Short Stories
THE TEARS OF AH KIM
by Jack Lo nd on
There was a great noise and racket, but no scandal, in Honolu-
lu's Chinatown. Those within hearing distance merely
shrugged their shoulders and smiled tolerantly at the disturb-
ance as an affair of accustomed usualness. "What is it?" asked
Chin Mo, down with a sharp pleurisy, of his wife, who had
paused for a second at the open window to listen.
"Only Ah Kim," was her reply. "His mother is beating him
again."
The fracas was taking place in the garden, behind the living
rooms that were at the back of the store that fronted on the street
with the proud sign above: AH KIM COMPANY, GENERAL
MERCHANDISE. The garden was a miniature domain, twenty
feet square, that somehow cunningly seduced the eye into a
sense and seeming of illimitable vastness. There were forests of
dwarf pines and oaks, centuries old yet two or three feet in
height, and imported at enormous care and expense. A tiny
bridge, a pace across, arched over a miniature river that flowed
with rapids and cataracts from a miniature lake stocked with
myriad-finned, orange-miracled goldfish that in proportion to
the lake and landscape were whales. On every side the many
windows of the several-storied shack-buildings looked down. In
the centre of the garden, on the narrow gravelled walk close be-
side the lake Ah Kim was noisily receiving his beating.
No Chinese lad of tender and beatable years was Ah Kim.
His was the store of Ah Kim Company, and his was the achieve-
ment of building it up through the long years from the shoe-
string of savings of a contract coolie labourer to a bank account
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