“Currents” (2) of (4) by Claudia Johnson. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

Suyin stands on her lānai, studying the crest of the tide, watching it move in and out of her life. She lives alone in a house that stands watch over the southern tip of ‘Ewa Beach on the island of O‘ahu. She wears a loose housedress.

Threads are unraveling, the material has become worn and frayed. Suyin brushes her fingers against the garment, gently rubbing the tattered edges back in place, not as an act of concealing, but to embrace what has endured the passage of time.

A light ocean breeze caresses her face, blowing wisps of gray hair across her brow. The morning wind is seducing her, carrying with it the scent of seaweed and brine mixed in with the sweet fragrance of fallen plumeria and gardenia flowers that have been tossed about her yard. She drapes a wool sweater over her shoulders and slides her tiny feet into rubber slippers, protecting them from the cold linoleum floor. She stares straight ahead, eyes piercing the gauzy screen, as if to memorize what lies beyond the door.

The years have ravaged her home. Salt air has stripped the paint from the surface of her house, leaving behind patches of decay. Most of her yard, arid and parched, has been reclaimed by the sea.

It is dawn, and together, she and Melissa are gazing at the ocean, studying its movements. She has her arm around Melissa’s shoulder, as if to draw her closer to things she does not yet understand. The water is beckoning, the tide, gently pulling.

“Kan jian ma?” she says, whispering. Then again, this time in English: “Do you see?” Melissa looks but her eyes betray her. There is nothing for her but the shifting hues of the waves, from black to cobalt blue, then black again. In the distance, she sees a shaft of early morning light pulling back the darkness. She does not see what Suyin sees.

“Ascending Angel, Green” by GeorgeWoollard. From the collection of Four Seasons Resort Maui at Wailea.

“Over there,” Suyin tells her, pointing. “Kan.” Look. Still, there is nothing.

Suyin does not ask again. She opens the door held in place by two rusted hinges. She breathes in, filling up on the salt air. Melissa looks at Suyin, ready for what is being offered.

“Girl walking on waves, float across water,” Suyin says, making undulating motions with her hands.

“Nu hai ku le”—the girl weeps. She is suffering.

“Ta hen tong ku,” Suyin turns to the shore and casts her glance out, as if to summon an apparition being pulled from the past. This is the story she tells:

Years ago, a Chinese family rode the crest of opportunity from the Pearl River Delta all the way to Honolulu. Tai Lee, the father, was a poor immigrant from a small village in Guangdong who possessed a five-year labor contract and an unshakable belief in Providence. He interpreted divine intervention as the promise of work on the ‘Ewa Sugar Plantation and the blessing of a beautiful young daughter who would draw rich suitors who could lift him from the cane fields and deliver him from his present station.

Tai Lee, like the rest of the laborers, lived with his family in one of the plantation houses provided as part of his contract. Though simple and efficient, it had the sort of comforts one did not find back in Guangdong: two bedrooms, a parlor, a small kitchen and a toilet and washroom that were separate from the main house.

Pots of boiled chickens raised in backyards steamed over wood fires behind the houses. Nights were lit by kerosene lanterns, positioned sparingly about the rooms. And since there was no sewer system, water was pumped into the houses through pipes from an irrigation ditch, then drained into another one just outside their doors. Rain occasionally rinsed the fields after they had been fertilized, so disease was something that also flowed through the plantation.

None of the houses were enclosed with fences or walls or had a division of any kind. Each house was guarded by a camaraderie that allowed neighbors to revel in the precocious noises of children’s games filtering from yard to yard and the loose sound of laughter drifting from one home to the next.

On warm summer evenings, the men would sit outside, silently contemplating a day spent cutting stalks, burning their harvest, then loading the remains onto railroad cars hauled away on steel tracks laid by hand. They would nod to each other from their own porches, tipping straw hats they still wore out of habit, acknowledging the passing of another day, as the fading light slipped slowly behind their fields.

There were no locks on any doors and none were required.What secured their bond was a community of trust that had developed among this fraternity of brothers that had left China and arrived here with a single belief in tow: They had all come with empty pockets and heads brimming with ideas, convinced they were taking up residence behind plantation doors where they believed opportunity was knocking. This faith gave them a solidarity so impervious, if they were to return home and find cans of sardines missing or their hoes suddenly pilfered, they would not suspect that a betrayer was in their midst. These weren’t the belongings that needed protecting. What they guarded, instead, was a bond that permitted them to silently share in the misery of those who had had to carry hardship with them across the ocean. They believed wherever their articles turned up was where they were needed most. And they would wait for the moment when everyone could rally around the sweetness promised by the cane fields, forever washing away the bitterness left by a way of living that was no longer theirs.

But Tai Lee, eager to reap another benefit accorded by plantation life, lived by another credo that separated him from his brothers and sent him reeling back to the past. A staunch believer in tradition where his daughter and money were concerned, he reverted to the ritual of arranged marriages, consulting a woman known around the plantation as a moonlighter who specialized in ladies-in-waiting. Unlike him, this marriage broker, also known around the plantation simply as Qiao, never saw her profit from these endeavors as a financial one. Her compensation came from the satisfaction of being an agent of love, responsible for giving the forces of attraction a gentle push.

