下载掌阅APP，畅读海量书库
立即打开
作品选读
(excerpt)
During the Depression, instead of laying off his employees, my father engaged them in testing his newest patent idea. He brightened the large showroom by adding more lightbulbs. The plain walls of the store were covered with displays of his innovative bamboo blinds and draperies. The upholsterers Yin Hong and Jimmie learned to install the bamboo hangings under cornices, which were built and painted by the carpenter and the painter. Only old Ordway hammered and coughed in the background, working on the few reupholstery jobs that trickled in.
My mother looked with anxiety on these efforts to keep the employees busy. She must have thought they were all crazy spending day after day playing with Father’s toys.
To her amazement, his invention began to sell. One wealthy client after another replaced their worn, faded draperies with new draperies made of bamboo. Furthermore, the new bamboo installed in their homes promoted sales of rattan-trimmed custom furniture. The clients enjoyed the tropical setting created in their homes by combining bamboo draperies and rattan furniture.
The bamboo material, which came from Japan, was made up of one-sixteenth inch split bamboo strips woven together with heavy threads. The green peel, or bark, of the bamboo pole from which the drapery material was made was extremely durable.
In Honolulu the best-known importer of Japanese goods was the firm Iida. My father bought dozens of ready-made blinds from Iida, then stripped and discarded the pulleys and cords attached to them; the horizontal strips of bamboo in Iida’s roll-up shade then could be turned to work in vertical strips in a drapery. It wasn’t long before he realized how foolish he was to squander money and labor purchasing the shades and dismantling them before converting the bamboo material into draw draperies.
As sales of the new draperies increased, a way was found to import the bamboo material in continuous rolls, like cloth yardage. The shipments of woven, peel, split bamboo began arriving in rolls of one hundred running feet. They were warehoused above the store. The rolls looked strange, standing like thick stumps of trees of varying heights lined up for inspection. A few rolls came in three foot heights; most were five, six, and seven feet tall—the heights needed most frequently for windows and doors in Hawaii’s homes. Later, rolls of eight, nine, and ten feet were ordered for the arches and windows in commercial buildings.
The new bamboo came raw and unfinished, unlike the polished staves of the blinds from Iida. So the material had to be blow-torched to remove loose, needly fibers. Yin Hong or Jimmie lay a cut-to-measure piece of the material over two horses and swung the blow torch back and forth until the surface was smooth enough for one’s hand to run over it without feeling splinters.
My father was the best salesman for the new bamboo draw draperies and the new bamboo folding shade—his two innovations for windows. He could speak for hours extolling their virtues with irresistible enthusiasm. A skillful craftsman and an adept handyman, he promised he could make his inventions fit any window, no matter how different it was from the ordinary. And he promised the bamboo would last the customer’s lifetime, although he had no proof. He believed it was important to hem the sharp edges of the cut bamboo with a cotton tape, which my mother sewed on. Our super-power sewing machine ran easily over the woody fibers. Soon Yin Hong and Jimmie became installers of these draperies and blinds in homes all over the city.
I wondered how my father was able to handle draperies with such proficiency. Then I recalled the experience he had while at Bailey Furniture Co., especially one time when he was involved with the “fanciest curtains” he had ever seen. The Princess Theatre on Fort Street, which in Honolulu in the 1920s served as a first-class movie theatre and symphony hall, had called on my father to take charge of the replacement of the proscenium curtains. For several nights he sat next to me at the kitchen table in the Pele Street house while I studied, making crude drawings of swirling drapes on wrapping paper. He arranged and rearranged the pattern of loose, flowing folds: a sheer inner curtain that parted gracefully to the sides and the heavy upper curtains rising to reveal the full stage. He hummed as he worked with numbers—how many yards of soft material? How many folds per swirl? How many swirls in all? I asked at one point what the heavy marks on the side in one drawing represented. He replied, “Those are the ties, the tassels.”
There came a time when my father felt so pressured he said he wished he had twelve pairs of hands. Every custom order of furniture and drapery seemed to require his personal attention. Women cried and begged him for special treatment of their jobs. My poor father was sought after from the moment he opened the doors of the store in the morning. The customers clamored, “Mr. Kwon, will you do this for me?” “Mr. Kwon, can you do that for me?” Then terse, stronger demands followed: “Kwon, you must do this for me!”
He made excuses and offered apologies for late deliveries. He had to resort to telling lies. The sheer diversity of orders required a variety of abilities; an employee often felt stymied and needed help before he could proceed with his work.
My father happened to be on the phone one day talking to an irate woman. He said, “I’m sorry, I hurt my hand—got it caught in a machine.” The same woman, looking very sympathetic, inquired a week later when she stopped in the store, “How is your hand?” He asked, “What hand?” When the woman reminded him of her call, he hastily replied, “Oh, that—it’s all okay now.”
