Makai by Kathleen Tyau (Beacon Press)
“So many secrets,” Alice Lum admits. She’s immersed in them and has been since childhood: her father’s pipe, “not the tobacco one,” that he smokes only when he’s in a room downtown or behind a locked door in his house; the reason behind the behavior of her best friend’s husband; the knowledge of who her own husband truly is; and her private secret, divulged only at the end of her story--of how she survived the Big Water that swept her and her daughters makai, to the sea.
Alice is the daughter of Chinese parents in Hawaii, a place where people have come from all over the world to live: Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, haole from the Mainland, forming a culture that blends with the Hawaiians. But there is little intermingling with one notable exception, Alice’s best friend, Annabel Lee, an unconventional beauty who makes her own rules. Annabel is half-Chinese, one-fourth Hawaiian, one-fourth Scotch with a great-grandfather whom she claims is Robert Louis Stevenson. A dreamer, “Annabel taught me how to dream,” Alice says wistfully. Of all the dreams Annabel gave her, only one comes true--her marriage to Sammy Woo who originally had his eye on Annabel, not Alice.
Alice grows up steeped in Chinese culture. Her father practices traditional medicine and her mother’s philosophy is “act rich so prosperity can find you.” Alice is a good Chinese daughter until she is sent to boarding school and finds a different way to behave after meeting Annabel. When World War II erupts with the attack on Pearl Harbor, her life becomes even more unfettered. “Days like mountains...Nights like water...We learned to live in the dark.” Alice’s mother cautions her to let people know she’s Chinese, not Japanese and her brothers go off to war along with Sammy Woo. Annabel and Alice take jobs as accountants during the day and dance instructors at Arthur Murray at night. “We’re career girls,” Annabel insists as she plans her future escape from the islands. Alice too is in her plans, but Alice wants a life with Sammy.
Sammy is different, an orphan who treasures the jade bracelet passed to him by the mother he never knew. His friends tease him, “Sure you not Japanese, Sammy,” a joke that Sammy fails to appreciate. He loathes the Japanese.
Years into their marriage, Alice receives a visitor, Sammy’s aunt, who brings an explosion in an envelope, adoption papers proving that her nephew isn’t of her blood. He’s the son of a Japanese couple who gave him up at birth. “That makes my girls only half-Chinese...I am the only one who’s Chinese all the way,” is Alice’s stunned reaction. In shock herself and frightened of how Sammy will react to this news, she holds it as another secret, waiting for the right time to divulge the truth.
Life conspires to forestall the right time. Alice’s oldest daughter falls in love with Annabel’s only son and Annabel, long divorced from the husband who left her for a man, returns to her old home. Suddenly all the secrets converge and spill over, old resentments rise to the surface, and bloodlines fade into unimportance. And in the end, the secret of Alice’s inner strength is disclosed when she tells how she and her daughters were saved when a flood swept them out to sea.
A beautiful patchwork of memories and history, stitched together as skillfully as one of Alice’s pieces of fabric art, Makai casts a bright spotlight upon Hawaiian life and culture, revealing its complexity and beauty. A story of friendship in all its complexities, it asks through Alice, “Is this what it means to love? To hide and worry and want,” and ends with the assurance of “One inch, one layer, one life at a time. MIne.”~Janet Brown