Honolulu by Alan Brennert Read Free Book Online Page A

as usual she shared it with me as we pounded our clothes with our bats: “Have you ever heard” IMPERIAL JAPANESE GOVERNMENT . We then applied for visas from the American Embassy in Seoul.
    Within six weeks, the hundred yen for my steamship ticket arrived, along with two hundred more for incidental expenses. I gave half of this to my mother to use for the household, and promised to send more once I was settled in Hawai’i. I was also required by law to deposit a portion of this money in a bank as a kind of insurance that I would go through with the picture marriage (some women, flush with spending money, had reneged on their engagements but kept the cash).
    Now that our plans were out in the open, Sunny and I boldly came and went as we pleased, increasing the frequency of our English lessons to an hour each day. By the end of these lessons we were conversing, simply but effectively, in English with our American teachers.
    Mother made two new dresses for me, in colors more befitting a married woman. As the day of departure neared, I packed these and my other clothes in a bag along with a sewing kit and the book my teacher had given me. The morning I left I bid goodbye to my family-all but Father, who had left for town before dawn. My clan surprised me with lovely and touching farewell gifts. Blossom, bravely trying not to cry, gave me some pressed flowers she had picked in the hills. My mother bestowed upon me a silver hairpintraditionally worn only by married women-to place in my hair on my wedding day. And finally, Joyful Day and my other brothers presented me with a package of writing paper and a fountain pen-“so that you might write us and tell us of your life and education in America, and keep us all as close as your pen.” This meant more to me than I can say: it was both an acknowledgment of my literacy and an approval of my aspirations. I embraced each member of my family in turn and wept without shame.
    Sunny’s parents took us on ponies to Taegu Station, where we boarded a train for the port city of Pusan. There, in the towering shadows of Mount Hwangnyeonsan and Mount Geumjeongsan, we transferred to a ferry bound for Yokohama, Japan. Though Sunny and I were sad to leave our families, being together made us feel less lonely; and the excitement of being aboard a ship for the first time, so far from everything we had ever known, was as bracing as the salty air. In Yokohama we were given physical examinations for smallpox and trachoma, and more embarrassingly were required to provide stool samples, which were to be tested for parasites. We knew it would take a day or two for the results, so we had made reservations at a local Korean-style inn, where we were made welcome and fed a fine dinner of kimchi, seafood soup, red bean paste, and, of course, rice.
    At the inn we met other Korean women who were traveling to America as picture brides. One, aptly named Beauty, was an exquisitely lovely sixteenyear-old with a melodious Kyongsang accent. In fact, all of us turned out to be from the same province. Within thirty seconds of introducing herself Beauty had pulled out a picture of her fiance in Hawai’i. “Isn’t he handsome?” she asked, showing us a small portrait of a serious-looking young man with penetrating eyes. “Such a fair complexion, so scholarly!” She was clearly smitten with her intended, or perhaps just smitten with the idea of being smitten.
    Another woman, a well-dressed city yangban with features sharp as a paper crane’s, glanced at the photograph and announced airily, “Fair … but common.
    Beauty wilted like a flower in a dry wind.
    Theyangban, whose name was jade Moon, quickly produced her own fiance’s photo. He cut a dashing figure in a Western business suit, holding a Panama hat in one hand as he posed jauntily with one foot on the running board of a Whippet automobile.
    “This is an uncommon man,” she declared.
    A tiny young woman named Wise Pearl, no more than five feet tall,