Song of the Exile Read online

  Two weeks after Dew shipped out, Keo started playing part-time at Rizal’s Dance Hall, sitting in after midnight when the second trumpet took a break. Filipinos were passionate, fiery; their exuberant sounds introduced him to new points of view, new attitudes. He followed the rules, and began blowing brass duets with the first trumpet, the band playing a jazzy sensual tempo couples danced to. It wasn’t the raw, improvisational jazz he loved, but it was a form of blues, with enough surprises to keep him alert. He memorized his sheet music, so he knew each trumpet arrangement by heart.

  When the band struck up, he played the score exactly as written. But sometimes in rehearsals he skidded off toward the edges, improvising, knowing he had gone too far when the bandleader narrowed his eyes. Because he couldn’t blow wild, he began to concentrate on tone. In time a quality crept into his playing, something came out of his horn he’d never heard. Keo began soloing, with such restraint and intelligent phrasing, bandsmen looked at him with interest.

  One night, playing “I Should Care,” he blew such sweeping, lilting arpeggios, couples stopped dancing and listened. He played on, pulling truth into focus, the rhythm section sliding in—piano, bass, drums—adapting to his sound. When it was over, the crowd applauded, shouting Keo’s name.

  Eventually soldiers came to hear him, serious jazzmen. He wrote Dew, keeping him abreast. Records arrived from New Orleans. Ellington, Basie. More Sidney Bechet. And wah-wah gutbucket sounds Keo hadn’t heard before, blues and jazz played on horns muted with plates, cups, hats. He found the sounds ugly, unorthodox. He thought of gutbucket as cheating. But as he listened, Keo began to like how a horn could be controlled.

  One night he put a rice bowl over the mouth of his trumpet, palpitating the bowl while he blew, giving the sounds a wavering, watery address. He switched to a derby hat, copying a photo in Down-beat. Excited by the new sounds, he wrote Dew long letters—how he was absorbing and learning.

  In the lane, Leilani held her head a little higher.

  HO‘ONALU

  To Form Waves, to Meditate

  NIGHTS AT CASINO BALLROOM, LISTENING TO BANDS. ONE NIGHT a face stood out from the crowd, pale and arrogant, yet somehow melancholy. She stared at him so long, he felt a slippage in his joints, his membranes burned. He felt if he didn’t look away, all the rules would change; more would be required of him than he possessed.

  A few nights later, blowing trumpet at Rizal’s, he saw her again. Staring as if she were shaking him down. While he stood in the alley having a smoke, she suddenly appeared.

  “I wanted to tell you how much I enjoy your playing.” Her voice low, almost shy.

  “You follow jazz?” he asked.

  “Not really. But I know when I hear excellence.”

  Up close her face pierced him, it was so lovely. Soft angles in her cheekbones, slight fullness in her lips and nose that bespoke Hawai‘ian blood. But in her slightly slanted eyes, straight black blunt-cut hair, he saw other blood as well.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sunny . . . Sun-ja Uanoe Sung.”

  Then he said a crazy thing. “You have very good posture.”

  Sometimes she came with friends from university. Then she came alone, and stood apart. He began to look for her. One night, wet and wrecked, he came off the stage and she was there. They spent nights walking by the sea, cautious, apprehensive. Keo spoke haphazardly, randomly, missing transitions. She described her life episodically, in reverse. As if their lives had not unfolded from prior events.

  He learned her father was Korean. As they grew closer, he saw how her skin seemed to go darker in sunlight, her black hair turned slightly curly in rain. She confused him further when she relaxed, seeming almost playful. Her lips grew fuller and there was a lazy glide to her gestures. Like all mix-bloods, she was complex, sometimes seeming one way, then another, sometimes both bloods—Hawai‘ian and Korean—struggling to dominate, giving her the benefit of neither.

  One night, sitting on a bench, Sunny talked about her father, how he had never wanted her, how he abused her Hawai‘ian mother. How being unloved sometimes made her feel invisible. She talked softly, wistfully, until she talked herself to sleep. Carefully, Keo put his arm round her. How defenseless she seemed. Yet he remembered how she looked when he first saw her—bold, casting her gaze at him recklessly, as if whatever he offered her would not be challenging enough. Now he pulled her close, and talked about a gnawing at his heart, dread of being mediocre. He talked about fox-trotting rich women, carrying their dishes, his fear that this would be his life.

