CHUN AH CHUN
There was nothing striking in the appearance of Chun Ah Chun. He
was rather undersized, as Chinese go, and the Chinese narrow
shoulders and spareness of flesh were his. The average tourist,
casually glimpsing him on the streets of Honolulu, would have
concluded that he was a good-natured little Chinese, probably the
proprietor of a prosperous laundry or tailorshop. In so far as good
nature and prosperity went, the judgment would be correct, though
beneath the mark; for Ah Chun was as good-natured as he was
prosperous, and of the latter no man knew a tithe the tale. It was
well known that he was enormously wealthy, but in his case
"enormous" was merely the symbol for the unknown.
Ah Chun had shrewd little eyes, black and beady and so very little
that they were like gimlet-holes. But they were wide apart, and
they sheltered under a forehead that was patently the forehead of a
thinker. For Ah Chun had his problems, and had had them all his
life. Not that he ever worried over them. He was essentially a
philosopher, and whether as coolie, or multi-millionaire and master
of many men, his poise of soul was the same. He lived always in the
high equanimity of spiritual repose, undeterred by good fortune,
unruffled by ill fortune. All things went well with him, whether
they were blows from the overseer in the cane field or a slump in
the price of sugar when he owned those cane fields himself. Thus,
from the steadfast rock of his sure content he mastered problems
such as are given to few men to consider, much less to a Chinese
peasant.
He was precisely that--a Chinese peasant, born to labour in the
fields all his days like a beast, but fated to escape from the
fields like the prince in a fairy tale. Ah Chun did not remember
his father, a small farmer in a district not far from Canton; nor
did he remember much of his mother, who had died when he was six.
But he did remember his respected uncle, Ah Kow, for him had he
served as a slave from his sixth year to his twenty-fourth. It was
then that he escaped by contracting himself as a coolie to labour
for three years on the sugar plantations of Hawaii for fifty cents a
day.
Ah Chun was observant. He perceived little details that not one man
in a thousand ever noticed. Three years he worked in the field, at
the end of which time he knew more about cane-growing than the
overseers or even the superintendent, while the superintendent would
have been astounded at the knowledge the weazened little coolie
possessed of the reduction processes in the mill. But Ah Chun did
not study only sugar processes. He studied to find out how men came
to be owners of sugar mills and plantations. One judgment he
achieved early, namely, that men did not become rich from the labour
of their own hands. He knew, for he had laboured for a score of
years himself. The men who grew rich did so from the labour of the
hands of others. That man was richest who had the greatest number
of his fellow creatures toiling for him.
So, when his term of contract was up, Ah Chun invested his savings
in a small importing store, going into partnership with one, Ah
Yung. The firm ultimately became the great one of "Ah Chun and Ah
Yung," which handled anything from India silks and ginseng to guano
islands and blackbird brigs. In the meantime, Ah Chun hired out as
cook. He was a good cook, and in three years he was the highest-
paid chef in Honolulu. His career was assured, and he was a fool to
abandon it, as Dantin, his employer, told him; but Ah Chun knew his
own mind best, and for knowing it was called a triple-fool and given
a present of fifty dollars over and above the wages due him.
The firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung was prospering. There was no need
for Ah Chun longer to be a cook. There were boom times in Hawaii.
Sugar was being extensively planted, and labour was needed. Ah Chun
saw the chance, and went into the labour-importing business. He
brought thousands of Cantonese coolies into Hawaii, and his wealth
began to grow. He made investments. His beady black eyes saw
bargains where other men saw bankruptcy. He bought a fish-pond for
a song, which later paid five hundred per cent and was the opening
wedge by which he monopolized the fish market of Honolulu. He did
not talk for publication, nor figure in politics, nor play at
revolutions, but he forecast events more clearly and farther ahead
than did the men who engineered them. In his mind's eye he saw
Honolulu a modern, electric-lighted city at a time when it
straggled, unkempt and sand-tormented, over a barren reef of
uplifted coral rock. So he bought land. He bought land from
merchants who needed ready cash, from impecunious natives, from
riotous traders' sons, from widows and orphans and the lepers
deported to Molokai; and, somehow, as the years went by, the pieces
of land he had bought proved to be needed for warehouses, or coffee
buildings, or hotels. He leased, and rented, sold and bought, and
resold again.
