The Pacific Triangle

This was only one of the many entangled lives that came to be straightened out in Hawaii. There are more than forty-seven different combinations of races there, such as American and American, German and German, Korean and Korean, Russian and Russian, Spanish-Marshall and English, Half-Hawaiian and Chinese-Hawaiian, Hawaiian and Chinese-Hawaiian, Hawaiian and Hawaiian-Portuguese, Chinese and Chinese, Hawaiian and Hawaiian, Portuguese and Portuguese, Spanish and Spanish, Spanish-Hawaiian and Spanish-Hawaiian, Portuguese and Creole-Spanish-Portuguese, Chinese and Irish, American and Half-Hawaiian, Portuguese and Pole, Half-Hawaiian and Half-Hawaiian, American and Hawaiian-Chinese, English and Half-Hawaiian, Japanese and American, American-Japanese and Japanese, Half-Hawaiian and German, Portuguese and Hawaiian, German and Irish, Hawaiian-Chinese and Spanish-Italian, Portuguese and Hawaiian-Chinese, Half-Hawaiian and Spanish, Porto-Rican and Porto-Rican, Oginawa and Oginawa, French-Porto-Rican and Porto-Rican, Swede and Portuguese, English and English, Hawaiian and Chinese, American and French-Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese, American-Portuguese and German-Irish, Portuguese-Hawaiian and Portuguese, Portuguese and German-Irish, Portuguese-Hawaiian and Portuguese, Portuguese-Irish and Hawaiian, Hawaiian and American-Negro, Portuguese-Hawaiian-Chinese and Chinese. And I am certain that I can add another, that of my New Zealand acquaintance and his Maori wife.

They are but one phase of the whole problem of the mixture of races and the melting of their silvers and bronzes down to the human essence within them. For there were in Judge Whitney's time on an average of two hundred and thirty couples divorced under that ceiling every year. Figures make human facts seem so remote that I hate to use them. As soon as figures are quoted the individuals lose their identity. That which is living and real becomes, as it were, an astronomical calculation and one might as well talk of stars. But the figures of the divorces in Hawaii are in themselves a living thing, as they interpret the life there more than words could do; so I'll risk giving a few of the figures Judge Whitney published while I was in Honolulu.

The Japanese contributed 49% of the divorces in Hawaii, though they comprise only 34% of the population; the Americans, 7%, though they were 8% of the population. The rest were distributed among the other nationalities. This is how those statistics compared with divorce statistics in other countries. There were in England out of every hundred thousand inhabitants, two divorces per year; in Austria, one; in Norway, six; in Sweden, eight; in Italy, three; in Denmark, seventeen; in Germany, twenty-three; and in France, the same; in the United States, seventy-three; and in the island of Oahu (Honolulu), four hundred.

Hundreds of little folk, a host of children, have passed out of that room either fatherless or motherless. Back in the lands which they might have called home it would not have happened in just this way, or having happened so, it would not have had the same tragic meaning. For in Oriental countries fathers frequently put the mothers of their children aside. Yet, somehow the tragedies do not fret and strut in such distorted ways in lands where distortion is much more common, as in the East. In most Oriental countries it is enough for a man to say his wife talks too much and declare her divorced, but when he comes to the half-way house, Hawaii, he must be cruel, extremely cruel to his wife before the law will grant him a divorce. So he is "cruel" in a way he may be sure will secure his freedom.

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What the results of all these mixtures will be, no one can as yet tell, but the consensus of opinion gives the Chinese-Hawaiian the prize for superiority. However promiscuous other races may be, the Japanese seldom stoops to conquer in that way. The maiden of Japan shares with the white woman an aversion for these strangers in Hawaii, though the number of Japanese women who marry white men is far greater than that of white women marrying into any of the races in the Pacific.

One of the most prolific causes of divorce in Hawaii has been the so-called "picture bride." Because of the exclusion of Asiatic laborers, few Japanese and Chinese women have been born in the island. But because of their preference for their own women, Japanese sent home for wives. To get round the exclusion laws, they stretched the home process a bit, selected by photograph the girls they wished, had themselves married by proxy (a method recognized in Japan as legal), and then simply sent for their "wives." Aside from the subsequent divorces which very frequently ensued, there have been cases not without their humorous sides.

One story was told that must be accepted with caution.

