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 on the day after New Year's in 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 deliverymen, 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 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 accommodate only three people abreast. Years later, when we grew up and wanted to drive, when streetcars and the city bus became not the godsend it was for 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 Wong’s, 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.
So, of course, the truck wouldn’t fit and they wanted to unload the icebox right in the middle of Nu'uanu Avenue, where I’m sure they would have left it because even though they were supposed to deliver on Sundays, they said it was really a gimmick for the store owner and carrying the icebox down the slight incline of our narrow lane was too much work for a Sunday morning. They were explaining how lucky we were to have it delivered this far and not be forced to come down to the store and pick it up, seeing as it was all free anyway, when Shane, my best friend from across the street who always called on me around mealtimes and ate so often with our family that he had his own chair at our table, suddenly interrupted with, "Roller skates!" He dashed off while the rest of us watched the deliverymen wrestle the canvas-cloaked appliance off the bed of the truck and onto the ground in front of us: a shrouded mystery almost as tall as a man. Shane returned with a pair of his steel skates and also a pair of mine that I had thought were lost and barked at the deliverymen to raise the legs of the icebox one at a time, as he expertly slid a skate under each leg and adjusted the positioning of each with the skate key. Soon, a little parade formed down our lane led by my exuberant Grandma, high-stepping like a drum major, followed by her new icebox now propped on rattling roller-skate feet beneath its four legs, flanked on both sides by the relieved deliverymen who guided the icebox down our little hill, followed closely by our curious neighbors and their children who had come to witness this remarkable event.
The deliverymen negotiated the icebox down the lane past the Tokina house and the monstrous hibiscus plants that rampaged through their yard, the unfortunate victims of their eldest son’s studies in botanical grafting at the university. They took a right at the mountain apple tree onto the path toward my grandma’s front door, where they raised the icebox up so that we could retrieve our skates. It was only when the delivery men had mounted the wooden steps for the front door, sharing the burden of the icebox between them, that we realized that the icebox was too wide to go through the doorway. It wasn’t as if Grandma’s doorway was unusually narrow, it’s just that no one had ever imagined a need for a doorway wider than the space it took for one person with groceries to pass through. It would only be years later, after half of Muliwai Lane had been appropriated, when the stream had been diverted and my grandmother's house razed to make way for the looming concrete condominium that threw shadows so large people said the area birds had stopped singing because they had been plunged into a perpetual nightfall, that I wondered how she managed to get some of the other furniture into her house, like her double bed and the couch. I like to imagine Grandma arranging the furniture first and then having the walls of the house built around her, like a queen ant who settles into a new location. If so, it would help to explain why in 50 years of living in the house, Grandma never once replaced or moved any of the furniture, but kept everything arranged in its familiar place, so that no matter how long we were away or how far we traveled from Hawaii, we would always be able to return to her and the intimate, comfortable surroundings of home.
After some half-hearted attempts, mainly at Grandma’s urging, to turn the icebox sideways (even though it was square) and back two of the legs through the door while trying to angle the rest in, the deliverymen put down the icebox, stripped its canvas covering and declared, “Da buggah too big but." They left the icebox facing the street on the stoop immediately in front of the front door, rendering that door useless and forcing us to enter the house through the back door in the kitchen, a habit that continued long after the icebox no longer barred the front door, because by that time, the warmth of the kitchen had become the invitation into our home, and the front door an alien thing, so much so that to enter anyone’s house through the front door again made us feel as welcome as door-to-door salesmen or proselytizing religious fanatics.
When I think about it now, it seems a strange thing to do, to leave a brand-new appliance outside, directly blocking the front door, but that day as we fingered the engraved brass nameplate that read "Capitol Ice-O-Matic," admired the solid oak cabinet that gleamed like the hull of a newly christened yacht, and winked at ourselves in its gleaming chrome hinges, the icebox no longer seemed out of place, but seemed as if iceboxes everywhere were always placed outside on the steps of the front door. Grandma made some lemonade and gave the deliverymen a drink before they left complaining about more deliveries, and we drank the rest in celebration. Everyone was still gathered around our steps, shaking their heads and laughing, marveling like the proverbial lucky woodcutter who cut down a stalk of bamboo to find it filled with gold coins, when one of the deliverymen came running back waving a paper in his hand and looking for a signature.