But there were other things as well. He put his confidence and his
money into Parkinson, the renegade captain whom nobody would trust.
And Parkinson sailed away on mysterious voyages in the little Vega.
Parkinson was taken care of until he died, and years afterward
Honolulu was astonished when the news leaked out that the Drake and
Acorn guano islands had been sold to the British Phosphate Trust for
three-quarters of a million. Then there were the fat, lush days of
King Kalakaua, when Ah Chun paid three hundred thousand dollars for
the opium licence. If he paid a third of a million for the drug
monopoly, the investment was nevertheless a good one, for the
dividends bought him the Kalalau Plantation, which, in turn, paid
him thirty per cent for seventeen years and was ultimately sold by
him for a million and a half.
It was under the Kamehamehas, long before, that he had served his
own country as Chinese Consul--a position that was not altogether
unlucrative; and it was under Kamehameha IV that he changed his
citizenship, becoming an Hawaiian subject in order to marry Stella
Allendale, herself a subject of the brown-skinned king, though more
of Anglo-Saxon blood ran in her veins than of Polynesian. In fact,
the random breeds in her were so attenuated that they were valued at
eighths and sixteenths. In the latter proportions was the blood of
her great-grandmother, Paahao--the Princess Paahao, for she came of
the royal line. Stella Allendale's great-grandfather had been a
Captain Blunt, an English adventurer who took service under
Kamehameha I and was made a tabu chief himself. Her grandfather had
been a New Bedford whaling captain, while through her own father had
been introduced a remote blend of Italian and Portuguese which had
been grafted upon his own English stock. Legally a Hawaiian, Ah
Chun's spouse was more of any one of three other nationalities.
And into this conglomerate of the races, Ah Chun introduced the
Mongolian mixture. Thus, his children by Mrs. Ah Chun were one
thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one sixteenth
Portuguese, one-half Chinese, and eleven thirty-seconds English and
American. It might well be that Ah Chun would have refrained from
matrimony could he have foreseen the wonderful family that was to
spring from this union. It was wonderful in many ways. First,
there was its size. There were fifteen sons and daughters, mostly
daughters. The sons had come first, three of them, and then had
followed, in unswerving sequence, a round dozen of girls. The blend
of the race was excellent. Not alone fruitful did it prove, for the
progeny, without exception, was healthy and without blemish. But
the most amazing thing about the family was its beauty. All the
girls were beautiful--delicately, ethereally beautiful. Mamma Ah
Chun's rotund lines seemed to modify papa Ah Chun's lean angles, so
that the daughters were willowy without being lathy, round-muscled
without being chubby. In every feature of every face were haunting
reminiscences of Asia, all manipulated over and disguised by Old
England, New England, and South of Europe. No observer, without
information, would have guessed, the heavy Chinese strain in their
veins; nor could any observer, after being informed, fail to note
immediately the Chinese traces.
As beauties, the Ah Chun girls were something new. Nothing like
them had been seen before. They resembled nothing so much as they
resembled one another, and yet each girl was sharply individual.
There was no mistaking one for another. On the other hand, Maud,
who was blue-eyed and yellow-haired, would remind one instantly of
Henrietta, an olive brunette with large, languishing dark eyes and
hair that was blue-black. The hint of resemblance that ran through
them all, reconciling every differentiation, was Ah Chun's
contribution. He had furnished the groundwork upon which had been
traced the blended patterns of the races. He had furnished the
slim-boned Chinese frame, upon which had been builded the delicacies
and subtleties of Saxon, Latin, and Polynesian flesh.
Mrs. Ah Chun had ideas of her own to which Ah Chun gave credence,
though never permitting them expression when they conflicted with
his own philosophic calm. She had been used all her life to living
in European fashion. Very well. Ah Chun gave her a European
mansion. Later, as his sons and daughters grew able to advise, he
built a bungalow, a spacious, rambling affair, as unpretentious as
it was magnificent. Also, as time went by, there arose a mountain
house on Tantalus, to which the family could flee when the "sick
wind" blew from the south. And at Waikiki he built a beach
residence on an extensive site so well chosen that later on, when
the United States government condemned it for fortification
purposes, an immense sum accompanied the condemnation. In all his
houses were billiard and smoking rooms and guest rooms galore, for
Ah Chun's wonderful progeny was given to lavish entertainment. The
furnishing was extravagantly simple. Kings' ransoms were expended
without display--thanks to the educated tastes of the progeny.