Mr. Goto, who just a short while ago was Goto San, wants a wife. He sees a go-between who secures for him the pictures of some girls of his own district. He makes his selection and the process of marriage is accomplished. With something little short of glee, he waits the maid's arrival.

She comes. But alas, not alone! Mr. Goto waits with others at the pier. Everybody is blessed but him. Chagrin and impatience battle in his heart. Nearly everybody has been supplied with a wife. There are only two women left. Neither seems to be the one he married. Goto thinks,—thinks rapidly. Who will ever know the difference? He claims the prettier; she accepts him, and off they dash on their honeymoon, à la Occident, a two-day trip round the island of Oahu in a motor-car. And never were nuptials more satisfactory.

In the meantime Fujimoto San comes rushing up pell-mell. His garage business has kept him. He finds a lone girl, but she does not tally with the reproduction he married. "Not so nice," is the first thought that flashes across his brain. "Little too broad in the nose, lips thicker than those on the photograph. Can I mistake?" But she is the only one left. He bows at least a half-dozen times, bows clean over, half-way to the ground, but alas! every time his head bobs up he sees the same disheartening face, a face he never ordered, a face he cannot accept. He must clear up the mystery. He calls the agent. Investigations reveal that Goto was there ahead of him; so Fujimoto sets out on a chase after the honeymoon pair. It ends in Honolulu two days later, and another divorce case comes up in court.

The "picture bride" is now a thing of the past, as the Japanese Government has agreed to deny her a passport in accordance with the spirit of our treaty with Japan. From the point of view of immigration, this may be a solution; but there is a phase of the problem of the mixture of races in Hawaii I have never yet seen discussed,—that is, the woman. In the case of the Japanese woman, much more than in that of the man, entrance to Hawaii or America is freedom such as has never been known before. At home she has been taught obedience and deference to her husband. There are many others ready to accept that burden if she is unwilling. But in Hawaii, where there are so many Japanese seeking wives and where she moves among peoples whose standards are an inversion of everything she has been taught to regard as virtuous and feminine, she finds herself in an altogether different position. On the streets she sees many white women treated with courtesy; in the courts women receive even more sympathy than men,—to her an unheard-of thing. And so we find that when all the divorces in the Hawaiian Islands have been tabulated, these little timid creatures of Japan have been emboldened to the extent of deserting their husbands in veritable shoals, making up 90% of the entire number of Japanese divorces. It is a scramble for readjustment of conjugal relations based on something nearer emotional equality.

But where do the Hawaiians come in? will be asked in all reason. They are virtually no more. Of the entire race which at the time of their discovery by Captain Cook numbered some 130,000 to 300,000, only a few thousand are left. At the time of the annexation of Hawaii by America (1898) there were some 31,000 Hawaiians of pure blood, or about 28% of the population. Of Orientals there was about 42% of the population, with 24,400 Japanese and 21,600 Chinese. Then there were 15,191 Portuguese, 2,250 Britons, 1,437 Germans, 8,400 Americans, 1,479 Norwegians, French and others combined. Already there were 8,400 part-Hawaiian. From the rulers down there was a free mixture, even the queen had a white spouse. Some of the best types of Hawaiian women had been married by men of fine caliber, unlike almost any other place in the Pacific. The relationships were of a permanent nature, for, as the governmental report in connection with annexation stated:

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In defiance of prejudice, intermarriage between the races in the Pacific is taking place. What the result is to be, no one as yet knows definitely. The number of white men legalizing their relations with native women is large. The tropics are veritable whispering-galleries sounding the stories of men who have returned to keep their promises even after they have been despatched from the islands under the influence of the cup so as to prevent their marrying. In the mid-Pacific, in the South Seas, in the Far East, white men are marrying native women, even in cases where these have been their mistresses for years.

In Japan, many leading white men have married Japanese women, among whom the most celebrated has been Lafcadio Hearn. The list is long. In the ports, many foreigners have married Japanese women, and though there is a strong feeling against it socially, discrimination is not universal. The French and the British are not nearly so fastidious in these matters as are the Americans and the Japanese. Wherever there is outward opposition, it comes from the Japanese side as well as from the white. Japanese complain against discrimination here, but we are received with no more open arms by them in Japan.

