Diamond Head

For Read, who never let me quit.

For my parents, who planted the roots and let me grow.

It was important to me that this novel be as historically factual as possible, but there were times when I preferred a personal encounter with Hawaii and its history over what I learned in my research. I chose locations close to me—neighborhoods where my grandparents live, where my parents were raised—even if they did not yet exist in the history of Oahu. At times, I favored my grandparents’ details of war, or the foods they ate, or the way they dressed, over what I read in historical reports. This novel is an exploration of an island with a complicated past, informed by family narrative, history, and, occasionally, a conflicting collision of the two, which resulted in my own invention.

November 1964

H
ONOLULU
, H
AWAII

Inside the car, it smells like hibiscus. It was his mother’s idea; something subtle, she told him, but fresh. Something alive. As the man pulls from his driveway he is grateful, just this once, for his mother’s meddling. He breathes in. Already, the sweet smell is working on his nerves.

The man turns on the radio and immediately turns it back off, before he can even hear what’s playing. He thinks of what he would prefer, if he were them, and turns the dial again, softly to the local station that plays old Hawaiian meles. The strum of ukuleles and the warm thump of an ipu drift through the car as he presses the gas, accelerating through a yellow light at the end of his street.

He’s finally gathering himself, relaxed enough to tap a single finger on his steering wheel, almost to the beat. The traffic is light, which lightens him as well. In his line of work, in East Honolulu, the flow of the road is his greatest adversary.

The man pushes through four changing lights and arrives at their house in record time—a whole minute faster than his final trial the night before, when he slowed before the drive and looked at his watch, right before the hand struck midnight. This morning, however, is the first time he pulls past the stone wall and through the open gate. It’s the first time he sees the full façade of the house, which is painted grey and is low and flat, wider than he imagined, as somber as the day.

As he steps from his car, it occurs to the man that his shoes are smudged. There was money in the stipend for a shoe shine, but he
spent it instead on three white handkerchiefs, square and identical, which he placed in his glove compartment, just in case. He was a driver, he told himself. His shoes were seldom scrutinized, hardly ever on display. If the grieving women began to cry, he could offer them a proper handkerchief. But now the man questions himself. He squats and wipes the dirt off with his fingertips, cursing.

The shape of the house is a horseshoe, the entrance hidden in the center, recessed between two identical wings. The two sides jut forward, wrapped by long windows filled with wooden blinds painted white, all of the slats tilted shut. The door is white as well, with a gold bell, a gold knob. He hears no sound from within as he rings.

The driver’s watch tells him he’s almost exactly on time. They should be expecting him. As he waits, he steps back from the door and loosens his hands, which he realizes have formed fists when without warning, the knob turns and the door begins to open. The space before him widens and there she stands, stately, elegant, quietly stern. She looks just as he thought she might, but older. She’s aged some since the picture they ran last week. Her skin is thinner, especially below her eyes, where it stretches like damp rice paper, revealing the delicate veins.

“Good morning,” the driver says, nodding, taking the opportunity to avert his eyes, to let them breathe before lifting them again. “I’m your driver. Peter Choi.”

Amy Leong smiles. Her face lifts in the corners of her mouth and eyes but she looks exhausted, almost pained from the effort. She nods and turns, walks briskly down the hall.

When she returns, seconds later, she is accompanied by her teenage daughter.
Theresa
, the driver reminds himself, as he becomes suddenly aware of what he is seeing—stricken by a sight he had not prepared for, something no one warned him about. Amy Leong’s daughter is extremely pregnant. Her belly protrudes uncomfortably as she shifts her weight between her heels, her arms swaying beside her, balancing her with each laborious step.

She’s a pretty girl, he decides, like her mother. Her dark hair is pulled back tight on her head; a white dress stretches over her stomach, falling above her knees. Without thinking, the driver looks for a wedding ring but does not find one.

“Good morning,” he says again, stepping backward from the entrance.

“Hi,” Theresa says. She cannot be more than eighteen.

With swift, eager steps, the driver strides toward his car. Already, he’s overwhelmed. He wants to be back in his seat, facing forward, his focus on the road. He opens the back door and smiles lamely as the women slide in, his mind searching for something, anything to say to put them at ease. He comes up empty.

They cross the valley floor in silence, the low hum of the radio alone in its efforts. Even between the two women, not a word is uttered. They hug the eastern coastline, headed south, the wind off the Pacific bending the palm branches overhead, pushing the clouds, streaking the morning sky. As he reaches the country club, he knows from his run-through that they’re halfway there, about to begin their approach to Diamond Head. Carefully, he lifts his eyes to his rearview mirror and catches Amy Leong turned to her left, toward her window, dark eyes narrowed against the rising sun. Like her daughter, she wears white today. A silk dress with long sleeves wraps around her tiny frame. It reminds the driver of a photograph, printed nearly twenty years ago. A double-page spread, he remembers. A white dress. Fireworks streaking the night sky behind her. They were from the same neighborhood, he and Amy Leong—Kaneohe, over the mountains on the windward side of the island. When the story came out, it was all their neighbors could talk about. Amy Leong’s mother-in-law had long funded the Kaneohe school system. It was through her, the Lin Leong scholarship, that the driver had sent his daughter to college. He had meant to say that, to say thank you, but now in the silence he feels his mind fumbling, his chance slipping away.