Ah Chun had been liberal in the matter of education. "Never mind
expense," he had argued in the old days with Parkinson when that
slack mariner could see no reason for making the Vega seaworthy;
"you sail the schooner, I pay the bills." And so with his sons and
daughters. It had been for them to get the education and never mind
the expense. Harold, the eldest-born, had gone to Harvard and
Oxford; Albert and Charles had gone through Yale in the same
classes. And the daughters, from the eldest down, had undergone
their preparation at Mills Seminary in California and passed on to
Vassar, Wellesley, or Bryn Mawr. Several, having so desired, had
had the finishing touches put on in Europe. And from all the world
Ah Chun's sons and daughters returned to him to suggest and advise
in the garnishment of the chaste magnificence of his residences. Ah
Chun himself preferred the voluptuous glitter of Oriental display;
but he was a philosopher, and he clearly saw that his children's
tastes were correct according to Western standards.
Of course, his children were not known as the Ah Chun children. As
he had evolved from a coolie labourer to a multi-millionaire, so had
his name evolved. Mamma Ah Chun had spelled it A'Chun, but her
wiser offspring had elided the apostrophe and spelled it Achun. Ah
Chun did not object. The spelling of his name interfered no whit
with his comfort nor his philosophic calm. Besides, he was not
proud. But when his children arose to the height of a starched
shirt, a stiff collar, and a frock coat, they did interfere with his
comfort and calm. Ah Chun would have none of it. He preferred the
loose-flowing robes of China, and neither could they cajole nor
bully him into making the change. They tried both courses, and in
the latter one failed especially disastrously. They had not been to
America for nothing. They had learned the virtues of the boycott as
employed by organized labour, and he, their father, Chun Ah Chun,
they boycotted in his own house, Mamma Achun aiding and abetting.
But Ah Chun himself, while unversed in Western culture, was
thoroughly conversant with Western labour conditions. An extensive
employer of labour himself, he knew how to cope with its tactics.
Promptly he imposed a lockout on his rebellious progeny and erring
spouse. He discharged his scores of servants, locked up his
stables, closed his houses, and went to live in the Royal Hawaiian
Hotel, in which enterprise he happened to be the heaviest
stockholder. The family fluttered distractedly on visits about with
friends, while Ah Chun calmly managed his many affairs, smoked his
long pipe with the tiny silver bowl, and pondered the problem of his
wonderful progeny.
This problem did not disturb his calm. He knew in his philosopher's
soul that when it was ripe he would solve it. In the meantime he
enforced the lesson that complacent as he might be, he was
nevertheless the absolute dictator of the Achun destinies. The
family held out for a week, then returned, along with Ah Chun and
the many servants, to occupy the bungalow once more. And thereafter
no question was raised when Ah Chun elected to enter his brilliant
drawing-room in blue silk robe, wadded slippers, and black silk
skull-cap with red button peak, or when he chose to draw at his
slender-stemmed silver-bowled pipe among the cigarette- and cigar-
smoking officers and civilians on the broad verandas or in the
smoking room.
Ah Chun occupied a unique position in Honolulu. Though he did not
appear in society, he was eligible anywhere. Except among the
Chinese merchants of the city, he never went out; but he received,
and he always was the centre of his household and the head of his
table. Himself peasant, born Chinese, he presided over an
atmosphere of culture and refinement second to none in all the
islands. Nor were there any in all the islands too proud to cross
his threshold and enjoy his hospitality. First of all, the Achun
bungalow was of irreproachable tone. Next, Ah Chun was a power.
And finally, Ah Chun was a moral paragon and an honest business man.
