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and settled in a new home at the East Gate of Shekki. A son, Tin Suk, was born a year later, followed by two daughters, Ah Fook and Ah Look. When all three children came down with a serious illness, only Tin Suk survived.
I treasure a vignette of Grandfather beside a horse tied to a tree behind our Iwilei home, ready to leave for Kaneohe, and another one of him sitting on a chair and asking me to press my face against the stub of his whiskers. I pushed his face away, but Ruth did not resist. He told Mother that he liked my 'spirit', a trait she considered as stubbornness, and tried to subdue by applying the rod generously.
It is hard to understand why Grandfather did not leave any money to Uncle when he left Hawaii. This meant years of hardship for Uncle and his family. Everyone had to share in the numerous tasks. The children had many chores: cutting grass to feed the pigs, beating kerosene cans to frighten flocks of birds which came to dine on ripening grain, pasting bags out of newspaper to protect melons from destructive insects, helping with the threshing of grain and bagging of the paddy, and on and on. Aunt's work was endless. In addition to child-bearing, she shared in the planting and harvesting of both rice and vegetables, chopped guava trees which were in great abundance on the hillside for firewood, cooked three meals every day, and saw to the needs of the children. Although Annie, the oldest child, was not a boy, she had to help in ploughing the fields at an early age, and had little opportunity to attend school.
One crop of rice a year was general, but some years Uncle managed two plantings. Vegetables were also grown: cucumber, bitter melon, mustard cabbage, napa, bak choy, water chestnut, watercress. At harvest time, as well as during the planting season, itinerant workers had to be hired. It was men against weather. They transferred the rice seedlings into the watery mud fields, inserting a few stalks at a time in neat, straight rows. When the grain ripened, the rice stalks were cut with sickles and laid row on row in neat piles for bundling. Sheaves of grain, balanced on each end of a long pole, were carried on the shoulder to the threshing ground, which was a large concrete area with a stake in the centre. A horse tied to it would be driven round and round to stomp the grain from the stalks, which were then pitch-forked away into a mountain-high pile that served as a play area for the children.