, my grandma’s, and mine—began to focus on that single grain of rice.
He saw us all looking at his face and thought that the rapt attention we were paying him was simply because he was so interesting. He didn’t realize that we were all wondering when, with all that jawing he was doing, that grain of rice was going to fall off his chin. Needless to say, this guy didn’t make the cut.
The guy who eventually did finally make the cut ended up being my haole doctor, Dr. Toney, who originally came from Piedmont, Missouri.
He had been married twice before but that didn’t seem to deter my mother. Dr. Toney was a very personable guy and everybody liked him. Even Grandma Chock was very fond of him. When he came to dinner, which he began doing often, he didn’t talk a blue streak and he was careful enough while eating so as not to get any rice on his chin. He also liked Grandma Chock’s cooking—but then again, who didn’t?
I suppose Dr. Toney must have courted my mother in some fashion that was appropriate for the time. I don’t remember, and I guess I was simply too young to have much interest, but one day I was informed that they were going to be married, and then they were, and we all went to live in a large old stone house not far from the main highway that ran through Kiluea town.
A little sister arrived in October of 1947. My parents named her Valerie. I was amazed by the cute new baby that now shared our house. She seemed so small and delicate when my mother allowed me to hold her. My mother told me that I was once this little, but I didn’t believe her. How could I possibly have been that small? My dad told me that I was now a big brother and I would have to help look after and protect my little sister.
It didn’t take me very long to get used to the fact that I was now a big brother. My parents hired a very nice little Japanese lady named Mrs. Kimura to help my mother with the housework and to care for the new baby. Mrs. Kimura had a niece who was only a little older than me, and her niece had a best friend so I always had a couple of other children to play with, even though they were girls.
They taught me how to play a Japanese card game called sakura, and when we weren’t playing cards or doing something around the house we’d run around the neighborhood looking for some kind of trouble to get into. Sometimes we would go to see movies at the old wooden barnlike structure that was the Kiluea Theatre.
But some of the other Japanese kids weren’t so friendly. Maybe they didn’t like the way I looked or how I was dressed, but there were a couple of raggedly clothed boys who were perhaps a few years older than me and used to follow and taunt me whenever I came across them by shouting out: “Ching, ching Chinaman, sitting on a fence; trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents.”
When I asked my mother about it, she told me that the Chinese were the first wave of immigrants that came as indentured workers. By the time the Japanese came to work as field laborers, the industrious and money-oriented Chinese had moved on to become shopkeepers and store owners, so it was only natural that there would be some animosity and jealousy. Apparently this prejudice had been passed down to the younger generation over the years.
Overall, however, life in Kiluea was good. The stone house kept us cool from the blistering heat of the summer days, and it was a lot of fun to play with my new friends or wander around the dusty dirt roads of the old plantation town.
I would always wake up before anyone else in the house. After throwing some water on my face and brushing my teeth I’d go to the kitchen to look for something to make my own breakfast with. I was doing this one morning when I was suddenly startled by a loud banging on the kitchen screen door and was startled to be confronted by a big, wild-eyed bearded man wearing filthy clothes.
His mouth opened in a somewhat hideous smile, because he was missing a few of his most prominent front teeth, and he stepped into the kitchen without any hesitation whatsoever and held out a banged-up old metal bucket with water sloshing in it to me. I looked into the bucket and saw three large lobsters slowly moving around.
“Give ’em for your daddy, OK?” he said as he put the bucket inside the kitchen door. “He going know who went bring ’em.” I nodded and he turned and left.
When my dad woke up and came into the kitchen, I showed him the bucket of lobsters. My dad told me that one of the Portuguese fishermen had brought him the lobsters to pay off part of his doctor’s bill.
“You let him pay you with lobsters instead of money?” I asked him.
“Sometimes people just don’t have enough money, so they try to pay their doctor bill in any way that they can,” he informed me.
That night at dinner I watched as my mother cooked the lobsters and I ate lobster for the first time in my life.
I’ll always remember her dropping the live, clawing lobsters in the boiling water and hearing their strange little screams as their spiny shells turned from their original blue color to a bright red.
It was an experience that I will never forget, but I have to admit that the lobster was delicious.
We didn’t stay in Kiluea for very long, however. The plantation doctor for the Pioneer Mill Company in Lahaina, on the island of Maui, was going to retire and my dad was offered his post.
Since it was a much better and higher paying position than the one he currently had on Kauai, he decided to accept it. That meant we would all soon be moving to another island.