He needed the signature of Hadashi Matsuyoshi, he said. Everyone fell silent as we realized that Hadashi had won the “Holiday Dreams” drawing at Lim’s Hardware near Fort Street. Lim’s is gone now but used to be located next to the old Chinese medicine place—the one with the gold dragons painted on the windows, and bottles of dried atrocities that populated the nightmares of many a Honolulu youth–and around the corner from the Luck and Prosper Culture Club. You always knew when you were getting close to Lim’s because you could hear the swearing of the old Chinese men and the castanet clacking of the Mahjong tiles from the club and could smell the slightly sweet and dusty odor, like a desiccated perfumed corpse, from the Chinese medicine shop.
Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, Grandma would go down to Lim’s and carefully inspect the prize—one of the fancy “automatic” washers with wringer or the newest ElectroLux vacuum—before inevitably entering the holiday drawing. “You don’t want to appear too da kine,” she would tell me, “otherwise next year he going make the prize junk.” And because the rules stated “only one entry per person,” Grandma took it upon herself to enter everyone in our family separately, including Hadashi, our cat, so named because his stark white legs and feet made him look like he wasn’t wearing any shoes and was just “going hadashi.”
“Hadashi, he stay sleeping,” Grandma said, which was what he did everyday after a night of feline holo-holo. It took him all day to recover from his nocturnal carousing, sleepwalking from one sunlit spot in the house to another, until dinnertime, after which he would disappear and we wouldn’t see him until sometime the following morning, sleeping it off again.
“Can wake him or what?” asked the deliveryman. “He gotta sign this.”
Grandma shook her head slowly and seriously, as if even the mere consideration of the idea could bring catastrophe. “You went heard the saying, eh: Let sleeping cats lie.”
“Yeah?”
Grandma nodded.
“Come mean and everything? What, swinging?”
“Li’dat,” she said ominously. “Scratch you up, too. Just like get claws.”
The deliveryman gave a low whistle. “He must work late, eh.”
“Let sleeping cats lie,” Grandma warned. “Gimme, I’ll sign for him.”
The deliveryman nodded. He took a pen out of his shirt pocket and handed both pen and paper to Grandma. He watched her while she signed. “I thought was dogs but. Let sleeping dogs lie.”
She shrugged and handed the paper and pen back to him. “Whatevah,” she said.
For the next couple of days, everyone in the neighborhood dropped by to get a closer look at our new Ice-O-Matic. It was as big as a regular icebox, and appended to the top was a large cylindrical object, rather like an oversized hatbox, which Grandma informed everyone was called a “Monitor Dome.”
“Like one brain,” she would explain.
The thing she was most proud of, however, was neither the fact that she would never again have to hang the “Ice Today” sign from our front window, which when repeated by our neighbors over the years would eventually shrink the territory of the iceman until he was reduced to the two-block area of the Chinatown fishmarkets, nor that she would never have the daily drudgery of emptying the icebox water pan again. No, what she was most proud of, what kept her from filling the refrigerator with food those first few days and made her keep only a pitcher of water in there so that when the neighbors came by to gawk and admire she could offer them a glass of water, was the tiny freezer compartment in the corner that made macadamia nut-sized ice cubes that she would drop into her startled visitors’ cups while they marveled at the pleasure of having something they never knew they needed: ice on command.
To this day, I don’t know if it was the outrageous luxury of having our own personal supply of ice, or if it’s just some weakness in human nature that makes us angry at victims of good luck, but suddenly our neighbors, people who were more “Auntie” and “Uncle” to me than my blood relatives, started to avoid us. They no longer stopped their yard work when we walked down the lane but let us pass like strangers. They never asked to hear about the latest twist in the continuing saga of my parents' attempt to break generations of filial obligation by refusing to inherit the ancestral property and instead were in Japan trying to convince my father’s parents to pass it down to the next oldest son. We no longer got the overflow cut flowers from the Matsushima’s, who grew orchids for the florists, and so Grandma quietly removed the empty vase from the center of the table. We started to hear mumblings of how Grandma "went cheat the contest" although they had all done exactly the same thing. And during mango season, we no longer felt welcome to the fruit from the Lee’s tree, even though that one tree always supplied more than enough for the entire neighborhood, and we had to start buying mangos from Chun Hoon Market like tourists.