  “I’m more than that. I won’t end up a should-have-been. I’ll be the best—I just need a blueprint.”

  The moon on her face made her look extremely young. He shook her awake.

  “Sunny. You don’t belong with me. You’re a college kid—”

  She sat up slowly.

  “—your father’s a doctor, you live in the Heights.”

  “He’s a lab technician. And we don’t own our house.”

  “Still. What are you doing here? Slumming?”

  She studied him. “I know what slumming is. That is not what this is.”

  “Then, what is it?”

  “. . . This is everything you told me. Everything we’ve said. I’m not afraid.”

  She bowed her head like a young animal drinking at a trough, and brought his fingers to her lips. Her hair fell forward, exposing her neck. He covered that place with his forehead.

  ______

  SHE BROUGHT OMENS, EXHILARATIONS, SHE MADE HIM LOOK UP from his life. He learned that her good posture came from dread, the constant surge of adrenaline.

  “I’ve known the taste of fear from birth. It was in my mother’s milk.”

  And so she grew up testing her courage, lying in the road at night while cars raced up the hill, holding her breath as headlights stroked her.

  “I’d wait until they hit the brakes, then I would roll away. Mama thought I was suicidal because Papa was so brutal. She didn’t understand I wanted to live! I was toughening myself.”

  She told him how she had stood on cliffs in storms, fighting the wind, toes curled round the edges of her slippers.

  “I was learning never to be afraid of things. I’d come home drenched, dazed, covered in mud, and Papa would hit me, thinking I’d been rolling in the fields with boys.”

  In summers she worked the canneries and clerked in stores. Her “proper” English and pale-honey skin should have smoothed the way for promotions, but Sunny kept putting herself on the line for darker girls.

  “I watched how Hawai‘ians and Filipinas were shoved around. It made me angry. I organized little strikes, wrote petitions, accusing bosses of favoritism.” She laughed. “I’ve been fired from three jobs.”

  She mentioned a brother, an engineering student at Stanford University. Her father wanted her to study medicine.

  “Is that what you want?” Keo asked.

  “He doesn’t care what I want. That’s not the Korean way. Everything is kongbu haera, kongbu haera! Study, study!” Then she frowned, trying to be fair. “Papa says learning is a duty to our ancestors. He’s not a bad man, just harsh and fatalistic.”

  “What about your mother?”

  Sunny hesitated. “Mama’s forgotten how to run, or even walk barefoot. I pull thorns from my heart watching how he treats her, wanting her to be a ‘lady.’ When she’s too local, too riff-raff, or when she talks Pidgin, he hits her. Then I want to attack him. I have to leave the room he’s in. Sometimes I do things to distract him, so he hits me instead. Other times he looks so sad I want to comfort him. I go as close as I think safe.”

  Keo shook his head. “My father did that, I would knock him down, much as I respect him.”

  “I’ve tried to take her back to her family in Waimanalo. But, you see, she loves him. His first wife died shortly after they arrived here from Korea. With Mama—Hawai‘ian, uneducated—Papa feels he married beneath him. She was young and beautiful, and he was alone.”


  Sunny hugged herself and sighed. “Hard to explain. He couldn’t live without her. Yet he treats her like most Koreans treat their wives, never calling her by name. It’s always Yobo!—‘Hey you!’ ”

  Listening, Keo had the sense that he had walked into an empty room and there was this girl lit by desperation. Wanting to save her mother’s life. He tried to translate that desperation, evolve it backwards to the girl herself. Make her pieces fit. Maybe it was her life that needed saving.

  She kept a tiny rented studio up near the university in Manoa Valley, a campus so small and rural, cows still wandered into graduation ceremonies. The first time they made love, Keo felt he would do anything she asked. He would give her his trumpet, his lungs, his life, for more of her, for all of her he could get. Weeks passed in a kind of dementia. They moved on each other with a scratched-itch ecstasy. His kisses animal-mounting bites, him lathered and wetted in her vagina that felt like a slick rolled-up tongue sucking him to incandescence.