The girl from Japan coming to the West is by virtue of her immigration alone to some extent emancipated; but to the white woman turning her steps east there is only the emancipation, in part, from drudgery by means of ample servants. To the white woman who goes a step farther and links herself in marriage with a Japanese or Chinese there is in the majority of cases only sorrow, soreness of heart, isolation, and regret. It is not that she might not be happy with the individual Oriental, but in the East she becomes part of a vicious family system that strangles her individuality. Though the maid of Japan is not over-welcome in the West, as the wife of a white man she comes into a higher plane of life. By no means is that true in the case of the white woman in the East. There are too many cases, still warm with regret, to be named in proof of the statement. I have come across several cases of American girls who had married Japanese and returned with them to Japan. They were content enough with their husbands, but their position in the Japanese home was intolerable. I remember the loneliness of a New York girl who had gone to live in Kyoto. The contemptuous way in which some notable Japanese looked at their countryman's white wife was only comparable to the treatment she would have received here. The children, born in the same labor, are not respected as are either "pure" Japanese or white. The Eurasian is frequently disqualified. The white father regrets that his children are not Aryan as did Lafcadio Hearn.

This is no attempt to make out a case for the mixture of natives and white in the Pacific. There are not enough facts at hand. Unfortunately, for the next few hundred years the differences between the peoples living on the borders of the Pacific will continue to irritate, and experiments in blood-mixture will probably be tried externally. I have only mobilized such incidents as have come within my own personal observation that will take the problem out of the cold, statistical plane. It is with human flesh and blood, human hearts and affections, human gropings and aspirations that we are dealing,—not with the conflicts of imaginary hordes and with terrifying invasions.

To me, the human elements in Honolulu and throughout the Pacific remain a memory of one perpetual stirring of sounds, colors, and desires. The whole is not confusing, for it is outside one's consciousness. In a sense it is an inverted world consciousness. Instead of nationals thinking outward, they have come together and are thinking inward, recognizing themselves as part of some whole. Eventually, after all the races in the Pacific have been mixed more or less, or have proved mixture impossible, they will find some way in which they can dwell at one another's elbows without nudging. The mixture may even assume an appearance of unity. The color scheme, like a thorough blending of all the colors of the spectrum, may yet become white.

CHAPTER XVII
"THIS LITTLE PIG WENT TO MARKET"

The first democrats and artists of Europe, the Greeks, knew this, and made the agora a market-place, a focus of public art, and the scene of their political gatherings. Wretched, indeed, was the little pig that stayed home when the agora was convoked, for he it was whom the Greeks had determined to ostracize. Despite their efforts as democrats, there were only too many who had to stay home when the affairs of that world were being decided; but as a market, with all the architectural genius concentrated on making it attractive and beautiful, and Socrates leading his classes through it, it was a certain success.

In the ruder parts of Europe, owing to the absence of means of communication and the dangers of carrying one's possessions abroad, definite market-places became an imperative necessity, and charters for their existence were granted by decree. They became an important means of securing revenue.

Even the Church recognized the value of festivals as means of enriching itself in a combination of barter with merrymaking and adoration. Festivals and fairs alike enhanced the material and the artistic life of medieval Europe, and marked, as it were, the embryonic element out of which grew all the later laws and ethics of trade. The legitimacy of piracy at sea and robbery on land had to be counteracted in some way, and the dignity and decency of exchange established.

The evolutionary process by which civilization has achieved some sort of business morality may yet be traced in various countries, especially among the primitive peoples of the South Seas, the more advanced Filipinos, the recently awakened Japanese, the Mexicans, and the accomplished New Zealanders. Beneath the surface of the market-place, the wide world over, one finds the source of civilization, and at its level, the level of human commonalty. For as men hunt to cover up their love of wild life and nature, so women market as an excuse for mingling with people. There is in the behavior of the marketer all the cunning of the animal in search of prey, and the degree to which these instincts are developed gives in a sense the measure of a man's civilization.

Even outside the bonds of law and order the mere process of exchange tends to establish social ethics. This is nowhere better exemplified than at the thieves' market in Mexico or in the hidden reaches of the Orient. Thither all robbers bring their stolen wares for sale. Thither all the robbed hasten, to recover their lost property. The instinct within each and all of them is the gambling spirit. The despoiler is eager to sell as quickly and as successfully as possible lest the rightful owner arrive and claim the booty. The general public is anxious to buy, for the prices naturally are low, and many a bargain may be secured. The despoiled, chagrined though they may be at their loss, are in part compensated by the hope of a purchase made at somebody else's expense.

