Short Stories
frost nor famine. The very pigs, never fed, were ever fat of the
generous offal disdained by man. A Cantonese or Yangtse
family could live on the waste of an Hawaii coolie. And wag-
es! In gold dollars, ten a month, or, in trade dollars, two a
month, was what the contract Chinese coolie received from
the white-devil sugar kings. In a year the coolie received the
prodigious sum of two hundred and forty trade dollars- -more
than a hundred times what a coolie, toiling ten times as hard,
received on the eleventh cataract of the Yangtse. In short, all
things considered, an Hawaii coolie was one hundred times
better off, and, when the amount of labour was estimated, a
thousand times better off. In addition was the wonderful cli-
mate.
When Ah Kim was twenty-four, despite his mother's plead-
ings and beatings, he resigned from the ancient and honourable
guild of the eleventh cataract towing coolies, left his mother to
go into a boss coolie's household as a servant for a dollar a year,
and an annual dress to cost not less than thirty cents, and him-
self departed down the Yangtse to the great sea. Many were his
adventures and severe his toils and hardships ere, as a salt-sea
junk-sailor, he won to Canton. When he was twenty-six he
signed five years of his life and labour away to the Hawaii sugar
kings and departed, one of eight hundred contract coolies, for
that far island land, on a festering steamer run by a crazy captain
and drunken officers and rejected of Lloyds.
Honourable, among labourers, had Ah Kim's rating been as a
towing coolie. In Hawaii, receiving a hundred times more pay,
he found himself looked down upon as the lowest of the low—a
plantation coolie, than which could be nothing lower. But a cool-
ie whose ancestors had towed junks up the eleventh cataract
171