Despite the fact that business morality was higher than on the
mainland, Ah Chun outshone the business men of Honolulu in the
scrupulous rigidity of his honesty. It was a saying that his word
was as good as his bond. His signature was never needed to bind
him. He never broke his word. Twenty years after Hotchkiss, of
Hotchkiss, Morterson Company, died, they found among mislaid papers
a memorandum of a loan of thirty thousand dollars to Ah Chun. It
had been incurred when Ah Chun was Privy Councillor to Kamehameha
II. In the bustle and confusion of those heyday, money-making
times, the affair had slipped Ah Chun's mind. There was no note, no
legal claim against him, but he settled in full with the Hotchkiss'
Estate, voluntarily paying a compound interest that dwarfed the
principal. Likewise, when he verbally guaranteed the disastrous
Kakiku Ditch Scheme, at a time when the least sanguine did not dream
a guarantee necessary--"Signed his cheque for two hundred thousand
without a quiver, gentlemen, without a quiver," was the report of
the secretary of the defunct enterprise, who had been sent on the
forlorn hope of finding out Ah Chun's intentions. And on top of the
many similar actions that were true of his word, there was scarcely
a man of repute in the islands that at one time or another had not
experienced the helping financial hand of Ah Chun.
So it was that Honolulu watched his wonderful family grow up into a
perplexing problem and secretly sympathized with him, for it was
beyond any of them to imagine what he was going to do with it. But
Ah Chun saw the problem more clearly than they. No one knew as he
knew the extent to which he was an alien in his family. His own
family did not guess it. He saw that there was no place for him
amongst this marvellous seed of his loins, and he looked forward to
his declining years and knew that he would grow more and more alien.
He did not understand his children. Their conversation was of
things that did not interest him and about which he knew nothing.
The culture of the West had passed him by. He was Asiatic to the
last fibre, which meant that he was heathen. Their Christianity was
to him so much nonsense. But all this he would have ignored as
extraneous and irrelevant, could he have but understood the young
people themselves. When Maud, for instance, told him that the
housekeeping bills for the month were thirty thousand--that he
understood, as he understood Albert's request for five thousand with
which to buy the schooner yacht Muriel and become a member of the
Hawaiian Yacht Club. But it was their remoter, complicated desires
and mental processes that obfuscated him. He was not slow in
learning that the mind of each son and daughter was a secret
labyrinth which he could never hope to tread. Always he came upon
the wall that divides East from West. Their souls were inaccessible
to him, and by the same token he knew that his soul was inaccessible
to them.
Besides, as the years came upon him, he found himself harking back
more and more to his own kind. The reeking smells of the Chinese
quarter were spicy to him. He sniffed them with satisfaction as he
passed along the street, for in his mind they carried him back to
the narrow tortuous alleys of Canton swarming with life and
movement. He regretted that he had cut off his queue to please
Stella Allendale in the prenuptial days, and he seriously considered
the advisability of shaving his crown and growing a new one. The
dishes his highly paid chef concocted for him failed to tickle his
reminiscent palate in the way that the weird messes did in the
stuffy restaurant down in the Chinese quarter. He enjoyed vastly
more a half-hour's smoke and chat with two or three Chinese chums,
than to preside at the lavish and elegant dinners for which his
bungalow was famed, where the pick of the Americans and Europeans
sat at the long table, men and women on equality, the women with
jewels that blazed in the subdued light against white necks and
arms, the men in evening dress, and all chattering and laughing over
topics and witticisms that, while they were not exactly Greek to
him, did not interest him nor entertain.
But it was not merely his alienness and his growing desire to return
to his Chinese flesh-pots that constituted the problem. There was
also his wealth. He had looked forward to a placid old age. He had
worked hard. His reward should have been peace and repose. But he
knew that with his immense fortune peace and repose could not
possibly be his. Already there were signs and omens. He had seen
similar troubles before. There was his old employer, Dantin, whose
children had wrested from him, by due process of law, the management
of his property, having the Court appoint guardians to administer it
for him. Ah Chun knew, and knew thoroughly well, that had Dantin
been a poor man, it would have been found that he could quite
rationally manage his own affairs. And old Dantin had had only
three children and half a million, while he, Chun Ah Chun, had
fifteen children and no one but himself knew how many millions.
"Our daughters are beautiful women," he said to his wife, one
evening. "There are many young men. The house is always full of
young men. My cigar bills are very heavy. Why are there no
marriages?"
