THE CHINESE LEGACY

San Franscisco was bursting with odd looking and very dirty cow boys their bags of gold couldn’t not clean.
“That is why most of us stay, they need us to keep them clean. We do not have to grovel in the dirt to find gold, they put it in the palm of our hands when they pick up their clean clothes.!” His cousins said persuadingly as they help him carry the last crates of Chinese food staples their father ordered.
“Aah our people can thank you in person for your dependable business. I don’t know how these Americans can subsist on beef, beans, bread and butter, and potatoes every day, some are becoming as large as cows, if they don’t get sick first and die. What have you got for us this time ?” his distant uncle said.
“ Three crates each of dried oysters, dried cuttle-fish, dried fish, sweet rice crackers, dried bamboo sprouts, dried fruits, five kinds of dried vegetables, noodles, dried sea-weed, dried Chinese bacon, dried abalone, peanut oil, dried mushroom, tea, and rice, the usual staples. You said not to bother send dried pork and chicken, since you can have that here.” he responded courteously, as he scanned the humble store weighing his options to stay and make his fortune here or gamble for better elsewhere.
His curiosity of what lay in that great South Pacific ocean and its undiscovered fortunes lured him on to balmier skies.
By the time he returned to China, or rather, by the time he felt sufficiently settled to finally send for his first wife-yes he married one of the servant girl in the meantime, (I don’t know if it was a convenience marriage due to French laws, or if even if it came about in San Francisco where only merchants had wives accompanying them), the boy sold to her and whom LaouSi had adopted during his abcence with his permission, had by this time had a son, and was managing the family estate while his wife, heartbroken, lonely, and angered by his neglect, left him to seek her own fortune in Paris France.
This son was my grandfather Yuen Thin Soy (the French put the last name Yuen first) who got to meet my great grandfather on his death bed, just a few hours before he died in Uturoa, the bustling village of Raiatea, in the upper room of his retail store.
His second wife , the servant, had left him in anticipation of his first wife’s arrival, since the French government did not allow polygamy, to make her life in Jamaica, where family members resided. She took all the gold she could wear on her person. The only other proper place for precious jewels in these uncertain times was under one’s pillow.

Yuen Thin Soy later married the bride mutually agreed upon by both families, a union calculated to benefit both families.
She was spunky and sassy in her own quiet way. There was nothing she could not do. When her husband did not get around to making her new baby a hanging swing seat, or a tricycle, she would grab the hammer to pull out the boards from the empty Nestle crates and straightened the nails to make them.
My dad remembers watching her in her black silk top and pants, her braid swinging down her back, building a bunk bed out of larger packing crate boards.
For Christmas she would give all the customers a bottle of fine Pineapple Rum she’d brewed for many weeks in the attic of the store, where my youngest uncle Adrien, Ki khong, lured by the delicious fruity aroma, dipped and licked his fingers until he fell asleep drunk near the bubbling vat, while the family looked all over for the missing child. She was definitely not a “Pointsettias Christmas gifts” kind of a person.
My mother remembers well the day her white cloth covered body, along with all the passengers of the hydroplane Catalina which crashed soon after takeoff into the pass between Raiatea and Tahaa, her white dainty feet even my mother who knew her only a very short time, recognized at once, among all the other dead bodies, most of them Chinese relatives returning from a funeral in Tahiti. They were all found still buckled in their seats, the 23 passenger hydroplane sunk at the bottom of Avapiti Pass in Uturoa. I remember pointing it out to sister Simmons from the dining room at the Hawaiki Nui Resort after a grueling day of Zone Conference in 2005.



Le Canso Catalina II A c/n 296 a été construit par Consolidated Vultee à San Diego pour le compte de la RCAF sous matricule 9712. Il est ensuite cédé à la RAF sous matricule V9712, VA712, puis vendu à un privé et porte VR-BAB comme indicatif. Il est acquis par la RAI et immatriculé F-OAVV. Le 19 février 1958, il est détruit lors d’un amerrissage à Raiatea dans les îles Leeward.

Grand father, Kung Kung, as I always called him, was devasted and began a downward spin with gambling and drinking til he died in 1976. He relied on his firstborn son, my father Kifa, Jacques, to carry on the business of the store. And so my father , at a very young age, had learned to work with very little sleep in between. They supplied the whole island with French baguettes which he made every night starting at 12 AM in a home made oven and delivered all of them by breakfast time on his bicycle. I asked him once what was his favorite thing in the world.
“ The sunrise!” he said without hesitation. Much later did it dawned on me the reason for his odd response: He was up and awake and delivering all those baguettes he spent all night making by sunrise every day for years, even to this day he is up and serving the Clinique Cardella personel, and the nearby college students at his Snack Dur Dur by that time. Hard work has not harden him though. It has actually kept him from debauchery and from getting old and decrepit, or is it Kung Fu that keeps him young and limber.

But now we must revert to about a year before all this happened, to the night of that fateful dance.

Kifa along with some friends decide that they must go back to Tiva to get some Mennen aftershave and Nestle concentrated milk out of the store to make their cocktail punch. If they left right after supper, before the sun sets, if they walked and swam really fast they could make it back by the time the dance has really warmed up, 8PM is about right.
Back at the family store, while his friends grabbed the ingredients for the hooch from the shelves, he slipped away to get a red flower island shirt, and plucked a tiare flower bud to tuck behind his ear. Oh he must not forget his boxing gloves, to show off his skills in case of a friendly boxing match.

The trip back was arduous to say the least, a dirt road didn’t quite girdle the island completely, a few stretches could only be traversed by swimming around a point before reaching the shore again. Some places had slippery cliffs to clamber over in the dark, all in the name of fun.
As it is today, the fun parties always seemed to happen at the far end of the island, the Tuamotu calls it “nake”, furthest away from where you are, and the boys took it in stride and made these treacherous jaunts almost every night, taking care to keep their change of clothes dry for the vahines, or rather , for the tamahines , considering how young their were.


The youth made their own party, a guitar or two and a ukulele strumming out “E Vahine Veve Au, O Tahiti Nui I Te Fare Auri, E Te Mau Tamarii, and a gallon of homemade hooch and you were “prime entertainment on the bridge”, which usually ended with gang fights, especially if there were no girls to distract their energies.


“We must restrain ourselves until after the dance. It’s a mormon dance and no drunkards are allowed. And those pretty girls are very picky too.” Kifa said.