The only person who seemed as thrilled about the refrigerator as we were was Shane, who presumed that his brilliant “roller skate” idea that first day gave him license to raid our refrigerator whenever he wanted, thereby eliminating the burden of having to wait for mealtimes to eat our food. Hadashi also, the rightful owner, took to his refrigerator right away, and for the rest of his life could be found spending his daylight hours sleeping on the warm Monitor Dome.
And Grandma, did she worry and fret like I did about our neighbors? Did she miss not getting some of the tako that Uncle Shige caught every Sunday when it was still possible to find them along the South Shore side? Did she ever mutter a curse against this bachi that equally gave and pushed away in the same motion? Are you kidding? All the tightfistedness and shrunken hearts of our neighbors seemed to make her relish her good fortune even more, and she polished that refrigerator every evening after dinner, in plain sight of everyone in the neighborhood, as if to make manifest her joy of rubbing it in their faces. As we walked down the lane, she boastfully complained even more loudly about her icebox, which she rechristened the "Bill-O-Matic" for the amount it drove up her electricity bill. Whenever I pointed out the latest snub—Mr. Ka’ai burning his yard waste and not offering to burn ours at the same time like he always did—Grandma would just shrug and say by way of explanation, “People come funny kine sometimes.”
Even weeks later, Grandma still paused whenever she approached the house and would gaze at her refrigerator, with the intensity of an artist studying a still life. She did this often, and would sometimes look at the neighboring houses, as if to compare the paucity of their doorsteps, unblocked by the latest technology. I would cringe and look away whenever I saw her doing that, for I considered it an ostentatious display, until one day she nudged me as we stood side-by-side on the path and said, “Look little bit funny, yeah?”
I looked up at her house and tried to cast a critical eye on the comfortable chaos of my childhood home, which if it were translated to music would present a cacophonous din. The simple melody of our original whitewashed wooden structure discordant with the newer addition hastily tacked onto the front to make room for me when I was born, accompanied by the warbling extension in the back that settled unevenly over the years, creating a permanent glissando from its high point near the front door, sliding down through the living and dining rooms where it bottomed out in the kitchen, and finally, imposing itself like a strident countermelody; the new electric icebox that looked exactly the same: standing patiently at the front door like a persistent suitor waiting to be let in, humming as it always did when it was on, with Hadashi sleeping on the Monitor Dome, as formless as a bag of poi, fitting himself so perfectly to the curve of the unit that one would swear that the icebox had grown hair. “More funny kine than usual?” I asked.
Grandma gave me stink-eye. Then, studying the neighbors’ houses once again, she said, “I going fix ‘em.”
She said it with the conviction of an oath. Or a curse. I couldn’t tell which. All I could do was hope she didn’t mean to get us in deeper with the neighbors.
Which is, of course, exactly what she meant.
One evening, soon after her pronouncement, Grandma led a phalanx of men down Muliwai Lane. In those days even construction workers wore uniforms, and these men in their pale blue uniforms and black boots looked less like gang laborers from Japanese Hospital than an invading force. At their head was a man they all called “Yeah-No,” who, I found out later, had been indebted to my grandmother ever since she, as the nurse on duty that night at the hospital, had resuscitated his first grandson after the boy had slipped on a reef while harvesting opihi and been sucked out and spit up face down on the beach five nervous minutes later.
I stayed in the house and watched Grandma marshal the battalion into her front yard where she proceeded to address the men and point to different areas of the house, formulating a strategy for attack. She was barely finished before Yeah-No stepped out of the crowd, turned back toward his men, and issued his commands to them. Some of the men went up the stairs to inspect the icebox, and the rest of them moved to different areas along the sides and front of the house, clearing away debris, moving my Grandma’s anthuriums to the rear of the house, and drawing lines in the dirt. Yeah-No circled around the house with Grandma, occasionally stopping to kick the concrete footers of the foundation, as if inspecting an automobile.