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I had not known that buying and selling was ever part of the scheme of things among people whose needs were as few as those of the South-Sea islanders. Saints and philosophers are always teaching us that the most desirable state is that in which wants are few, and their indulgence is still more limited. But it seems to me that where that condition holds, the few necessaries of life become so much more desirable and so much more difficult to obtain that, instead of a release from slavery, slavery is even more rigorous. Our pictured impressions of the tropics are full of breadfruit-trees and fruits growing in abundance without labor. But quite the contrary is the case. The fear of famine and the insecurity of life have dampened the joys of many a wild man, and the pressure of population has only too frequently resulted in infanticide and cannibalism.

When, therefore, I heard that there was to be a native bazaar across the Rewa River, in Vita Levu, the largest island of the Fiji group, I defied the yellow sun that hung overhead, secured a complement of guides in two Fijian boys who were more afraid of me than they were of their chief, and set out for real primitive excitement. We were pulled across the river on a punt secured to each shore by a cable, and made our way up the banks in the direction of the sugar-mill.

It was noon when we arrived at the fair-grounds. Aside from long wooden tables that stood beneath arbors of palms, there was nothing completed by way of preparation. A few straggling natives wended their ways from hut to hut of slab-board and thatch, their quiet manners reminding me of the monks in monasteries, absorbed in their duties. Gradually, venders arrived; the tables began to sprout with banana-leaves and flowers. Strings of berry beads were displayed, like fish out of water,—appealing eyes of the plant world asking why, with nature so near at hand, they needed to be torn from life. Bottles of liquid fats, like capsules of the castor-plant, stood ensconced in green-leaved packages containing sweet messes that left the eager natives, old and young, literally web-handed.

The goods displayed, the crowds from the surrounding huts arrived, drawn by an irresistible charm. A Fijian never came with his mate; maiden never approached on her lover's arm. Though they all appeared indiscriminately, there was no obvious grouping of friends with friends. They moved like shoals of fish that had got the scent or the sight of food. It was a crowd with every evidence of cohesiveness except that of companionship.

To me there was something pathetic in that crowd. An outsider by all the laws of centuries of contrary development, I had no means of entering their emotional lives, of guessing the promptings which made them leave privacy for herding. I had only the most outward signs to go by, and I thought what spiritless, barren lives they must lead who could be brought together on such an occasion in so casual a mood. For aside from the bottles of oil, the strings of beads, and the wrappings of stuff in banana-leaves, there was nothing from my view to make a hundred or two hundred thousand pounds of sluggish flesh rise from its mats and dare the piercing sun.

Yet the women, who did most of the selling, with their unkempt hair and their crude alien costumes, awoke to something universal under the game of barter they were here called upon to play crudely. Rummage-sales and carnivals, dog-shows and dances, likewise change the glitter of blue eyes and pink cheeks; and I smiled at the thought of Lao-tsze and Tolstoy, who between 650 B.C. and A.D. 1910 preached the ugliness of trade.

When the play of barter and exchange had stirred these primitive folk to a little more life, they quite naturally sought a way of giving it off again; but so foreign did a real bazaar seem to them that they entered the recreations with little zest. In these days of savage sedateness, with trade becoming more and more a feature and a pastime of life, it is not surprising that the natives attend with spirits in abeyance. Following the great exchange of beads and oils and edible messes, the crowds moved out to a more open space, under the clear sun. There, with the aid of a native band, under the conductorship of a Catholic priest, they made merry, with strange sounds and more familiar dances. But it all seemed perfunctory and not without a touch of sadness. The Fijian voice at its best is rich, deep, and stately. One cannot imagine it attuned to singing jazz or rag-time. It seems exclusively made for hymns. In consequence, the crowds could not rise to the occasion, and stood behind the entertainers like so many solemn Japanese in the presence of royalty.

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But lest the little pig who stays at home may really starve to death, the world sometimes indulges him a little by letting the market go to him, and never have I seen a market more picturesque and more self-possessed than one of this sort that visited our steamer as she lay anchored in the harbor of Manila.

All about us during the night had crept Filipino lighters, their gunwales capped with low-arched mats. They hugged the steamer like a brood of younglings waiting for their food. They were to receive the cargo of boxes and canned goods from New York and other markets of the world.

