The Icebox Stay Coming

by Jeffrey Higa

My grandmother did not believe in luck. She was more fatalistic than that. She believed in bachi, an especially virulent form of fate. She believed that most of the time you worked hard for nothing—no reward—because bachi happens. The only thing we could do was “be more sly than one mongoose, more akamai than bachi.” So, the day after New Year’s, 1932, the year my grandmother took care of me while my parents made the long sea voyage to Japan to pay respect to my father’s parents, my grandmother got her first electric icebox. Bachi, we knew, would not be far behind.

The arrival of the electric icebox came as a complete surprise to us, and also to the delivery men, who found her lane too narrow to drive the truck into. In those days, Muliwai Lane was like a number of small working-class neighborhoods in Honolulu where the streets weren’t as wide as they are now, squeezed as they were between the shady haole enclaves rising up the Ko’olau mountains and the heat of the Chinatown plain. Even Muliwai Lane’s widest point—the circle at the dead end—could only accommodate three people abreast. Years later, when we grew up and wanted to drive, when street cars and the city bus became, not the godsend of our tutus and parents because “otherwise got to walk,” but an unfashionable annoyance, only then did we relent and roll back our front yards so the city could survey and plot and pave a street, while we cheated our lots to build garages. But before that, when our properties were more approximate—see, over there by the hibiscus that I got as a cutting when I was working for the Foster estate, come big, yeah, our yard probably ends somewhere over there, and the Wongs, most of that side over there is theirs because, well, what you going do, they always need more room for their growing family otherwise bumbae got to put their house sideways, and of course that ditch over there that runs into Muliwai Stream is part of the widow Gonzalez’s property because she needs it to drain the wash water for all the extra laundry she takes in—all our front yards spilled together and we kids played in one big yard, our yard, along the length of the entire lane, beneath the dormers of our houses like watchful eyes....

Jeffrey Higa is a principal at Launch Multimedia in Berkeley.