Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Tran smiled. The man was right. Patience was necessary. The man's wife said, "Move the umbrella, okay? I'm boiling in all this sun." As Tran adjusted the umbrella, putting the woman in the shade, she said, "Listen, too much sun can make you real sick."

"Yes, yes," Tran said, returning to wiping the tables. "That is right."

An African American at the bar, drinking Wild Turkey, confided in Tran, saying, "People think that things have changed, but I'm here to tell you that nothing has changed. We seek empowerment. But this is two countries. White and black."

"Yes," Tran said as the man signaled for a new drink with one hand while tipping his glass back to finish it.

"What I want to know is, when are you going to give me my rightful share?"

Tran said, "Anytime."

"You're blowing sunshine up my ass."

Keola heard this. After the man left, he said, "What's he complaining about? We Whyans went cheated out for our land. We worship the Eye- nah. But we got none. That no fair."

"Not fair," Tran said.

"You're standing on my land. Dis my Eye-nah."

Even I complained. "My wife is late again. Is your wife ever late like

that?"

Tran laughed in a miserable sympathizing way. "Got no wife!" A big friendly Chicagoan sat at the bar one night and said to Tran, "I'm a sightseer, but not the usual kind. I want to see something special.

Wherever I go — islands, foreign countries, France, Cancun — people say to me, 'You want to see the ruins? You want to see the museum?"

Tran was smiling, saying yes, as he mixed the man's third mai tai.

"I say the hell with the museum. Take me to your house. I want to see where you live."

"Pow-hanna at five," Tran said, and they went in a taxi to McCully after Tran finished his shift, pau hana.

The man kicked the weeds growing through the cracks in the sidewalk and narrowed his eyes at the Club Lucky Lips sign and said, "I was fifteen when I saw my mother for the first time. Never saw my father. People were paid money to raise me."

"Too bad," Tran said. "I'm sorry."

"My father was a bum. My mother was institutionalized. I went to night school. I own my own company now."

"This is where I live," Tran said, indicating the flat-faced building, the alley, the stairs to his room.

Inside, the man said, "You have no idea how fortunate you are."

"I know. Very lucky."

"Don't let success spoil you." He picked up a coconut shell ashtray and turned it over as if looking for a brand name. "I've never told that story to my children. Who's that of?"

It was a family photo, water-stained, faded, seven people standing and sitting stiffly, taken one day in a studio in Saigon, in 1962. Tran was a boy. The man had mistaken his father for Tran, his mother for Tran's wife.

"My family."

"Lovely family," the man said. "You're lucky. I never had a family."

Except for Tran, all the people in the picture were dead, though Tran didn't say so.

Just married, Tran had left the Mekong Delta in 1978 with his wife and his parents, his two younger brothers and two younger sisters. The boat, not more than forty feet long, held 550 people, all Chinese from Vietnam. It was a five-day trip to Malaysia, where they were turned away by soldiers with rifles. "Guam is America," the captain said, and headed there. After three days at sea there was a terrible noise as the boat hit a

reef and stopped. There was no sign of land, nor even of birds. Eleven days passed, and in that time forty-five people died and their bodies were thrown overboard. The people prayed, they wept, some drank urine. On the twelfth day clouds appeared, rain came down, and a swell lifted the boat. But even under way more people died, thirty-seven more, the rest of Tran's family, and lastly his wife, before they sighted land — an outlying island of the Philippines. The survivors were taken to Palawan, and after three years in a camp, Tran was given permission to enter the United States. Now he was glad to have a phrase for what had happened to him.

"Long story — Chinese story," Tran wanted to say. He said to me, "I can write a book."

"And never plump your foot straight into your shoe in the morning," Earl Willis said. Anyone could tell from the way he parted his lips and leered that he knew he had a meaningful gap between his two front teeth.

We waited for more, the five of us, the hui — Sandford, Peewee, Buddy, Lemmo, me — but I was on duty. Saturday night, quieter than usual in Paradise Lost, and Sweetie was bowling with her team in Pearl City. At the other end of the bar, men whispered to their wives or girlfriends, romance on the lanai under the hula moon.

"I did it once in the Philippines," Willis went on. He sipped his drink, sucking it through the gap.

Drunks can be smilingly patient. Everyone was drunk but me. This was one of those evenings, like islanders meeting on a beach, Buddy and his pals, not listening, just taking turns to talk. Tran kept the glasses filled.

"There was a centipede inside," Willis said at last. "That cured me."

"That's in the book," Buddy said.

The book was The Sexual Life of Savages, by Bronislaw MaImowski. Buddy had bought it for the title alone, believing it was racy. Discovering that it was anthropology, describing village life in the Trobriand Islands, he boasted that it proved he was an intellectual, and flashed it like a badge,

saying, "I'm real area-dite." He said he had plenty he could tell Malinowski, but when I mentioned that the man was dead, he shouted, "I want to finish my fucking book! You'll help me, won't you, like you did with my Fritzie story?"

"Sure."

Buddy's favorite section of Malinowski's book described the island of Kaytalugi, populated entirely by man-hungry women who went about naked. The island was to the north of the Trobriands, two days' rough sailing, but it was worth it: the women were voracious and insatiable. They waited on the beach, and when men arrived the women pounced, ravishing them. Buddy loved the part about the women using the men's fingers and toes when their penises went limp. Boys were sometimes born to the women of Kaytalugi, but they were fucked to death before they grew old. As intensely as the chest-thumping men of the Irobriands, Buddy dreamed of going to Kaytalugi.

"I am in the Philippines once. Nice place, but plenty of bugs," Tran said, pouring gin, jerking caps off beer bottles, and no one heard what he said for his being an employee.

"I've seen spiders like this," Peewee said. He made a fist and hefted it bravely, lifting it to his eyes, seeing a dangerous hairy creature. "In Tahiti."

"That's small for a spider in the Irobriands," Buddy said.

Sandford said, "Who hasn't had spiders in his boots?"

"The most poisonous spider in Australia is no bigger than your fingernail," Lemmo said, beckoning with his finger, displaying his bitten nail. "If you're stung, you die. Nerve toxin. You're fried in five minutes."

"Goddamn rat curled up and died in my shoe in Samoa," Buddy said. "I wore the shoe all day without even noticing. It was a very small rat."

"Fungus is worse than any animal. I went green between my toes from some crud I picked up in Tahiti," Peewee said.

"Ever get ookoos in your crotch?" Buddy said. "I had them in Fakareva."

"Buddy loves saying Fakareva," Sandford explained to me.

Hearing that, I was reminded that they were not really talking to each other; they were talking to me, as other people did, with deadly insistence, knowing that I had once been a writer. I thought: If they had read anything I had written, they would never tell me stories.

Willis filled his cheeks with beer, but before he could swallow, he sneezed and spewed a mouthful, as mist, as droplets, as foam, as specks of surf, and everyone laughed at the coarseness of it, and his dripping chin.