Mamma Achun shrugged her shoulders and waited.
"Women are women and men are men--it is strange there are no
marriages. Perhaps the young men do not like our daughters."
"Ah, they like them well enough," Mamma Chun answered; "but you see,
they cannot forget that you are your daughters' father."
"Yet you forgot who my father was," Ah Chun said gravely. "All you
asked was for me to cut off my queue."
"The young men are more particular than I was, I fancy."
"What is the greatest thing in the world?" Ah Chun demanded with
abrupt irrelevance.
Mamma Achun pondered for a moment, then replied: "God."
He nodded. "There are gods and gods. Some are paper, some are
wood, some are bronze. I use a small one in the office for a paper-
weight. In the Bishop Museum are many gods of coral rock and lava
stone."
"But there is only one God," she announced decisively, stiffening
her ample frame argumentatively.
Ah Chun noted the danger signal and sheered off.
"What is greater than God, then?" he asked. "I will tell you. It
is money. In my time I have had dealings with Jews and Christians,
Mohammedans and Buddhists, and with little black men from the
Solomons and New Guinea who carried their god about them, wrapped in
oiled paper. They possessed various gods, these men, but they all
worshipped money. There is that Captain Higginson. He seems to
like Henrietta."
"He will never marry her," retorted Mamma Achun. "He will be an
admiral before he dies--"
"A rear-admiral," Ah Chun interpolated.
"Yes, I know. That is the way they retire."
"His family in the United States is a high one. They would not like
it if he married . . . if he did not marry an American girl."
Ah Chun knocked the ashes out of his pipe, thoughtfully refilling
the silver bowl with a tiny pleget of tobacco. He lighted it and
smoked it out before he spoke.
"Henrietta is the oldest girl. The day she marries I will give her
three hundred thousand dollars. That will fetch that Captain
Higginson and his high family along with him. Let the word go out
to him. I leave it to you."
And Ah Chun sat and smoked on, and in the curling smoke-wreaths he
saw take shape the face and figure of Toy Shuey--Toy Shuey, the maid
of all work in his uncle's house in the Cantonese village, whose
work was never done and who received for a whole year's work one
dollar. And he saw his youthful self arise in the curling smoke,
his youthful self who had toiled eighteen years in his uncle's field
for little more. And now he, Ah Chun, the peasant, dowered his
daughter with three hundred thousand years of such toil. And she
was but one daughter of a dozen. He was not elated at the thought.
It struck him that it was a funny, whimsical world, and he chuckled
aloud and startled Mamma Achun from a revery which he knew lay deep
in the hidden crypts of her being where he had never penetrated.
But Ah Chun's word went forth, as a whisper, and Captain Higginson
forgot his rear-admiralship and his high family and took to wife
three hundred thousand dollars and a refined and cultured girl who
was one thirty-second Polynesian, one-sixteenth Italian, one-
sixteenth Portuguese, eleven thirty-seconds English and Yankee, and
one-half Chinese.
Ah Chun's munificence had its effect. His daughters became suddenly
eligible and desirable. Clara was the next, but when the Secretary
of the Territory formally proposed for her, Ah Chun informed him
that he must wait his turn, that Maud was the oldest and that she
must be married first. It was shrewd policy. The whole family was
made vitally interested in marrying off Maud, which it did in three
months, to Ned Humphreys, the United States immigration
commissioner. Both he and Maud complained, for the dowry was only
two hundred thousand. Ah Chun explained that his initial generosity
had been to break the ice, and that after that his daughters could
not expect otherwise than to go more cheaply.
Clara followed Maud, and thereafter, for a space of two years; there
was a continuous round of weddings in the bungalow. In the meantime
Ah Chun had not been idle. Investment after investment was called
in. He sold out his interests in a score of enterprises, and step
by step, so as not to cause a slump in the market, he disposed of
his large holdings in real estate. Toward the last he did
precipitate a slump and sold at sacrifice. What caused this haste
were the squalls he saw already rising above the horizon. By the
time Lucille was married, echoes of bickerings and jealousies were
already rumbling in his ears. The air was thick with schemes and
counter-schemes to gain his favour and to prejudice him against one
or another or all but one of his sons-in-law. All of which was not
conducive to the peace and repose he had planned for his old age.