Amy Leong shifts her gaze and the driver turns abruptly back to the road.

They cross through into Kahala and the land flattens, the rust disappears. Walls made of brick, of moss stone, of bright terracotta, of chocolate teak, of glistening koa begin to rise, guarding the houses that lie behind them. Flowers appear in long pendants, tiny and periwinkle, plump and magenta, dropping from the trees above. The base of Diamond Head spreads before them and the driver takes his left, the shape of the volcano guiding his path, drawing them closer to what he seeks: the odd curvature of land that cuts into the crater, the only one like it, a spectacular anomaly on an island teeming with surprises. Seen on a map, it’s unmistakable. The base of the volcano forms an oval save for a piece on the southwest side where there is a mouth, a fortress sealed by an iron gate.

To their left the ocean crashes, gargles, foams onto the pale sand and the driver knows that it’s too late. Anything he says now will seem strange. He can’t comment about the weather, can’t ask about the specifics of the arrangements; he’s failed to execute the lead-up, the words he’d planned before saying his thank-you. They’re almost there. He fights the urge to slow the car, to elongate the last stretch so he can think of a solution, but he doesn’t.

He rounds the bend and at once it appears. A mammoth gate extends between the ridges of the crater, five hundred feet of solid wrought iron, towering above the lampposts before it. The driver slows beneath its shadow.

Bohai Leong

Born July 23 1902, Died November 16 1964

Age 62 years

Born to Frank and Lin Leong in Guangdong, China

Bohai is survived by his mother, Lin Leong, his wife, Amy Leong, and his daughter, Theresa Leong

There’s an announcement posted to the gate. Amy finishes reading first and reaches for the bell, but her daughter stops her. Theresa’s hand extends absently, wrapping around her mother’s wrist. Her eyes remain on the fluttering paper.

“Sixty-two,” she whispers to her mother. “Dad was fifty-four, why does it say sixty-two?”

“What?” Amy replies, her hand still hovering over the bell.

“Sixty-two,” Theresa repeats, her finger flicking against the announcement. “It says sixty-two.”

“I don’t know.” Amy exhales. “Hong was in charge—she wrote it. I suppose she thought it might be better this way. People—
Leongs
—aren’t supposed to die before sixty. Chinese superstition. It speaks poorly of the family.”

“So you agreed to this?”

“I didn’t agree to anything, Theresa. I’m just telling you what I know.”

Theresa releases her mother’s wrist and presses the bell herself. The gate opens inward and the low rumble of the motor vibrates throughout her thoughts, rattling them into something they’re not. She thinks of all the ways she could win against her mother, all the ways her mother could be defeated. It’d be so easy, Theresa’s mind coaxes, with just one slip of the tongue. She closes her eyes as the gate latches into place and the vibration halts. Stop it, she warns herself. Let it go.

The women step beyond the gate, where the garden looks as it has for decades. The thick lotus drifting gently in the silver ponds, the glossy stones, the red pavilion—painted white today, for Bohai—it’s all as Amy remembers. Astonishing, she thinks, how money can slow the passing of time, erasing the years of growth and change and damage, painting over them when they begin to show through. A family might fall, but with a sweep of a lawnmower, a sprinkling of fertilizer, a garden can preserve the dignity that a family has lost. It can restore the pride that they can no longer find.

She wonders if it can recognize her today—if the garden knows
she’s Amy. She fights the urge to speak with the lotus, to whisper to the pond, reassuring them that she’s still the same girl who arrived with her father in nylon shoes, all those years ago. That despite how it might look now—and she knows how it looks—she’s not altogether bad. Not entirely selfish.

Amy pauses. She lets the heels of her shoes sink softly into the grass.

Framed in the doorway of the great house, dressed in a white blouse and trousers, Theresa can see Hong arranging a basket of lisee. Her hands work quickly for her age, deliberately, positioning the small envelopes of lucky money so that their painted images face forward. Next to the lisee there’s a second basket, a mountain of hard candy to give mourners as they arrive. Something sweet to lessen the bitterness of death.

Watching Hong work, Theresa forgives the old woman for faking her father’s age. In Hong’s careful hands, Theresa sees the complexity, the desperation that accompanies losing a person whose entire life you have witnessed, have followed across two continents, from difficult conception to unexpected death. Hong was there the entire time, quietly serving tea, wrapping the family’s skeletons in lucky red paper. She’s the only one left who can remember Bohai’s real mother.

Bohai’s real mother. In Theresa’s mind, the funeral announcement appears. Her father’s face, pale and clumsy, and the words printed below.
Born to Frank and Lin Leong.
She absorbs the second lie, lets it fill her, amazed that within such sparse words her family has managed so much dishonesty.

“Are you ready?” Amy asks. Theresa realizes that her legs have stopped moving.

“Right,” she says, her palm pressed to the underside of her belly. She wonders if her mother realizes, if she even cares. It was she who had told Theresa, the day after her father passed, of his elaborate inception, of the complications that had followed. Now, as she climbs the stairs to the entrance of the great house, Theresa wishes that she had known sooner. Theresa wishes a lot of things.