  Breathing. It seemed an achievement, coming out of her. Coming back alive. Or half alive, nothing left but sweat, stunned marrow. Inflamed and semen-full, how beautifully she arched, how coming made her skin catch fire. Even when they slept, exhausted, their joints sought out each other’s clefts, smooth and sly as water. Sometimes they woke up shy again, almost like strangers, until their hungers combined to focus them. Then how his lips sought out her nipples, how his teeth—oh, gently!—dented them. And she would shock him, coming at him in blind heat, mounting his penis, seeming to soar.

  “Carnal,” she whispered. “What we are.”

  He hoped it was a good word. What they did together seemed ordained long before they met. Everything fit. Organs, limbs, studs, and joists. Her perfect mouth accommodating him, his hardness, her jaw articulating. Even when she felt she was going into labor in reverse—a human bursting into, not out of, her, trying to grow deeper—everything fit.

  She didn’t say she loved him. She didn’t understand the word. If what her parents shared was love, then it meant eagerness to punish. Be punished. It meant terrible deficits. Yet she moved into him. He breathed her, wore her like a tight midday shadow.

  Even his mother, Leilani, was drawn to her, her beauty, her mixed-blood confusion, the toughness riding her fragile tremor. Only his sister, Malia, held back. Wearing a hat that looked like someone’s bladder, she sat in the kitchen frosting a guava chiffon cake.

  “That Sunny’s no good for him. High maka-maka college girl. She’ll break his heart.”

  Leilani stared at her. “What you know about dis girl? Keo say her papa mean, beat da wife. I t’ink Sunny carry plenny scars.”

  “Scars are contagious, Mama. Sometimes, hurt folks need to hurt.”

  “Maybe you jealous, you like go university like Sunny.” She took her daughter’s hand. “No need. I always say Malia going be somebody. You da one.”

  She smelled detergent on her mother’s arms. Chinese parsley in her hair. She hugged her. “I must admit, sometimes I’m lonely. Everybody poking fun.”

  Leilani stroked Malia’s cheek, touched her finger waves. “Dat’s what I worry fo’. You so ambitious, got no time fo’ men. How you going find one husband? You treat local boys like dey real trash.”

  Malia lit a cigarette, holding it just so. “Mama, everything takes time.”

  On the crowded bus to Waikiki, she imagined life with a “local.” Shabby, bust-up rented house, kids in dirty diapers, beer cans on the floor. She would drink rat poison first. So what if now and then loneliness drove her to pick up a tourist? It was innocent, a drink, a conversation. In that way she got to study privileged whites—how they used silence, how they could summon waiters with a glance.

  So what if sometimes she stole trinkets from hotel guests—perfumes, designer labels cut from their dresses? Schiaparelli, Fortuny, Chanel. Resewn into hers. It made her feel expensive, worthwhile. Made life a little easier to bear. She thought of Sunny Sung, college girl who worked only in summers, never reduced to dancing hapa-haole hula in cellophane grass skirts. Who never had to endure strangers mauling her.

  “TAKE DA ’BRELLA FO’ DA RAIN.”

  Sunny heard her father’s slap, then the aftermath.

  “Umbrella! English, speak English!”

  Her mother weeping. Sometimes when he slapped her, he wept too, hating himself, hating his inferiority in the eyes of the world, knowing it would outlast him. Unable to find work as a board-certified physician, he was reduced to testing blood and urine, tracking bacteria in dots of human excrement. Nights when immense fatigue blurred his perfect textbook English, he staggered round the house speaking garbled Konglish. When his wife answered him in Pidgin, he went berserk.

  Sunny rubbed her mother’s bruises with kukui oil. “Why, Mama? Why is he so violent?”

  Her mother sighed. “Ovah-educated.”

  Keo found her in her studio. Eyes swollen, exhausted from a fugue of grief, she spoke in the stuffed-head tones of one who has wept long and copiously.

  “If he hits her again, I will kill him.”

  He tried to comfort her. “Don’t you see? He’s really striking back at those haole and Chinese doctors who won’t let him practise, who still think Koreans are medieval herbalists.”

  “Don’t excuse him!” she cried. “I see Koreans working as garbage men. They serenade their wives, walk their daughters to dancing school.”

  She heard them at night—bed creaking, her father’s moans, forgive! forgive!—trying to erase the bruises, destroy the evidence. Sunny vowed she would never enter into such a contract.