It was still cool. A native Filipino woman squatted on the ridge of a lighter top between two men. She was enjoying her morning cigarette. As she caught my gaze her face beamed flirtatiously. Then and there I tried my tongue for the first time in the real use of Spanish, and failed. As the morning advanced, children crept from the darkness of the covered lighters; charcoal pails were fanned into a glow like that of the dawn; and roosters, tied to the boats by one leg with a string, crowed, their contempt, protest, or indifference to a gluttonous and unjust world.

As the hour of breakfast's needs arrived, a thin, long canoe came up, insinuating its way among the many more capacious crafts, quietly, slowly, like a thing just stirring with the new day. On its narrow bottom flopped dozens of little fish in agony, dying of too much air. They looked like so many bars of silver when they lay dead. A basket of bananas and a few simple vegetables comprised the rest of the stock of these aquatic tradespeople, this man and his woman. She squatted comfortably, looking from side to side for customers, while he pushed the canoe along with easy strokes. They did not cry their wares, and handed their stores out as though known to all for fair dealing and fearless of competition. Thus with the freshness of morning air they stimulated this little world to action.

By noon that day I was slipping through narrow streets, avoiding the moldy shops of the main street, seeking out the men and women who make life interesting. The coolness of the morning was gone, crowded out by steaming noon. The casual, gift-like manners of those two aquatic traders was now a thing not even to expect, for I was in the midst of civilized trade. Unexpectedly, I came upon the public market.

What a different world! The hand of the law was in evidence. Here, despite the general confused appearance, the concrete drains and stone tables gave an assurance of at least periodical cleansing. Here the laws of barter held men tied to fair dealing, as the roosters were tied to those lighters. Venders make a mad dash for freedom through cheating, but were jerked back to honesty by the bargain-hunter who watches the scales and knows the laws. Values are measured by the size of the pupil or the intensity of the gaze; if eagerness is manifest, up goes the price.

A Buddhist, looking upon a market like this, if he were unaccustomed to pagan ways, would shrink from the sight as we would at a cannibal feast. Here the world was calmly cruel. All the things we eat lay in their naked ghastliness,—the thin streams of blood, the bulging eyes of little creatures, the stiff inflexibility of limbs once quick and supple. And the men and women were unconsciously affected by the scene.

For nothing stimulates the snarling quarrelsomeness of human beings more than the sight of food or the fear of imposition. The appeals of the sellers were mingled with the bargainings and bickerings of the buyers, a competition among both to best one another. Two women stood over a fish-bin engaged in a matching of wits that might well have been envied by filibustering senators. The debate was over a tray of tiny fish.

A white woman, firmly knit in body and in character, made her way through the many aisles, purchasing with a precision as clearly civilized as it was silent. A Spanish woman, dark and dashing, swung through the same aisles like a little whirlwind. There was brilliance in her eyes, and brilliancy in the gems on her fingers and in her ears. She was exceedingly well dressed, buxom, and attractive, but every purchase was made with a gust of austerity and command quite uncalled for. She bullied the fisherwoman, she bullied her hackman, she bullied the servant who had come to carry her purchases for her; and then she sat down at one of the little restaurant tables and ate the strange concoctions with a dexterity obviously native to her. She was a half-caste, but the Spanish vein was strong in her blood, and Spanish passion actuated her. She got into her ancient-looking hackney-coach with flash and gusto; but not, however, before she had gained her point in the matter of an extra piece of fat upon which she was insisting. She was the little pig who had roast beef because she knew how to market economically.

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But the little pig that has none, and the one who cries, wee! wee! wee! all the way home, in the Far East, is like the Greek about to be ostracized by the community in the agora. Indeed, he has been ostracized in Japan for hundreds of years, and even modernization and imperial edict have changed his status but little. He is known as the eta. To him has been allotted the task of attending to dead animals, whether edible or not, and though his touch profanes the lowest classes of Japan, his labor keeps the country clean after a fashion. Much more. Not only do these outcasts remove dead carcasses from a careless Oriental world, but in one place at least they have been given the sweetest of all professions,—that of selling flowers with which to decorate the tokonoma, the most honorable place in the Japanese home. And all through the day, if one is not too much engrossed in the marts of the foreign settlement, one will hear the voice of these flower-girls calling plaintively, "Hana! hana-i! hana-iro!" Flowers are the things that stand between her and the degradation of her class, because for years the shrine of a loyal servant of the neglected emperor who was struggling against a greater and more powerful group of disloyal Japanese had been kept fresh with flowers by these eta, or outcasts, who did not know whose grave they cherished.