Over the next week, mysterious deliveries appeared in our front yard: a couple of torn bags of cement, a load of slightly warped but usable planks, half-empty boxes of nails and brads, even a couple of cans of paint that looked suspiciously similar to the color they were painting the new wing of the hospital. It would be from Grandma that I would learn how to get things done in this world—not by charming the lunas and their bean counters, but by befriending the people who actually carried the loads, for they were the ones with the most to offer. By the time the weekend arrived, our yard was choked with misfit building materials.
Early the following Saturday morning, I was awakened by voices and hammering outside of my bedroom window. I knew immediately that Grandma’s troops had returned, and so, making as little noise as possible, I rolled stealthily out of bed and onto the floor, where I crawled to the dresser. I pulled some clothes out of the two lowest drawers and changed into them while still lying on the floor, which resulted in my underwear becoming twisted and bunched up around my waist like a sumo belt. But speed was critical, so I would have to wait until later to adjust myself. I snuck out of my bedroom door, and not seeing Grandma anywhere, sped through the kitchen and out the back door, where I ran straight into her backside as she stood on the steps talking to Yeah-No.
“Look who finally went wake up,” Grandma said as I got back on my feet.
“Yeah, no,” he said.
Grandma looked at me, frowned, and then yanked down my pants. “How come you stay all kapakahi like this?”
“Yeah, no,” he said as Grandma turned me around and untangled me, “Look like somebody tried to pick him up by his underwears.”
“Anyway, good thing,” she said as she pulled my pants back up, “just in time for go work.”
“Yeah, no,” he said. “We need somebody for bring us water.”
Grandma nodded. “You go follow him,” she said to me.
My escape had proved futile. I had been drafted into Grandma’s army. “Okay,” I mumbled.
Yeah-No looked at me and laughed. “Going be good exercise but,” he said as he led me back out to the front yard.
“Yeah, no,” I heard Grandma say.
Fueled by Grandma’s massive lunch of miso butterfish, pickled eggplant, pansit, Primo, and poi, and kept rejuvenated by my missions of water, Yeah-No's men finished Grandma’s new porch in just one day. It was a splendid porch that was wide enough to turn a horse and ran the entire length of the front of the house. Although the porch shortened the front yard some, it had a large overhanging roof that not only protected her new icebox but gave us a sheltered place where we could play outside, even when it rained. Even though she now had room to move the refrigerator anywhere she wanted, Grandma elected to leave the refrigerator exactly where it was blocking the front door because as she said, “Going look funny if we move ‘em.”
Then a funny thing happened.
Mr. Wong, patriarch of his family and the acknowledged “Mayor of Muliwai Lane” for using his crony connections to force the city to bring electricity to our little lane, came by the next evening with his sons-in-law, all six of them, as we sat on Grandma’s porch in the new rocking chairs she had bought.
“We seek,” he said, “your permission to study your porch.” Although he and my grandmother were approximately the same age, his dignified bearing and elegant manner of speech made it seem as if he had come from an earlier, gentler time. Despite what everyone told me, it was hard for me to believe that this man, who seemed the epitome of the shrewd investor with several of his own businesses in Chinatown as well as directorship on the boards of many charitable organizations, had gotten his start as a contract laborer on one of Hawaii’s sugar plantations.
“Go,” Grandma said to the Mayor.
We sat on the porch and rocked while the men discussed the details of the porch construction with each other in Chinese. They peeked and peered under our porch for a long time with Grandma occasionally interrupting them to point out some special feature that Yeah-No had specified: the metal caps that covered the posts in the footings to prevent termite damage, or the tongue-and-groove laths that they used to finish the eaves. When they were done and bowed to her in thanks, she pointed to the stacks of unused material Yeah-No had wanted to burn with the rest of the scrap but Grandma had prevented him, telling him there might be some use for that yet. “All that over there, extra. Take ‘em.”