He hastened his efforts. For a long time he had been in
correspondence with the chief banks in Shanghai and Macao. Every
steamer for several years had carried away drafts drawn in favour of
one, Chun Ah Chun, for deposit in those Far Eastern banks. The
drafts now became heavier. His two youngest daughters were not yet
married. He did not wait, but dowered them with a hundred thousand
each, which sums lay in the Bank of Hawaii, drawing interest and
awaiting their wedding day. Albert took over the business of the
firm of Ah Chun and Ah Yung, Harold, the eldest, having elected to
take a quarter of a million and go to England to live. Charles, the
youngest, took a hundred thousand, a legal guardian, and a course in
a Keeley institute. To Mamma Achun was given the bungalow, the
mountain House on Tantalus, and a new seaside residence in place of
the one Ah Chun sold to the government. Also, to Mamma Achun was
given half a million in money well invested.
Ah Chun was now ready to crack the nut of the problem. One fine
morning when the family was at breakfast--he had seen to it that all
his sons-in-law and their wives were present--he announced that he
was returning to his ancestral soil. In a neat little homily he
explained that he had made ample provision for his family, and he
laid down various maxims that he was sure, he said, would enable
them to dwell together in peace and harmony. Also, he gave business
advice to his sons-in-law, preached the virtues of temperate living
and safe investments, and gave them the benefit of his encyclopedic
knowledge of industrial and business conditions in Hawaii. Then he
called for his carriage, and, in the company of the weeping Mamma
Achun, was driven down to the Pacific Mail steamer, leaving behind
him a panic in the bungalow. Captain Higginson clamoured wildly for
an injunction. The daughters shed copious tears. One of their
husbands, an ex-Federal judge, questioned Ah Chun's sanity, and
hastened to the proper authorities to inquire into it. He returned
with the information that Ah Chun had appeared before the commission
the day before, demanded an examination, and passed with flying
colours. There was nothing to be done, so they went down and said
good-bye to the little old man, who waved farewell from the
promenade deck as the big steamer poked her nose seaward through the
coral reef.
But the little old man was not bound for Canton. He knew his own
country too well, and the squeeze of the Mandarins, to venture into
it with the tidy bulk of wealth that remained to him. He went to
Macao. Now Ah Chun had long exercised the power of a king and he
was as imperious as a king. When he landed at Macao and went into
the office of the biggest European hotel to register, the clerk
closed the book on him. Chinese were not permitted. Ah Chun called
for the manager and was treated with contumely. He drove away, but
in two hours he was back again. He called the clerk and manager in,
gave them a month's salary, and discharged them. He had made
himself the owner of the hotel; and in the finest suite he settled
down during the many months the gorgeous palace in the suburbs was
building for him. In the meantime, with the inevitable ability that
was his, he increased the earnings of his big hotel from three per
cent to thirty.
The troubles Ah Chun had flown began early. There were sons-in-law
that made bad investments, others that played ducks and drakes with
the Achun dowries. Ah Chun being out of it, they looked at Mamma Ah
Chun and her half million, and, looking, engendered not the best of
feeling toward one another. Lawyers waxed fat in the striving to
ascertain the construction of trust deeds. Suits, cross-suits, and
counter-suits cluttered the Hawaiian courts. Nor did the police
courts escape. There were angry encounters in which harsh words and
harsher blows were struck. There were such things as flower pots
being thrown to add emphasis to winged words. And suits for libel
arose that dragged their way through the courts and kept Honolulu
agog with excitement over the revelations of the witnesses.
In his palace, surrounded by all dear delights of the Orient, Ah
Chun smokes his placid pipe and listens to the turmoil overseas. By
each mail steamer, in faultless English, typewritten on an American
machine, a letter goes from Macao to Honolulu, in which, by
admirable texts and precepts, Ah Chun advises his family to live in
unity and harmony. As for himself, he is out of it all, and well
content. He has won to peace and repose. At times he chuckles and
rubs his hands, and his slant little black eyes twinkle merrily at
the thought of the funny world. For out of all his living and
philosophizing, that remains to him--the conviction that it is a
very funny world.