Occasionally, Qiao could be found in Tai Lee’s house discussing affairs of the heart, sipping ginseng tea poured by Suyin, his wife and accomplice in these matters. The object of their attention, Meili, their daughter, would sit with her eyes in her lap, listening silently while a stranger planned a future in which she would have no voice.

“Finding right man very important,” Qiao once said. “As we say in China, doors and windows should match.”

“But we not in China now,” Tai Lee told her. “Only thing need matching is the bride price I could get for her back in Guangdong.” He brushed his fingers across Meili’s cheek, as if to assess her value. “Nine hundred yuan,” he boasted, “six hundred dollars.”

Meili, in appearance, had the demeanor of a child not yet touched by life and her eyes, when not cast downward and fastened to the floor, sparked with an awareness that made her privy to the shady compromise that had befallen this child of fifteen.

Her flight from innocence began the moment she heard Qiao’s voice again.

“I think I have match you like. Rich florist from Nuūanu, family own many flower shops. Man name Walter Pang.”

As if to delay her arrival into a world of complicity, Meili slowly looked up at her father, expecting to see an expression of weightless abandon. Instead, she saw a man lost in the shrewdness of his own thoughts.

In his mind, Tai Lee saw himself opening up negotiations, delivering a list to the Pang family in exchange for his daughter’s hand: six hundred dollars for the marriage, three hundred dollars for the privilege of the engagement, eight dollars for every year of Meili’s life, a gold ring for the memory of his dead mother. He pictured Suyin rummaging through all the cupboards, inspecting pots and pans, checking for silver, adding up the inventory.

When Tai Lee told Qiao of the wheels spinning in his head that would transport his family to a better life, she told him he was right. They weren’t in China anymore. There would be no rummaging, no gold ring.

“I make introduction, but that is all,” Qiao said. “After that, we let fate do the rest.”

She told him if Walter Pang asked for a second meeting then he would get his bride price, but nothing more. Meili, however, would get the lifelong security that she and Providence were arranging for her.

But Tai Lee, overtaken by the thoughts whirling inside himself, was convinced that his daughter’s destiny would not be hers alone. He decided, if needed, he would give Providence his guiding hand. The machinery in his mind continued to grind away, evoking visions that included neither the ‘Ewa Sugar Plantation nor his own two hands leathered by a machete.

He saw himself as the eventual manager of the Pang Flower Shops, stringing together a new life. He would send barefooted boys through the streets of Nuūanu carrying delivery boxes lined with orchids, fill orders for maile lei twisted with pīkake, supervise a back room of chattering women sewing strands of red carnations while weaving tales of gossip. Tai Lee closed his eyes, allowing these thoughts to linger.

Exactly one week later, amid more tea being poured and the air of anticipation being fanned about the room, they all sat in silence, awaiting the arrival of Walter Pang. In preparation, Suyin had unpacked her grandmother’s porcelain teacups and teapot, which had been wrapped in old newspaper and buried away in a wooden trunk ever since their arrival. She spent the morning exercising the culinary skills she had also brought across the ocean with her from China, lining her table with cooked taro wrapped in banana leaves, rice cakes to be peeled one layer at a time, char siu bao—barbecued pork in steamed buns, jin dui—golden fried pastries filled with black beans and rolled into balls.

But the real efforts of her labor shone through her daughter Meili. She wore a pink cotton dress decorated with red ribbons tied in bows, sewn by Suyin. It was fastened with pearl buttons up to the collar and gathered tightly about her bodice to accentuate her youth and cling to Walter Pang’s imagination. Her hair was slicked down and pulled tightly in a bun, clasped in back with a black lacquered barrette and adorned with a halo of white ginger flowers clipped from their yard. But no matter how many accessories she was primped with, under the ornamentation, under all that embellishment, the painted lips, the pencil lines streaking her eyes, the mask of powder dusting the façade, she was still a fifteen-year-old fieldworker’s daughter from a long line of plain and simple folk.

When Walter Pang finally came calling, he did so with a stunning bouquet of red roses as evidence of his sincerity as well as evidence of his stature as owner of the largest flower shops in Honolulu. Qiao had revealed nothing more about him than his name and rank in the local community, and with good reason. He was neither the worldly tycoon that Tai Lee had imagined nor the armored knight his wife had hoped for. Walter Pang was a stodgy, middle-aged man, balding, past fifty and already twice married. Although not a handsome man, he was a rich one, and that one fact was enough to suffice.

He greeted them in tailored trousers neatly pressed and creased, and a starched white shirt fresh from the laundry, matching the seriousness with which he took this matter. After introductions were made and Suyin’s dim sum passed around, Walter Pang sat, and without saying a word, stared without mercy at the nervous young girl, who averted her eyes. Then, almost as an act of ceremony, he placed his left hand over his chest as if tomuffle the stirring beneath it, and nodded once. Turning to Tai Lee, at last, in precise English, he said: “You have a pretty daughter. I would like to meet her again.”