When he ran out of excuses, apologies, and lies he decided to hide himself far back in the carpenter shop where no one could find him.
There was one woman, however, who was clever enough to ferret him out of hiding. Not believing that “Mr. Kwon is not here,” she brushed aside all the employees who tried to stop her from entering the carpenter shop. Dressed in shorts and zori slippers, wearing huge sunglasses, Doris Duke Cromwell, the tobacco heiress, swept through the shop looking for my father. Obviously tired of peddlers of goods fawning over her, she found my father refreshing and a challenge. But he did not favor her. In fact, he did not particularly care to do business with her. He said she was overly demanding and demeaning. She haggled over the price of every item. Perhaps because she had years of fending off cheaters, she had acquired a style of bartering when buying.
He found her especially unreasonable with time . He did not mind if she acted like many other women who expected special attention. But when he was forced to make an appointment at 5:30 P.M. at her home, a most inconvenient hour for a man who started work at 5:30 A.M., and he was made to wait and wait once he got to her home until her swim lesson with Duke Kahanamoku was over, he was angry. Her maid, feeling sorry for him, offered to take him on a tour of the tobacco heiress’ home, the famous Shangri-la at Black Point, which was just being completed. But he told her he was too tired.
But my father had great respect for most of his clients, especially the gracious kamaaina wives of wealthy businessmen in Hawaii. He referred to them as “ladies.” He noted their modulated voices, their expressions of appreciation, their trust in his billing as fair.
My mother, who had to divide her time between the shop and home, found little time to rest. She even had to give up regular church attendance. Our house on Nehoa Street, she said, needed so much of her attention. She alone had planted all the grass around the house, a coconut tree in the front, and an avocado tree in the back. A lawnmower was purchased and we depended on Father to push it occasionally around the property. After six days at the factory, my mother spent most of her Sunday cleaning the house and washing clothes. Every Sunday I helped with the laundry—most of which was boiled in soapy water in a five-gallon square tin, set up outside over a crude arrangement of stones. I didn’t understand why we had to go through the arduous task of stirring, boiling, and retrieving the laundry, carrying it dripping to the wash trays in the garage to be rinsed. We hoped for sunny Sundays, for the wash could be dried on the lines outside, then ironed in the afternoon. On Sunday nights we could sleep on crisp, clean, pressed sheets and our clothes for the week would be ready.
We all felt an urgent need to save time somehow. My father had the idea that if he bought a family car, then Mother would not have to take the bus to the shop. She could then spend more time at the store.
The difficult task of teaching her to drive the new Ford Model A touring car fell on him. What stormy driving lessons they must have had, for when they returned from one he would be shouting as they walked in the house: “I told you to step on the brake and clutch at the same time. Why do you forget? How many times must I remind you?”
She looked indignant but determined to succeed. We children cheered her, and made faces at her instructor when he wasn’t looking. We couldn’t wait for her to get her license and take us riding in the open green car with the narrow running board.
One day when we got home we noticed part of the jungle across from our house was being cleared. We were pleased; we could be expecting neighbors soon. As we had hoped, one house started going up, then another. Then we found both houses torn down several weeks later and the ground leveled. What was going on?
Trees and shrubs were being cut down every day until the area looked cleared for about twenty or more houses. The bald ground revealed a gently rising slope from Nehoa Street. The land rose sharply and met the hill behind; steep ridges and bare clefts showed.
Instead of houses, one large building began to take shape. Its architecture was Mediterranean; its roofing, colorful tile. Before it was completed we learned it was to be the new Roosevelt High School. The new building when finished looked stark—like a fortress or a prison—situated alone on a rise of the land. But later, with plantings around the structure, the lines of the school softened. Roosevelt graduated its first class of seniors at the location in June 1933, and I was one of them.
At the beginning of that summer my mother started packing for a trip to Korea. I had been so excited about graduation and planning for college I hadn’t been aware of my mother’s plans.
“Omoni, where are you going?” I asked.
“Oh, don’t you know, Chung Sook? I’m going to visit my—my—parents.” Her eyes misted and she made an effort to control her tears by biting her lips.
“Why? Are they ill?” My grandparents’ son, a doctor, would be able to care for them. “Are they very ill?”
“No. I don’t think so. But there is something not quite right going on there. I have to go and see...”
“This trip is sudden, isn’t it?” I said to her. “How long will you be gone? Just for the summer?”
“I cannot say. I hope I can come back soon.”
The words sounded ominous. A lump formed in my throat. I was more concerned, I was ashamed to admit, about myself faring at home without Mother than for her safety. “It’s going to be hard for us without you, Omoni. Maybe I should stay out of college this year if you plan to stay a while.”
“No. No. You will be able to manage, I’m sure. Your father says you can look for someone to come in and help with the housework and the cooking while I’m gone. Remember this: your father and I insist you register to enter the University of Hawaii this fall. You must get an education. No matter what happens at home.”