Short Stories
"Now will I make you cry. As never before shall I beat you
until you do cry."
"Then let us go into the back rooms, honourable mother,"
Ah Kim suggested. "We will close the windows and the doors,
and there may you beat me."
"No. Here shall you be beaten before all the world and this
shameless woman who would, with her own hand, take you
by the ear and call such sacrilege marriage! Stay, shameless
woman."
"I am going to stay anyway," said Li Faa. She favoured the
clerks with a truculent stare. "And I'd like to see anything less
than the police put me out of here."
"You will never be my daughter-in-law," Mrs. Tai Fu
snapped.
Li Faa nodded her head in agreement.
"But just the same," she added, "shall your son be my third
husband."
"You mean when I am dead?" the old mother screamed.
"The sun rises each morning," Li Faa said enigmatically.
"All my life have I seen it rise—"
"You are forty, and you wear corsets."
"But I do not dye my hair—that will come later," Li Faa calm-
ly retorted. "As to my age, you are right. I shall be forty-one next
Kamehameha Day. For forty years I have seen the sun rise. My
father was an old man. Before he died he told me that he had ob-
served no difference in the rising of the sun since when he was a
little boy. The world is round. Confucius did not know that, but
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