  “So horrible, that Mama’s happiness, her entire life, depends on what he will, or will not, do.”

  “I think it’s the other way round,” Keo said. “Your father depends on her to hide his humiliations. Pretty wife, nice house. Kids at university. You’re his accomplishments in life.”

  Sunny laughed. “I’m his nightmare. Mama says I have his temper. But it’s mine. All mine.”

  He sat back, studying canvases on her walls, images that seemed to leap at him, made him want to cringe. Human limbs metamorphosing into white vipers. A man on all fours wearing the dripping, bloody head of a deer.

  “Scary stuff. What’s it about?”

  She looked at her paintings. “Anger, I guess. At Papa’s obsession with his teas. He drinks them religiously. Albino-snake tea for longevity. Yellow-python tea for neuralgia. Deer-antler tea for potency. . . Unfortunately, there is no tea for compassion.”

  There was another painting—a faceless girl, repeated and repeated.

  “Who is that?”

  “The girl who my father—ohh, I’ll tell you by and by.”

  While she slept he studied the walls again.

  MONTH AFTER MONTH, SHE SAT WATCHING HIM PLAY, HIS DEEP concentration when other men soloed. Even his stillness was eloquent. She felt pride—yes, that was it. Such pride, she occasionally shivered watching the faces of the drummer, the bass, how they respected Keo. Not just his talent but the distance he left them when playing, the space each man deserved as his right. It gave them hot energy, a wire of electricity connecting them.

  Yet she suspected the space Keo left them wasn’t always out of courtesy, or manners, but the blind drive of someone groping, wondering how far he could push himself without going too far. Curious to know how far was too far. She was beginning to understand him, his ability to turn so easily from the world, to need no one but her. Maybe not even her, maybe no one but himself. And maybe not even himself, but someone he prayed he could become.

  She was beginning to understand the word love, which really meant trust. An almost involuntary fusing. With it came fear of loss of the object loved. Of one’s equilibrium. She thought somewhere in the future she would have to fight for him, for his attention, and that excited her.

  Sometimes he waited until he thought she was asleep. Then he sat up in the dark and silently blew his trumpet, reaching for new combinations, new sounds, in his head. He pla
yed until sweat ran down his chest and back, until wetness spread across the sheet and touched her hips and shoulders, chilling her.

  She lay still, imagining him searching, reaching, never satisfied. Sometimes she suspected he forgot she was with him, forgot, perhaps, she was even in the world. He would return and focus on her almost in shock. And she would be waiting, wondering what it was like to be so obsessed. When he reached for her, she felt frantic, eager to grip him and know he was real.

  One day she played a record just released from France. Belgian jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt. As they listened, she carefully translated titles. “La Tristesse de Saint Louis—‘St. Louis Blues.’ Le Thé pour Deux—‘Tea for Two.’ J’ai du Rhythme—‘I Got Rhythm.’ ”

  Keo shook his head. “Man’s a genius.”

  He’d heard of Reinhardt, a Gypsy with two paralyzed fingers, the most brilliant jazz guitarist known. He closed his eyes, imagining them playing together.

  Turning the record over, Sunny nonchalantly asked, “Have you ever thought of Paris? The Hot Club. Club Saint Germain des Prés.”

  He smiled. “I hear they’re breaking all the rules in jazz. It’s absolutely wild. Sure, I’ve thought of Paris. I’ve thought of New Orleans. The moon.”

  She sat down facing him. “Few weeks on a ship, that’s all. I’d go, if you wanted to. Once I knew Mama was safe.”

  He thought of the vast differences between them. He was just a guy from Kalihi. She was a college girl from the Heights, ready for anything, daring the world to call her bluff.

  “Even if we could afford it, what could we do there? How would we talk to Frenchies?”

  Sunny laughed. “Jazz is international. You wouldn’t have to talk. They’re all over there, all those guys you worship—Basie, Hawkins, Buddy Tate.” She leaned forward, deadly earnest. “Keo. You’ve peaked here. You can’t go any higher than dance halls. When big bands come to Honolulu, they don’t hire locals. Even Ellington brings his own relief men. You’ve got to go where no one looks down on you. Where you can expand.”