Later, after Walter Pang and Qiao had left and new arrangements made, the blissful air that now filled the house was replaced by the sound of laughter wafting through. Meili, with eyes lifted from her lap, giggled at the very idea of marriage to a man more than three times her age. She shook with amusement, and through that cotton dress, painted face and flower garden crowning her head, at last revealed herself as the young girl she really was: a child, stubborn and with a mind of her own, who saw herself being boxed into the confines of a loveless marriage prompted by the desires of her father.

He is old, he is ugly, I don’t even like him, Meili told her father.Walter Pang is rich, you will learn, the arrangements have been made, were the answers that came.

She shook her head, and as if to unleash a different sort of passion racing through her heart, screamed thewords of a child: “No, I won’t.”

Then, she ripped the halo of white ginger from her head and threw it onto the table, next to the dirty dishes. Tai Lee stared at his daughter with an expression that spoke through silence. Suyin, recognizing this expression, focused her own eyes on a tray of empty teacups and dirty plates, and quickly shuffled herself into the kitchen.

Meili, feeling herself nudged by instinct, followed swiftly behind. Tai Lee, pushed forward by a blinding rancor, followed her into the next room. Something in his head must have pulled him back for he stood before her, his arms folded rigidly against his chest, as if to keep what was in him from leaping out.

“Take off your dress,” he said, his voice tight and controlled. Then again, this time shifting his tone, sharper and in Chinese:

“I said take it off.”

Then, he lunged at the pearl buttons, unfastening them one by one, so that this dress of soft pink cotton, with red ribbons tied neatly in bows, was pushed past her shoulders, yanked over her hips, down her thighs, until it lay in a crumpled heap on the linoleum floor. Then he unbuckled his leather belt and whipped it from the hoops, causing a snap so sharp it sliced the air and echoed in his daughter’s imagination. He tugged at her arm, forcing her flat onto the kitchen table, then pushed himself back into the world of the past, across an ocean, back to the Pearl River Delta, a man of tradition where his daughter and money were concerned. In nothing now but a loose white slip, Meili called out to Suyin, in the way that children often cry for their mothers. But this mother drowned out her daughter’s pleas with the sound of running water rushing down the kitchen drain, while clutching a dishrag that grinded violently against greasy pots and pans.

The first strike fell across the back of her legs, the red lash rising quickly to form a welt. The belt came down again, this time whipping her thighs, then once more, landing on her stomach so hard and severe that she recoiled from the pain and could feel her own hand wrapped tightly over her mouth. As he raised his hand, the strap looming high, the machinery in his mind kept turning and twisting, spurring him on with red hibiscus and bird-of-paradise and white plumeria pushed through needle and thread, prompting, goading, pulling that belt down, down, down, closer and closer to that little flower shop on Nuūanu Street.

The way Suyin tells it, this story would find its end two days before the wedding of Meili and Walter Pang. The sounds of sorrow could not be confined within four bedroom walls and, many years later, could still be heard drifting out in the open sea where waves would ripple every time a young girl floated gently across the water. On that day coolly arranged by Providence, this young fieldworker’s daughter, dressed in a pink cotton dress sewn by her mother, walked to the stretch of ocean that watched over the southern tip of ‘Ewa Beach. On the exact spot where a house would eventually stand, battered and ravaged by the cold salt air, she waded out and offered herself to the pull of the current. As she surrendered to the tide, Meili would not be thinking of Suyin, Qiao or Walter Pang, but of fate and her slow descent beneath waves of oblivion.

Years later, after harvests were burned and hauled away on steel tracks, Tai Lee could still be seen carrying his machete and wearing a straw hat. As dusk faded into night, he would sit on his porch and watch as the stillness of day sank slowly behind his fields.

As if pulled from a dream, Suyin looks out at the ocean and says: “Girl who sank with the tide,” but before continuing, she swallows her words, studies the linoleum floor and whispers to herself: “Meili is my daughter.”

Melissa is in the kitchen, putting away dishes. She walks over to Suyin on the front porch, rests her hands on the handles of her wheelchair, gazes out at the ocean.

“I love working here, you have such a beautiful place.” Suyin turns around, looks past her wheelchair, up at Melissa.

“Just like the brochure said, you are my companion.”

“Ready for your bath?” Like a child, Suyin lowers her head and nods. Melissa wheels Suyin back into the house. The gauzy screen door with two rusted hinges slams into place.

Outside, the ocean roars. Waves slam against the rocks in front of Suyin’s yard, pulling a little more of her life out into the sea. In the distance, amid the curtain of mist being pulled back to reveal the dawn of a new day, a young girl walks on the waves and faces the ravaged house of a Chinese family who rode the crest of opportunity from the Pearl River Delta, never once forgetting why they had come.

BENTON SEN, a frequent contributor to SPIRIT OF ALOHA, was the recipient of a Walker Foundation scholarship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Mass., and a writing fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center—both for a memoir in progress. A native of Honolulu, he lives in Waikīkī.