Short Stories
broken the taboos, cast down their own Polynesian gods, and
weak-heartedly listened to the preaching about the remote
and unimageable god of the Christian missionaries. Li Faa, ed-
ucated, who could read and write English and Hawaiian and a
fair measure of Chinese, claimed to believe in nothing, alt-
hough in her secret heart she feared the kahunas (Hawaiian
witch-doctors), who she was certain could charm away ill luck
or pray one to death. Li Faa would never come into Ah Kim's
house, as he thoroughly knew, and kow-tow to his mother
and be slave to her in the immemorial Chinese way. Li Faa,
from the Chinese angle, was a new woman, a feminist, who
rode horseback astride, disported immodestly garbed at Wai-
kiki on the surf-boards, and at more than one luau (feast) had
been known to dance the hula with the worst and in excess of
the worst, to the scandalous delight of all.
Ah Kim himself, a generation younger than his mother, had
been bitten by the acid of modernity. The old order held, in so
far as he still felt in his subtlest crypts of being the dusty hand of
the past resting on him, residing in him; yet he subscribed to
heavy policies of fire and life insurance, acted as treasurer for the
local Chinese revolutionises that were for turning the Celestial
Empire into a republic, contributed to the funds of the Hawaii-
born Chinese baseball nine that excelled the Yankee nines at
their own game, talked theosophy with Katso Suguri, the Japa-
nese Buddhist and silk importer, fell for police graft, played and
paid his insidious share in the democratic politics of annexed
Hawaii, and was thinking of buying an automobile. Ah Kim nev-
er dared bare himself to himself and thrash out and winnow out
how much of the old he had ceased to believe in. His mother was
of the old, yet he revered her and was happy under her bamboo
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