The Mayor bowed toward her. “Never mind, you,” she said to him, smiling.
Armed with their information and the scrap wood, the Wongs erected a huge balcony from the second floor of their house. It had a generous platform, large enough to land a helicopter, and during the daytime was commandeered by the growing number of Wong grandchildren, who used it as their base of operations for their neighborhood adventures. But in the evenings, the balcony belonged to Mr. Wong, who had built a raised stage onto one corner of the balcony so that he could perch even higher and not only see the ocean but also smell it. “So we never forget,” he would often say when he invited Grandma and me over to share his evening view, “how lucky we are to live here.”
Soon afterward, Shane’s dad, unemployed for years with a mysterious injury that allowed him to do everything but go back to work, could be seen for a couple of hours each day with a paint can and brush, repainting his house. He worked like an artist should, spending much of his morning studying the blank wall that was his canvas, before slapping on the white paint in an inspired vision, and then lying in the yard the rest of the afternoon to monitor the drying of his work. Even Mrs. Gonzalez, whose yard had always had the severe utilitarian look of a laundry—large vats and sturdy washtub stands networked by the spiderweb of clothesline strung up for maximum drying efficiency—spent her evenings planting a showy flower garden around the edges of her property, which would become our favorite place to net butterflies.
Grandma looked out at what she had done and saw that it was good. “See,” she said to me, “What I went tell you? I almost went fix ‘em.”
“Almost?”
“Not pau yet,” she said as she watched young Mrs. Ka’ai trying to calm her wailing baby by walking up and down the lane. “There’s one more thing you have for do.”
I froze. Even my heart stopped to listen. Being volunteered by Grandma was something I never got used to, as the outcome could be as benign as running to the store to pick up some flour or as malevolent as cleaning elderly Mr. Anderson’s yard, who, I was convinced, must have been feeding his Doberman other smaller dogs judging by the size of the messes I had to clean up.
“Yeah,” she said, motioning to the icebox over her shoulder, “Go give some ice to Darleen.”
Relieved, I hurried down the porch with my fistful of ice and offered it to Mrs. Ka’ai. “Here, Grandma said it would help with the baby’s teeth.”
Mrs. Ka’ai took the ice from me and soon Muliwai Lane grew quiet once again as the baby burbled happily. Mrs. Ka’ai then went up our stairs and sat on my rocking chair, rocking and talking quietly with Grandma. I stayed out in the middle of the lane to watch and wonder about the two of them, Grandma and her new icebox.
Starting from the following day until it finally expired 13 years later—just quietly stopped humming there at our front door—the icebox became a community resource. No one was refused: Not Mrs. Matsushima who wanted to borrow some space for the haku and leis for her grandchild’s first birthday because they were some kind of special mountain flowers; not Mrs. Cruz who wanted to cool the whipped frosting on the guava cake she made for the church every week; not even Old Man Tanaka who perpetually kept his can of bait in the icebox because “Going make the worms easier to handle.”
Only once, years later, when the Ice-O-Matic was long gone and the mystery of electric refrigeration had worn off, so much so that the only time we talked about our refrigerators was to complain about having to clean the frost buildup in our freezers all the time, did I ask her what had seemed obvious to me, even as a child: “Why didn’t you just make the door wider?” It would have been so much easier on everyone, I explained, not having to build a new porch and all. I invoked a picture of what that would have been like, of having to go only a few steps to get something out of that icebox, instead of having to go out the back door and around the side to the front of the house, to get, say, a glass of milk.
Grandma stopped rocking and just looked at me. Finally she said, “You never learn nothing, yeah?”
In later years, we could always tell who was getting a new appliance or a new piece of furniture on the lane. The workmen would come one day and chalk lines and arcane symbols around the front door. The next day they would come with their axes and hammers and frame out a new door, leaving a gaping wound in the front of the house like a missing tooth. After the new refrigerator or couch had been delivered the workman would come back and finish the door proper, but we always made sure to make it as narrow as the new building codes would allow, because, as Grandma said, “Sometimes when opportunity knocks at your front door, more better leave it outside.” 
